Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing

Howard Dean, Tim Kaine, Vince Lombardi, and a guy named Phil Bengston

Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net

When the football team starts losing games, the fan base tends to start getting antsy, and when the losses compound into a losing season, you can start hearing calls for the coach’s head.

Politics isn’t unlike football in that respect, which brings us to the curious case of Tim Kaine, the former Virginia governor who was tapped by Barack Obama in January 2009 to head up the Democratic National Committee, a playoff team at the time, to borrow from the football analogy.

The coach that Kaine was replacing was former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who pulled himself up from having been the frontrunner who couldn’t in the 2004 Democratic Party presidential nomination race to basically being the man responsible for rebuilding the DNC from the ashes of two stinging White House defeats on the wings of his controversial 50-state strategy. In the process Dean established himself as a sort of Vince Lombardi of the Democratic Party, the party’s triumphs in the 2006 midterms and the 2008 Obama win in the presidential race being his back-to-back Super Bowls. Read more