"Carville coup" has been crushed

The Carville coup has been crushed. From MyDD:

The attempts to oust Dean have been crushed. The anti-Deaniacs in the party are fresh out of friends:

"James Carville's attempt to topple Howard Dean as chairman of the Democratic National Committee failed after state party officials and even a vocal critic of Dean crushed the coup, officials said.

Insiders from the Clinton camp winced at Carville's untimely remarks last week calling for Dean's ouster in favor of unsuccessful Senate candidate Harold Ford of Tennessee.

"It was not coming from [Sen. Hillary Clinton] and they made a real effort to distance themselves from James' comments," said a source close to the Clintons.

The Clintonistas don't want an undeserved backlash from the activist wing of the party that overwhelmingly supports Dean, especially because some anti-Clinton Democrats have blamed Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) for the attack by Carville, a longtime Clinton insider. Those forces claimed Carville's motive was to topple Dean in favor of a chairman more favorable to Sen. Clinton's bid for President."

The remarks form Clinton's camp come after Charles Schumer and Donnie Fowler backed Howard Dean and the fifty-state strategy, the Association of State Democratic Chairs did the same, and after Dean scored a 96% approval rating on the latest Dailykos leadership poll. The latter two are particularly key, because over the past two years, Howard Dean's base of support in the party has come primarily from two sources: state parties and the progressive movement. Although lacking in nuance, it would not be inaccurate to characterize the current modus operandi of the DNC as follows: small donations from progressive movement activists flow to the DNC in record amounts, and most of those donations end up being spent on direct grants to state parties and in the form of state-level field organizers. This is a novel path for Democratic money to take, especially since it generally bypasses both Washington, D.C. based consultants and wealthy donors. It is also exactly why Carville's base of supporters hate Dean so much.

Naturally, those who have made tremendous amounts of money losing elections for us will never go away completely. But it's very clear that the progressive netroots will not allow scummy consultants like Carville to mess with our hopes for success. Smart consultants will embrace the new era. Dumb ones will continue to make lousy television ads.

Carville should be finished as a Democratic Party force. But he'll be back in one form or another, I'm sure, probably on Faux Network. I hear they have a big programming hole to fill now.