As we all expected, Howard Dean is leaving the DNC in January when his term expires. He is probably one of the only people in politics to stick to a self-imposed term limit. The last person I know of who did that was George Washington. I think he always planned to do this and would have even had Barack Obama asked him to stay, which everyone also knew was never going to happen.

The irony of something rarely gets missed, by me anyway. Here it almost hits you in the face. Howard Dean began the ‘fifty state strategy’ and got a lot of crap for it. This plan helped win the election for Obama. I have heard there is some bad blood between the two men but have not found anything to prove that. It is customary for a president to pick the chair of the party but I don’t feel Dean has been given the credit he deserves. The Nation ran this back in February: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080317/berman.

I don’t know how President-elect Obama feels about Dean. I am not sure it matters and it would be natural to want someone from his inner circle there. The problem is that Dean rebuilt a party that was in trouble all over the country. His departure, while expected and blah, blah, blah makes me wonder what direction the DNC will take now. Given the recent success of Dean’s plan (in both 2006 and 08) I hope they continue it.

PS. Note to sensible readers, I know everyone just loves the Huffington Post. I don’t. This is because they do not believe in fact checkers. That is important because when they ‘break’ a story it is hard to tell if it is real and they have put stories up that were later found to be false. If you read it on a regular basis, just keep that in mind. You’ll get better breaking news from Drudge.