In a small but significant development that virtually no one would notice without the blogosphere, Chris Bowers is drawing attention to impending layoffs by the Democratic National Committee of 200 state-embedded field operatives. These operatives are the beating heart of Howard Dean's famous 50-state-strategy. You can read Chris' post yourself, but it seems the DNC assumed all along that the field staff would be terminated immediately after the election. And ironically, Chris' contact at the DNC hastened to reassure him that they were trying to get the embeds jobs in Washington, as though the whole program were nothing more than a DC internship network.

That's a distressing throwback to the past habit of thinking of state party organizations as nothing more than adjuncts to campaign organizations. Anyone who's worked with state parties over the years, especially in smaller and/or "red" states, probably shares my impression that they were largely either completely moribund, or served as dumping-grounds for incompetent castoffs from specific campaigns or even from state governments. The idea of the 50-state-strategy, or so I thought, was to encourage steadier year-in-year-out state party infrastructures, staffed by professionals with a particular expertise in field organizing. You'd think this program should have represented a small down payment on a bigger investment in state parties, not a temporary experiment to be terminated the minute the votes were counted in this particular cycle.

I realize this issue is dwarfed in significance by the separate question of what happens to the large and well-trained Obama field organization. If that organization is ultimately folded into the DNC/state party apparatus, then the problem of state party infrastructure may be solved for the immediate future. But if it's not, we may be back to square one.

In any event, it's disappointing to see that Howard Dean's signature initiative at the DNC may not outlast his personal tenure as chairman.