Dean looks likely to win Demo party post

NEW YORK — With just two weeks to go before the Democratic Party picks a new chairman, the race now revolves around former Vermont governor and presidential candidate Howard Dean.

"For each of us, the issue now is whether we can keep Howard from winning on the first ballot," former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb said, acknowledging Dean's momentum before taking the stage at a party caucus here Saturday.

Dean picked up a key endorsement last week when Harold Ickes, a top adviser to former President Clinton and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, joined the Dean camp.

Ickes is a top Democratic strategist who flirted with the idea of running for chairman himself. But the significance of his endorsement was the signal it sends to the party rank and file that the Clintons have signed off on a Dean chairmanship.

However, Dean's strengths — his surety and his ability to rally the progressives he famously called "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" — are still factors cited by critics as disqualifying weaknesses.

While his early opposition to the Iraq war seems principled and prescient to the Democratic left, the party's moderates and conservatives wonder whether Dean is the right choice at a time when national security remains the top concern of the American electorate.

Former Rep. Martin Frost, a moderate Democrat from Texas who knows how to raise funds and has run one of the party's congressional campaign committees, has emerged as a counterforce in the race.

Webb and a handful of other candidates hope that a stop-Dean movement snuffs the former governor's aspirations — then chooses one of them as a more palatable alternative than Frost.

"We need a chairman . . . that doesn't just represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," said former Rep. Tim Roemer, a moderate from Indiana.

"We will never win until we can capture the South and capture the West," Webb said.

Dean, Frost, Roemer and Webb joined Democratic operatives Simon Rosenberg, Donnie Fowler and David Leland here Saturday, at the final regional party caucus.

There is a diminishing chance that senior Democrats or party interest groups will intervene and provide more structure to what so far has been an ad hoc process seized by Dean. The association of Democratic state chairs and major labor unions may endorse favorite candidates this week.