The Washington Post has a good profile of the many issues & problems facing Howard Dean & The Democratic National Committee:

It won’t be a summer of love for Howard Dean, with peace and understanding in short supply.

The Democratic National Committee chairman faces several formidable challenges. Some states are determined to move up the dates of their presidential primaries despite the potential for upending the nomination process, and the party’s convention in Denver in 2008 is already dealing with nettlesome labor and financial woes.

Dean’s biggest test will come next year when the DNC will primarily serve as a shadow campaign operation for the party’s presidential nominee.

I would genuinely be surprised if the Democrats were not able to pull off an election victory this cycle but I have been urging caution all along in this blog. Politics is exciting because at any moment things can and often do go horribly, horribly wrong. Parties & campaigns have a habit of imploding just when they look poised to triumph and things generally don’t go according to plan.

The left wing of the Democratic Party seems like it doesn’t just want a victory, it wants on on its terms & though the focus is 100% on the candidates right now once there is a nominee all those state party chairs, delegates, interests etc. will run out of the woodwork attempting to get their own messages and faces on the national stage with the nominee.

Right now expectations are enormously high on the Democrats. Everyone expects big things from them as a party giving them a larger amount of room to fall. The expectations are the complete opposite for Republicans, frankly I don’t know how things can get much worse for the president or the party. I am sure something will come up (Alberto Gonzalez seems to redefine the term dumbass at every turn) but after awhile there is so much bad news that new bad news just gets added to the bin without much consideration.