Howard Dean - Building Democracy in America

With the end of his presidential he is working on a harder task - building Democratic backbones.

Instead of the White House, his goal has become a wholesale redefinition of American politics through the grassroots movement he created: to transform the Democratic Party from "a party without backbone" into a real opposition to Republicans.

Already, he is backing candidates across a broad spectrum of lower-order political races for Congress and state offices. The idea is to organise to try to beat Republican incumbents wherever they are. It may not be easy to shift political trends to the left in a time of crisis and war, but Mr Dean believes it is essential and - thanks to the extremism of the Bush administration - possible.

When it comes to the war in Iraq, or the growing influence of Christian fundamentalism on public policy, or the mounting budget deficit exacerbated by targeted tax cuts for the wealthy, Mr Dean - in contrast to John Kerry, who beat him to the Democratic presidential nomination - does not believe there is room for compromise with the Bush White House, or any of the like-minded politicians he characterises as "right-wing wackos".

Instead, he believes, the Republicans need to be fought on their own turf, in places where ordinary working-class voters have been persuaded to vote Republican but may yet be open to the notion that they are betraying their own interests.

"You've got to show them the Republicans will never deliver jobs and education because they can't manage money," Mr Dean said. "You've got to talk about the enormous deficits. These are people ... who really struggle with money issues of their own and know they can't go into debt. So when they see the country go into debt, they worry about it."

He told a rally in Los Angeles a few days ago: "Don't be afraid to sign on to a race where you think the candidate can't win. We must make sure not one congressional seat goes unopposed ... Never again are we going to be able to treat politics as a dirty business we don't want anything to do with. It is dirty, but it's on our doorstep and we're going to have to deal with it."

Events in Iraq, he said, showed President Bush was "almost inept as well as untruthful". Specifically, he wants to put an end to the practice, perfected by President Bill Clinton, of "triangulation", trying to defang the Republicans by advocating policies only slightly at variance with theirs, and getting back to the old-fashioned to-and-fro of a two-party system.

"Our opposition party collapsed, in terms of their willingness to take on the government, and that is what my campaign is about, trying to get the Democrats to function as an opposition party," he said. "You can't take the power back unless you have some opposition. Take the Labour Party in Britain: Blair would be long gone if the Conservatives had a remote potential for leadership, or an attractive programme."

What he preaches is a pragmatic form of empowerment through political organisation. Voting, and getting others to vote, is just the start.

Progressive groups need to take over local Democratic party hierarchies and put up candidates for office, he told the Los Angeles audience, and the way to do that is to be better organised and more impassioned than anyone else. "We've got to keep this alive," he said. "Democracy can't be a spectator sport."