Dave Boundy, the DNC's political director, says that while Clinton has used voter files from a private vendor, Obama has mostly purchased the files from state parties. Under the agreement with those parties, Boundy added, Obama will update the files to show which voters responded to his outreach efforts. That should help state parties and the eventual nominee target their own turnout campaigns this fall.

Dean has remained fastidiously neutral and low-key in this presidential cycle. Yet a number of his top supporters believe the Clinton-Obama contest has become a referendum on the kind of grassroots party building and citizen empowerment Dean pioneered as a presidential candidate and continued as DNC chair."

...."Howard Dean and Bill Clinton were both pragmatic, moderate governors of rural states who shared an affinity for balanced budgets and free trade. But ever since Dean became a presidential candidate, his relationship with the Clintons has been rocky. His campaign was a striking repudiation of Clintonian centrism, which had urged Democrats to support the Iraq War and throw piles of money at TV ads in a few key swing states every two to four years rather than systematically invest in long-term party building, from the local level up. The Clintons even urged their old friend Gen. Wesley Clark to run against Dean. When Dean entered the race for DNC chair in January 2005, Bill Clinton asked McAuliffe to consider staying on. When he declined, Governors Bill Richardson and Ed Rendell were floated as possible replacements. In the end, the Clintons remained officially neutral, and Ickes, a key Clinton ambassador to the party's liberal wing, endorsed Dean for chair, giving his candidacy a huge boost. But the brief honeymoon didn't hold.

..."In his final years as DNC chair, McAuliffe had developed a list of Democratic donors and fundraisers. When Dean came in, state party chairs, who found McAuliffe's list ill suited to their needs, asked Dean to build a national voter database. He hired new consultants and spent $10 million expanding the voter file. The move angered McAuliffe, and Ickes launched his own database, which was widely viewed as a buttress to Clinton's presidential campaign and a challenge to Dean."

On a number of occasions during this cycle, the Clinton campaign has questioned the DNC's authority. The first split came during the Nevada caucuses, when Clinton allies challenged the DNC over the validity of caucus sites that they thought favored Obama. The courts ruled in the DNC's favor, but the showdown in Nevada looked like small potatoes compared with the growing debate over whether to seat the Michigan and Florida delegates. The Clinton campaign's PR blitz in favor of seating them was a clear affront to Dean's leadership. "The DNC rule is the rule, and it's not going to change just because Clinton says we're going to change it," says one Dean confidant.

A few months earlier, The New Republic had reported that Clinton's camp was "laying the groundwork to circumvent the DNC in the event that Clinton wins the nomination." This shadow DNC had a number of integral parts: adviser Harold Ickes would develop state-of-the-art technology to help Clinton reach prospective voters; EMILY's List and Clinton's allies in organized labor would launch an unprecedented effort to turn out supporters, especially women voters; former DNC chair Terry McAuliffe would raise untold sums from wealthy donors and the business community; and communications honcho Howard Wolfson would direct an unrelenting war room. Ever since 1992 the Clintons had used the DNC as an outpost for raising money from big donors, and funding candidates had taken precedence over nurturing progressive organizers. That model would continue into '08. Dean could remain at the DNC as a figurehead but only if he stayed in line.