Getting your player ready...
WASHINGTON — Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean plans to step down when his term expires in January.
Dean, briefly his party’s presidential front-runner in 2004, was elected chairman in 2005 and has vowed to serve just a single four-year term.
President-elect Barack Obama is expected to choose Dean’s successor.
Dean was the architect of a “50-state strategy,” investing money and staff in every state — including those where Democrats had long fared poorly — to build party infrastructure and lay the groundwork for electoral gains. The Obama campaign, working with DNC organizers in every state, won several states that had not backed a Democratic candidate in decades, including Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana.
