It’s official. Howard Dean is the new chairman of the Democratic party. I’ve already written about why I think Dean is the perfect person for the job, so I won’t bore you with gushing praise about the grassroots and such. Now that Dean’s in charge, he’s ready to hit the ground running. Here’s his answer to the question of “What now?” :

Chairman Howard Dean’s DNC Plan

1. Show up! Democrats should never concede a single state, a single district, or a single voter to the Republicans. We must be active and compete in all 50 states and work with the state parties to build a true national party.

2. The success of the national party depends directly on the success of the state parties — we must better integrate our operations by:

Having the DNC pay the salary of each state party executive director to help ensure that the state parties have adequate funds.

Collectively building and sharing supporter lists between the national and state parties.

Recruiting, training, and encouraging candidates to run for office at every level — building tomorrow’s farm team from the ground up.

Actively grow local senate committees and communities by working with neighborhood activists who can reach out in their communities and enable the grassroots to support state and local candidates.

Maintaining a permanent campaign in every state. We need to establish an ongoing, active presence, which does not have to be recreated every four years for four months.

3. Set core principles that define the Democratic party and what we stand for and take a bottom-up approach to the development of the Party’s message;

4. Use cutting-edge Internet and other technologies to fundraise, organize, and communicate with our supporters;

5. Strengthen our political institutions and leadership institutes to promote our leaders and our ideas — these organizations must work together in a coordinated and integrated fashion to elect Democrats at every level, so that we can take this country back.

If you agree that this is the right direction to take the party, I hope that you’ll join me and the rest of the liberal blogosphere in making a donation. Before I give you that link, however, let me just mention one more thing…

This news is going to make the wingnuts go crazy. We’ll be hearing that goddamned scream ad infinitum and countless pundits will try to plant the meme that the Democrats are getting “too liberal”. The conservatives are gonna get cocky again in their insistence that Dean is “unstable”. We’ll see shit like this again:

..and in the end, the GOP will do everything in their power to make people think that the lunatics have taken over the asylum. Well…that’s one way to put it, but I prefer to say that the grassroots have taken over the establishment. And it all starts today.

As a symbol of solidarity with the new direction that the Democratic party is taking, a fundraising link has been set up to be shared by the left-wing blogosphere. If you’d like to donate, click here or use the form below :

Contribution amount: $

If you’ve got your own blog, you can get the code to add this form to your site at DailyKos.