By Marie Horrigan, CQ Staff

Love him or hate him, Howard Dean and his approach to campaigning laid the groundwork for Barack Obama to be nominated Thursday night.

And the party appears on the cusp of solidifying gains in the midterm election and perhaps winning the White House.

Dean has built his tenure as chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) ‑ the ultimate insider’s job - on antipathy to Washington insiders. “This is a line that I probably shouldn’t use in Washington, but I will. When I came to the DNC we fired all the Washington consultants because we paid all of them a lot of money to tell us how to lose every four years,” Dean said earlier this month at a stop to rally party workers in Washington.

The lack of regard has gone both ways, and Dean’s desire to balance short-term gains with longer-term growth put him in opposition to many in Washington who were focused on the election cycle in front of them. Dean clashed during the 2006 election cycle with the chairmen of the House and Senate campaign committees, who argued that Dean should devote more party funds to competitive races.

Ire among some Democrats was so high that strategist James Carville described Dean’s term as “Rumsfeldian in its incompetence,” and called for his ouster as DNC chair just one week after Democrats took control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1994. Carville was one of several Democrats to charge the party could have won even more seats if Dean had used party resources to fund top congressional candidates.

Dean’s “50-state” strategy is designed to take advantage of the national environment now — opposition to the war in Iraq, concerns about the economy and President Bush’s record low approval ratings.

The DNC built a new voter database and paid for campaign workers on the ground in every state to bolster the state committees.

Dean has ushered in a new era of grass-roots activism for Democrats that allows the party to take advantage of technological innovations, focus on small donors and utilize the energy of Democrats in typically red-ribbed states across the country.

“Governor Dean’s advocacy of a bottom-up, people-led Internet-based politics has utterly transformed the Democratic Party and today you have Barack Obama having taken that model to a completely different level, giving him a financial advantage and a political advantage that we’ve never seen,” gushes Simon Rosenberg, president of the progressive think tank NDN and second place finisher in the 2005 election for DNC chair.

In late September, Dean is scheduled to travel to Alaska, a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat president since Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964, but one in which Obama has said he will campaign. “The New York Times made fun of me when I went to Alaska three years ago,” Dean said. “Now here we are, on the verge of picking up a Senate seat and possibly even picking up Alaska’s three electoral votes. So it’s astonishing what you can do when you show up in these places and pay attention to people.”

That motto is borne out of his own failed presidential campaign and what Dean said were lessons learned by Democrats losing two consecutive presidential elections. Despite early concerns, there now is little skepticism for the policy.

“It’s aggressive, it’s bold, it’s exciting and it’s going take some time to work but you’re starting to be able to feel like we’re not just a party of shrinking territory but expanding possibilities,” Sen. Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana said Sunday.

Debra Boehlke, a delegate from Arizona, said the resources provided by the DNC were vital to help the state party utilize in-state assets. “We always had the volunteers, we always had a very active group of Democrats in Arizona, but we didn’t really have the organizational skills to put it all together and that helped us,” she said Sunday.