Dr. Dean is just what the DNC ordered

I wanted Howard Dean to be president. To admit this in November would have been a sin, a break in Democratic unity tantamount to voting for President Bush. The young people who supported Dean in the primaries did our part for Senator Kerry. We raised money and went door to door. We stayed up late on Election Night and held out hope for Ohio long past the hour when hope had become irrational. We did our best to believe in John Kerry.

It seems fitting, three months later, that Democrats have elected Dean to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee. In a country defined by red states and blue states, us and them, those on the left side of the political spectrum were finally given a chance to choose a leader for "us," and we didn't have to worry about national electability or who played better on television. We chose a fiery governor from a decidedly blue state who doesn't think that liberal is a dirty word, who doesn't take his Democratic beliefs and water them down for mass consumption as if he were embarrassed by them. Now he'll have to repay our leap of faith by giving our party the direction it desperately needs.

Past chairmen of the DNC have sunk their hearts and souls into fundraising. We need Dean to raise money, but he will have to do much more than that. Dean will have to give all of us who invested energy and enthusiasm in this election a reason to come back again. He will have to reach out to us, to excite us about the Democratic Party when we have been told over and over again that political parties are part of the problem.

My biggest fear the morning after the election was not what President Bush would do in a second term but that the legions of first-time voters and volunteers, once defeated, would not return to the active duties of citizenship. For so long, many of us believed that politics had nothing to do with us. Yet, for a few brief months in 2004, our cynicism gave way. Though we knew John Kerry was not perfect, we went to the polls with hope. Dean must remember how important we will be in any Democratic victory; he must convince us that we can, and will, do better next time.

Governor Dean is also charged with building an operation on the ground to rival that of the notoriously better-organized Republicans. He must put in place a field operation that has time to cement relationships among volunteers and to build an organized infrastructure of people invested in Democratic victories. He must use the Internet to raise money and to recruit volunteers. He must not forget the local and state races that allow us to train future leaders so that we never again have to wonder about a presidential candidate, "Isn't there anyone better?"

He has done all this before, in his campaign for the presidency and in his leadership of the grassroots PAC Democracy For America. Now he has been given the chance to apply those skills nationwide.

The election of Dean to head the DNC surprised many pundits, but the Democratic Party is in need of something different, of a kind of leadership and strategy we haven't found since Bill Clinton left office in a cloud of conflicting emotions. We're tired of ceding the grounds of family values and morality to Republicans, as though families don't need a working wage to survive and equality and honesty aren't values worth protecting. Dean has rightly said that he will leave the policymaking to Democrats in Congress, as he spends his first months in office traipsing through red states, showing up and speaking his mind. But he can provide the leadership we've been lacking, and the plans that can return Democrats to legislative majorities and to the White House.

Political parties, though often maligned, are meant to be a place for people with a similar vision for this country to come together in words and in action. Howard Dean may not have been our nominee for President, but he is our choice to lead us now, to build Democrats a party of which we can be proud. Katherine Reilly is a Wilson School major from Short Hills. She can be reached at kcreilly@princeton.edu.