Dean is a Player

The current fight for the nomination is being fought out along lines of age, sex and race between two candidates who don't have much space between them in terms of ideology and policy. If Hillary really wanted to balance the ticket between factions in the Democratic Party I would suggest Clinton-Dean.
Dean has been hard at it as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee since winning a hardfought election to that post in 2005, and frequently clashes with Clintonistas such as Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Dean has backed proportional allocation of delegates in 100% of Democratic primaries and caucuses, a policy that is doing exactly what it was intended to do: support consensus-building through democratization, and resist dominance by party bigwigs. This is part of a larger vision that famously developed grass-roots internet fund raising with Joe Trippi during Dean's 2004 campaign, a practice that has since become a basic part of the contemporary campaign. Another facet has been investing money and time in areas that are usually ignored in the big-media circus that the election has become. Dean has taken a lot of criticism for that but I think it will pay off.
And so today we get Dean suggesting that Clinton and Obama ought to reach some sort of entente in the interest of the party and the people. And this suggestion is, of course, yet another expression of Dean's left-populist commitment to consensus politics, and of course it's also exactly right. Count me a fan of the left-wing Yankee.