Opinion: Howard Dean wants it over in June

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But will it end with a scream? You know, the one he wishes he could take back?

Howard Dean worries that infighting by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton -- and among their supporters -- will demoralize the party’s base and damage the Democrats’ chances of winning the White House in the fall.

The chairman of the Democratic National Committee, himself a candidate for president in 2004, told the Associated Press that he hopes that the party’s nominee will be determined shortly after primary voting ends in early June -– and he will encourage party superdelegates to make up their minds before the party’s convention in Denver in August.

The countercharges between Clinton and Obama have grown too personal at times, Dean suggests.

‘You do not want to demoralize the base of the Democratic Party by having the Democrats attack each other,’ Dean said. ‘The supporters should keep their mouths shut about this stuff on both sides because that is harmful to the potential victory of a Democrat.’

The superdelegates, the nearly 800 party and elected officials who can support whomever they choose at the convention, ought...

UPDATE: Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy says why wait? Clinton should quit now.

to decide soon. ‘There is no point in waiting,’ Dean said. ‘Somebody is going to lose. My job is to make sure the person who loses feels like they have been treated fairly so that their supporters will support the winner.’

Dean has been quietly consulting with party stalwarts about how to wrap up the nomination. He has spoken with former President Jimmy Carter, former presidential contenders Al Gore, John Edwards and Jesse Jackson, former Sen. George Mitchell and former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo as well as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (if you haven’t heard from Dean yourself by now, there’s probably no sense sitting by the phone).

‘There’ll be some nasty fights if it goes to convention, and people will walk out,’ Dean said. ‘But I’ve also been talking to a fairly significant number of, by and large, nonaligned people about how we might resolve this.’

-- Mark Silva

Mark Silva of the Chicago Tribune’s Washington bureau wrote this for The Swamp blog.