At Condé Nast’s Portfolio, Matt Cooper claims that Howard Dean may have gotten a bad rap for that scream in 2004, but has been a “mess” as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. 

He argues that Dean (while not entirely to blame) let the Florida and Michigan situation to spin out of control.  Cooper suggests that the GOP stripping FL and MI of only half their delegates for moving up their primaries seems like a much more appropriate sanction.  Copper fails to mention — and perhaps is unaware — that stripping half the delegates is in fact the standard DNC sanction, and that Dean and others chose the death penalty in these cases, while imposing no sanction on Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina for moving their contests.

Cooper also notes that the DNC has raised less money than the RNC, even as the Democratic candidates are vastly outraising their Republican competitors:

Democrats say their limited party fund-raising is a result of several factors, including the competition for dollars from the presidential candidates and the party’s Congressional fund-raising committees. And they also say the D.N.C. is hamstrung by its inability to raise money in any serious way without a presidential nominee to rally around.  (The former is more plausible than the latter, which has not hampered the RNC — K)

Since the beginning of 2007, the Democrats have raised $60.5 million, and have spent most of it. Not only does the D.N.C. have far less cash on hand than does the R.N.C., but in this election cycle the R.N.C. has also outraised the D.N.C. by $37 million.

Party officials maintain that the D.N.C. is cash poor partly by design, reflecting a strategy by Howard Dean, the party’s chairman, to invest in building a party infrastructure rather than amassing a huge war chest.

Handing out money to the state party chairs has cemented Dean in his chair, but it remains to be seen whether the Democrats have prospered from the “50-state strategy” or are simply the beneficiaries of an unpopular mission in Iraq and a possibly deteriorating economy.

Given my bent toward recognizing the importance of organizing in political campaigns, part of the above-quoted NYT article leapt off the page:

To that end, the D.N.C. hired 180 local organizers and opened offices in 50 states. It set up training classes for organizers. It poured money into statehouse races, with the idea that state legislatures are the key to Congressional redistricting. To close the gap with tech-savvy Republicans, it spent $10 million to develop “VoteBuilder,” a databank with the names of every registered voter in the United States.

Matt Stoller recently wrote in The Nation about how the tech lag affected the Kerry campaign in 2004 and the current upgrade in organizing tech on the Democrats’ part:

After 2004 several efforts were launched to fix this problem. Two high-quality voter files were created, one at the Dean-led DNC built by technologist Josh Hendler, and one outside the DNC called Catalist, assembled by a group of former DNC consultants. A front-end web application known as the Voter Activation Network, or VAN, was standardized across campaigns. The Donkey, a volunteer management program developed in 2005, along with bar-code scanners, Palm Pilots and Google Maps, whose satellite feature allowed field organizers to cut turf without having to physically explore the routes, produced huge efficiency gains. Judith Freeman, co-founder and chief executive organizer of the New Organizing Institute and a former senior political strategist for the AFL-CIO, notes the change. “Prior to 2004, the work of creating walk packets and materials for door-to-door canvassing was a labor-intensive process that could take all night and a significant amount of a field manager’s time. Now much of it is automated.”

The new crop of campaign software tools sends data back instantly to a centralized database, so effort isn’t wasted on voters who have moved or died. And campaign knowledge is accretive, with voting history, political identification and contact history retained every cycle. (This is especially important in states like Washington and Minnesota, where voter files do not identify voters by party.) With the data put on the web, organizations could begin experimentation and innovation with the tools. In 2006 New York Congressional candidate John Hall allowed his volunteers to do “virtual phone-banking” through a browser. With a log-in, volunteers could get a list of people to call and a script, and then plow through them at home or in groups. This technique has been widely adopted across the party; there are now volunteer-driven groups on Barack Obama’s site that offer help for people trying to use the DNC’s new voter file to do this. MoveOn.org has used Catalist to launch VotePoke, a site that lets people look up whether they or their friends are registered to vote, using social pressure to increase political engagement. With better data, there is substantially more sophisticated modeling, research and training through such groups as the New Organizing Institute and the Analyst Institute (disclosure: I’m currently a fellow at the New Organizing Institute).

Peer pressure can be a very cost-effective way to increase turnout.  But it is far from clear that Dean’s efforts are the driving force on the tech front.  The above-mentioned Catalist seems to be the choice of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, the DSCC, EMILY’s List, and the AFL-CIO.  In contrast, Obama’s camp seems to be having to offer help to people wanting to use the DNC system.  Perhaps the DNC’s VoteBuilder is being geared toward the general election… or perhaps Catalist simply does the job better.  If Howard Dean ends up helping his party to a defeat in an environment so favorable to the Democrats, it will be the party doing the screaming.