July 31, 2007 3:18 PM

A Quick Pre-Kos Book Recommendation

A good number of you are probably going to be getting on a plane pretty soon, heading out to Yearly Kos. Or, if you're not traveling to Kos, there remains a decent chance you have some sort of outing, be it a major vacation or a quick trip to the beach, still planned for the summer - some sort of substantial voyage by plane, train or automobile to be made in the next few weeks. You need something to read to pass the time between departure and arrival - short but still substantive, breezy without being braindead, something that takes the duration of a medium-size flight to finish but perhaps lingers with you longer than the time it takes to get to the luggage carousel.

Our recommendation? Howard Dean's You Have The Power: How to Take Back Our Country and Restore Democracy in America - less than 200 pages in paperback, but it still carries a wallop.

In fact, for all of the media attention lavished on Terry McAuliffe's DNC-leadership memoir What A Party! a few months back, Dean's book is by a considerable distance the more unorthodox and potentially newsmaking of the two. (When was the last time you read a major-party chairman speak warmly about the democratic possibilities of instant-runoff voting?) But that's perhaps to be expected, given that McAuliffe was speaking from the august perch of a former DNC Chairman at the time of publication, whereas Dean's political memoir-slash-handbook for saving democracy was published a mere six weeks before election 2004, at a time no one would have predicted he'd ever be DNC Chairman, much less within less than a year. All of which makes Dean's book somewhat of an oddity, historically speaking - it's hard to think of another book written by a future major party chairman where the author so explicitly outlines their view of how the party should function at a time they had no expectations to be personally forced to deliver on such reforms. As such, we have a unique opportunity to judge Dean's behavior as DNC Chairman; we can use the criteria of successful party leadership he employed back when he was merely opining on what he might do if he magically had the position. As we approach the first Yearly Kos more than halfway through Dean's term as Chairman, it certainly helps us take inventory of that leadership.

All that being said, perhaps the most interesting contrast between Dean and McAuliffe's book has nothing to do with timing, but an intrinsic difference of philosophy which permeates all of You Have The Power. In McAuliffe's book, there seems to be a running theme that if we can just consistently elect Democrats again, the fight is over, and the republic will have been saved. Dean's book, written at a dark time where one could be forgiven for viewing the election of Democrats as a panacea in and of itself, is far different in tone: renewing participatory democracy will save us, according to Dean, not Democrats. "In my mind, voting gets you a D if youw ant to live in a healthy democracy. To get an A+, you have to run for office yourself...Politicians can't solve our problems for us." (180-1)

If you already have a severe crush on Dean (cough cough), you will eat up this book. If you aren't quite there yet, give this book a whirl - you might find yourself among us secret crushees by the time he speaks at YK, practically swooning and shrieking despite ourselves.