Democrat outside looking in

Hailed abroad, Dean not part of Obama's inner circle

by Sasha Issenberg/ Boston Globe

>>>>HARROGATE, England - "I could have kissed you," Lynne Featherstone, a member of Britain's Parliament, told Howard Dean after a midday address to the Liberal Democrats' spring conference in which he explained how the Internet could be an effective tool to energize activists and enlist new supporters.
"We do all look to you as the mother of all this and then to Barack Obama as the child who prospered from it," Featherstone said, introducing Dean to the party technology board she chairs.

That embrace, which Dean greeted with an impish smirk and a flicker of eyebrows, was far warmer than anything the former Vermont governor has felt recently from his domestic allies. After November's landslide, Obama let Dean move on from his four-year chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, and bitter rivalries with some in Obama's circle have kept the former practicing doctor out of the three top administration posts committed to changing the healthcare system.>>>> snip

>>>>He knew little about online social-networking platforms until aides alerted him in 2003 to his popularity among their users. Following his 2004 presidential campaign, he questioned his overheated style - his brief rise to frontrunner was propelled by furious attacks on President Bush few other Democrats were ready to deliver - after his children told him, "Dad, you're too confrontational."
"I knew what they meant," Dean told students at Oxford. "My generation was the confrontational generation. We took on the establishment in every way."

But after his party's 2004 losses, Dean chose not to wage another outsider's campaign and instead committed himself to becoming an establishmentarian, leveraging grassroots popularity in a wide-open election for party chairman.
"I didn't think any Democrat could win unless we reorganized the party dramatically," Dean said. "There were some famous dustups between me and people who are now in the administration. I don't regret any of them.">>>>

http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2009/03/20/democrat_outside_looking_in/?page=2