The Return of Howard Dean

ABC News’ Rick Klein reports: Attendees at this week’s gathering for progressive activists in Washington, the “America’s Future Now” conference, aren’t getting an appearance from President Obama. But they are hearing from Howard Dean. As Congress prepares to take up health care reform efforts in earnest, Dr. Dean is reemerging as a major voice inside the Democratic Party — playing an inside-outside game that’s might make him to health care what former Vice President Al Gore is to the environment. Suddenly, Dean is everywhere, talking up the issue that first animated his presidential candidacy in 2004 (though would later become subsumed by the war in Iraq). He’s out with a new e-book next week (the print version comes out next month) offering his “prescription” for health reform. He’s just been named chairman of the Progressive Book Club, a new idea factory for the political left.
 
Through the Democracy For America network that grew out of his campaign, he’s traveling the country to tout health care reform, with today’s appearance at the progressive conference the latest attempt to fire up the grassroots. Last week alone, he appeared at town-hall style meetings in Denver, Des Moines, and Wilmington, Del., to talk about the importance of major health care reform. That's on top of Web chats, robo-calls, and conference calls with key constituency groups.  ”This is Dean's latest crusade, prodding Congress — and prodding Americans to prod Congress – to pass the type of health care reform President Obama proposed last year on the campaign trail,” Jill Lawrence writes for Politics Daily. Dean’s efforts align broadly — though not necessarily in every detail — with the White House and congressional efforts to enact a health care overhaul this year. Dean’s main point in his public rounds is that anything Democrats pass must include a “public option” — perhaps the most contentious item, in addition to health care financing, in negotiations on Capitol Hill. Dean made little secret of his desire to be a direct part of the president’s health care efforts. After Tom Daschle bowed out of his Cabinet appointment, Dean and his allies pressed Dean’s case to become Health and Human Services secretary. He wound up without a formal role in the Obama administration. Having ended his term as DNC chairman after the election, and with a famously cool relationship with the new White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, his next step wasn’t clear. But Dean has kept in close contact with key congressional offices, as well as with the White House and its main allies. He’s in regular touch with Daschle — who’s still playing an important, if informal, role in health care reform — and met recently with Emanuel and David Axelrod, the president’s top political adviser. Asked if he’s talking to the White House about his push for health care reform, Dean told Jill Lawrence, “Yeah, sort of.” Is he getting any encouragement? “Not necessarily,” he said.