Most people don't know who Ken Mehlman is. He's the chairman of the Republican Party, obviously, but what he's doing that Howard Dean isn't doing is spending a lot of time on the nuts and bolts of putting the party together.
Bureaucracies are inherently antidemocratic. Bureaucrats derive their power from their position in the structure, not from their relations with the people they are supposed to serve. The people are not masters of the bureaucracy, but its clients.