The Bush White House isn’t the only institution in this city undergoing forced change.

Howard Dean is shaking up the status quo at the Democratic National Committee, too. But though Dean faces substantial obstacles, he now appears to have a better chance at success than the president.

Bush has shaken up his inner circle, replacing loyal chief of staff Andrew Card with another longtime Bushite, Joshua Bolten.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan resigned, and political guru Karl Rove lost his policy role. Rove is now free to focus on the fall congressional elections, which could be disastrous for Republicans if Democrats can nationalize local races as a referendum on the president’s job performance.

Bush, ever the loyalist, vows to stick with embattled Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The president’s problems aren’t rooted in who sits in what chair but in the policy decisions they confront. Bush’s signature domestic initiative, Social Security reform, has failed as spectacularly as the Clinton health care remake of the mid-1990s. And Iraq, by any reasonable definition, is far closer to outright civil war than it is to the peaceful, stable Middle East ally that Bush and Rumsfeld had envisioned shortly after Saddam Hussein fell more than three years ago.

Unless Bush can turn the latter crisis around – perhaps with troop withdrawals that don’t look political or with Osama bin Laden’s capture or death – one or both houses of Congress could be in Democratic hands after the fall elections.

The prospect of a Democratic takeover has energized Dean. Dean, who introduced campaigning to the Internet and vice versa, is certain that the Democrats’ best path back to power is to compete in Republican bastions as seriously as they do in states like New York and Illinois.

“I think we need to be a national party again, and I think we need to run on a message that can appeal to people in Alabama as well as appeal to people in New York,” Dean told reporters at a mid-April Christian Science Monitor breakfast. “And I think we have a list of issues and a message that will do that.”

But as Dean learned in a meteoric campaign for the presidency in 2004, even the best ambitions sometimes crash into on-the-ground realities. Democrats, by definition, are anti-monolithic: This is a political party that celebrates Will Rogers’ assertion that he belonged to no organized political party – he was a Democrat.

Already, veteran Democratic organizer Harold Ickes is building a private voter list, in competition with the DNC’s, that some view as one of the first acts of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. And South Dakota’s controversial ban on abortion illustrates the difficulties in building a national apparatus around a party identified as hostile to abortion opponents.

Dean told reporters that “the first thing out of our mouths on abortion should be we ought to reduce the number of abortions dramatically in this country, and we ought to seek common cause with other people who want to reduce the number of abortions.” But he went on to call the South Dakota Legislature’s abortion ban “an outrage.”

Dean did not say the bill could not have passed without significant Democratic support. The chief sponsor in the South Dakota Senate was a Democrat, and six of 10 Democrats in that body voted for the ban.

Still, Dean – never short on certitude – is convinced he can build a powerful, 50-state machine that includes states like South Dakota. He says the old way of remodeling the national party around a presidential candidate every four years and then focusing on a few states is out, at least on his watch. Dean is replacing it with a kind of trickle-down politics, if you will.

The national party is raising money to help build parties in every state – funding at least four organizers, press secretaries and others in each state – and is building a massive national voter list that any Democrat down to city council level will be able to borrow.

“I want to do everything I can to help a Democratic president get elected, but my job is to have a long-term plan for the success of the Democratic Party,” Dean told reporters.