Can Howard Dean be stopped in his bid to become the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee? That’s the question the party’s establishment has been asking since Dean—who’d said he’d run only if he thought he had the votes to win—jumped into the contest with a media splash last week. Instantly he became the front-runner in the field of seven candidates for party chief and prompted the establishment to embark on an Anybody-but-Dean movement.

It may not be easy for the center-right leaning power elite in the party to bar the route to the doctor from Vermont. The establishment’s original candidate, former Indiana Congressman Tim Roemer, entered the race with the puissant backing of the Democrats’ two congressional chiefs—Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. The handsome and articulate Roemer got a lot of face time on the tube during the 9/11 Commission hearings, where he proved himself an aggressive questioner and burnished his image on national security—the latter, the party elite thought, made him a bulletproof winner for a party still reeling from its November defeat, in which post-9/11 security hysteria played a major role.

But Roemer has been effectively torpedoed by a bizarre alliance—a double-whammy, slash-and-burn lobbying campaign by two of the party’s most influential interests: the women’s groups and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The women’s groups, led by NARAL Pro-Choice America and the political fund-raisers at EMILY’s List, have targeted Roemer’s anti-abortion voting record.

AIPAC—the powerful, pro-Israeli lobby, now embroiled in accusations that it was at the center of a spy ring within the Pentagon on Israel’s behalf—has been brandishing a list of what it claims are 22 “anti-Israel” congressional votes by Roemer, who’s been a critic of the $6 billion plus in U.S. aid to Ariel Sharon and his “Wall of Shame.”

A gaggle of little-known center-right postulants for the DNC post have failed to catch fire. Donnie Fowler, a callow technocrat from South Carolina has a Web site featuring a plug for him that begins, “He loves God.” Simon Rosenberg, a former staffer for the center-right Democratic Leadership Council, runs the New Democrat Network, the DLC-oriented PAC. Wellington Webb, a lackluster former Denver mayor and the only African American in the race, hasn’t even generated much enthusiasm among black elected officials.

As Roemer sinks, the man who’s emerged in the last week as the party establishment’s Stop-Dean candidate is former Texas Congressman Martin Frost. Frost is much appreciated by party insiders for limiting his party’s losses when he ran the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the ‘96 and ‘98 election cycles, during which he proved himself an adept fund-raiser and a master of organizational detail—and he’s got a powerful lobbying force in the Democratic House members whose seats he helped save.

A fairly reliable liberal on economic issues who has opposed all of Bush’s tax cuts, Frost is a hawk on foreign and military policy. A supporter of the Star Wars missile defense system who has voted against cuts at the Pentagon (Texas gets a lot of military-industrial complex contracts), Frost was a big supporter of the war in Iraq.

The mood of the Democratic establishment these days is aggressively centrist, and Frost’s candidacy could be boosted by Democratic governors who have an inordinate influence over docile DNC members from their states.

It doesn’t seem to matter that Dean’s reputation as a liberal is exaggerated. In the lead-up to his DNC candidacy, Dean reiterated in interviews that he was a “centrist” who had governed as one in Vermont; and last year he told my colleague David Corn, “I really have a healthy mistrust of the left as well as the right.” Dean was infinitely less leftish—and less significant—than the movement that crystallized around him. But Dean’s shoot-from-the-lip style scares the bejesus out of party powerbrokers and Democratic consultants. There’s even a move afoot to persuade a fresh Stop-Dean centrist candidate with more charisma than the dull and wintry Frost to enter the fray: most often mentioned is ex-Sen. Bob Kerrey, another ex-9/11 Commission member.

Even so, Dean is the man to beat. At a regional forum for the candidates for DNC chair in Missouri on Saturday, it was Dean whose every sally drew enthusiastic applause. And a recent poll for The Hotline of 187 of the 447 DNC members showed a clear Dean-Frost contest—with a first ballot choice of 58 for Dean, 30 for Frost, eight for Roemer, four each for Fowler, Rosenberg and Webb with the rest undecided. (But add all the votes in this poll for the other centrist candidates to Frost, and he edges out Dean.) The DNC meets Feb. 12 to make its choice. Stay tuned.

Doug Ireland writes for LA Weekly.