RESEARCHING HOWARD DEAN, PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

I do not understand why, regardless of who is in the WH, why negativity regarding an incumbent needs to come into play in a campaign.

I guess I didn't make myself clear.

I do not understand why, regardless of who is in the WH, why negativity regarding an incumbent needs to come into play in a campaign.

We all know who Bush (or whoever the incumbent at the time) is.

But challengers continually couch their positions in relationship to that incumbent.

It is a matter of perspective, Tartarin, regarding "all the negative", and I can understand your perspective when I recall his predecessor, because I felt the same thing at that time.

Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, is fond of saying he is running for President "from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party"--a direct quote from the late progressive Senator Paul Wellstone. Like Wellstone, Dean is critical of the Democrats for not putting up more of a fight against an aggressively rightwing Republican agenda.
"I think the country is going in the wrong direction both economically and in terms of foreign policy," he told me in a car-phone interview during a recent campaign trip, "and I don't think the Democrats are going to be able to beat the President with the equivalent of Bush Lite."
As an outspoken opponent of the war with Iraq, Dean has been drawing cheers and lifting the spirits of Democratic activists who are spoiling for a fight. He chastises his colleagues for voting for the war, and for rolling over on the Bush tax cuts and what he calls the "Every Child Left Behind" education bill.
But while Wellstone spent his life fighting his party's creeping centrism, Dean only recently took up his position as a left fielder. He considers himself a moderate, and he has often crossed swords with Vermont progressives--including a challenger from the state's Progressive Party who won 10 percent of the vote in the last gubernatorial election.
"It's a pathetic thing that I'm the most progressive candidate" among those considered to have a serious shot at the nomination, Dean says.
Progressives in Vermont don't disagree. "Few people would have accused him of being a progressive governor in Vermont," says Paul Burns, executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group (one of the network of consumer and environmental advocacy groups founded by Ralph Nader). "It was not by accident that a strong progressive party was formed while he was governor here as an alternative to some of the positions he was taking."
Environmentalists in Vermont faulted Dean for weak enforcement and for policies that favored large factory farms, as well as for his position in favor of Yucca Mountain as the single repository for nuclear waste in the country--a position that put him at odds with then-Republican Senator Jim Jeffords. Social service advocates criticized him for being a fiscal conservative. And during the last election, the Progressive Party was outraged when Dean attempted to defund the public campaign finance system in Vermont.
Dean, who advocates federal campaign finance reform in the form of public financing of elections, instant runoff voting, and spending limits, responds that Vermont's campaign finance system was a mess after the courts struck down spending limits. "I didn't pull the financing out to screw the Progressive Party. I did it because nobody could use the money," he says.
On other issues, though, he is unapologetic about raising progressives' ire. Dean had the strong support of the National Rifle Association when he was governor, and he insists that gun control should be a state, not federal, issue.
"My position is not unreasonable," he says. "I support the assault-weapon ban, I support the Brady Bill. I want to close the gun-show loophole. But after that, I want each state to be able to make their own gun laws--as much as they want or as little as they want. We don't have much gun control in Vermont, and we also have the lowest homicide rate in America. So why have a big gun control law? Why not let California and New York make as many gun laws as they want but not have them in Vermont and Wyoming and Montana?"
Dean is not categorically opposed to the war. "I don't think you should run for President unless you're willing to use the military might of the United States to defend ourselves," he says. "But I don't think that the President ever made a case that Iraq was a particular danger to the United States. And I think that North Korea is a particular danger. Bush is refusing to negotiate with them. The policy is a policy of bullying and intimidation of both our allies and our enemies."
On domestic issues, progressives give Dean high marks on the issue of health care. A former family doctor, he is a passionate advocate for providing health care coverage to the uninsured. Vermont now provides coverage to more people than almost any other state, thanks largely to Dean's efforts. Only 1.9 percent of the state's poor children were uninsured in the years 1996-1998, according to a report by the Vermont Agency of Human Services. This was the lowest rate in the country.
Instead of advocating a Canadian-style, single-payer system, Dean says he wants to apply Vermont's model to the whole nation, expanding Medicare, Medicaid, and employer health coverage, then working toward crafting a better system.
"My attitude, having tried to do it for twenty years in one way or another, is we ought to try to get everyone in the system and then talk about reform," he says. "We've done the opposite the first three times we've tried it under Truman, Carter, and Clinton. The result was that we couldn't get anything done. . . . Every time we have that fight about how to reform first, the losers are the forty-two million people who go on for another ten years with no health insurance."
Dean's political role model is Jimmy Carter. He got interested in politics while licking envelopes on Carter's 1976 campaign. "Jimmy Carter got me into politics on the notion of connecting human rights and foreign policy," he says. "Now we've got to connect human rights and trade policy." By that, he means attaching labor and environmental standards to all trade agreements.
Dean is not a member of the Democratic Leadership Council, the group founded in 1985 to promote centrism within the party, but he reads their literature and says they have some good ideas.
"At the beginning I think it was very good, because I think the party wasn't winning elections because we were too far to the left," he says. "Now I think the party has moved too far to the right."
Dean says Bush has been something of a stealth conservative.
"George Bush governed Texas as a relative moderate--not a super moderate--but then when he came into the White House he started espousing all this super rightwing stuff," says Dean. "And I think this country is headed in an extreme direction. I think it's painful for a lot of middle class Americans who are trying to make ends meet, and I think it's painful for a lot of our former allies who've discovered that America's woken up to be a bully."
Dean may not have a progressive track record like Wellstone or leftwing candidate Dennis Kucinich, but at least he is raising issues that once constituted the core of the Democratic Party's message. He could act as a healthy corrective to a party that seems to have trouble distinguishing itself from the Republicans, even as the Republicans move further and further to the right.
"Harry Truman first introduced the notion of health insurance for all Americans in 1948," Dean points out. "Now people consider it a socialist plot. That shows how far to the right we are. I think it's too far right, and I think most Americans agree with that."

Ruth Conniff is Political Editor of The Progressive.
http://www.progressive.org/may03/rc0503.html

War Profiteering
Even before US troops arrived in Baghdad, looting broke out--in Washington. While Republicans in Congress and their allies in the media yammered about the need to silence dissent and "support the troops," corporations with close ties to the Bush Administration were quietly arranging to ink lucrative contracts that would put them in charge of reconstructing Iraq. Bechtel's contract, worth up to $680 million, to rebuild Iraqi roads, schools, sewers and hospitals drew a lot of media attention, but it was chump change compared with the deal greased through by Vice President Cheney's old oil-services firm, Halliburton. The Army Corps of Engineers told Representative Henry Waxman that a Pentagon contract awarded without competition to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) to fight oilwell fires is worth as much as $7 billion over two years. The Halliburton subsidiary has been authorized to take profits of up to $490 million.
Congress dozes while the treasury is raided. Waxman has done the best job of monitoring the rapidly burgeoning relationship between the federal government run by Dick Cheney and a corporation formerly run by Dick Cheney. He's been asking polite, persistent questions such as, "What is the exact nature of the work that Brown & Root is expected to be asked to perform under the contract?"
But where's the outrage? Where is the leader with the courage to say, as Franklin Roosevelt did during World War II, "I don't want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster"? Democrats in Congress--and Republicans who have not placed their conscience in a blind trust for the duration of the Bush/Cheney years, a group we hope still includes Arizona's John McCain in the Senate and Iowa's Jim Leach in the House--should borrow a page from past wars, when the nation's elected leaders knew what to call businessmen who used hostilities abroad as an excuse to raid the federal treasury. Senator Robert La Follette tagged them as "enemies of democracy in the homeland." During World War II Harry Truman referred to some forms of war profiteering as "treason."
When he heard rumors of such profiteering, Truman got into his Dodge and, during a Congressional recess, drove 30,000 miles paying unannounced visits to corporate offices and worksites. The Senate committee he chaired launched aggressive investigations into shady wartime business practices and found "waste, inefficiency, mismanagement and profiteering," according to Truman, who argued that such behavior was unpatriotic. Urged on by Truman and others in Congress, President Roosevelt supported broad increases in the corporate income tax, raised the excess-profits tax to 90 percent and charged the Office of War Mobilization with the task of eliminating illegal profits. Truman, who became a national hero for his fight against the profiteers, was tapped to be FDR's running mate in 1944.
How about authorizing a contemporary "Truman Committee" to oversee Iraqi war contracts? There's a strong issue here for candidates John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, Bob Graham, Dick Gephardt and all the other Congressional Democrats who would lead their party in 2004 against a President who will be rolling in corporate dough, some of it from companies that profit from war. Voters will respond to a Democrat who is willing to battle the profiteers. Like most Iraqis, most Americans want to see an end to the looting.
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030512&s=editors

An interesting thought, Snood, in the context of our earlier discussions about who can and can't achieve the presidency. That sounds ironic, but in fact I'm admitting a) I never thought about that before and b) I'm not sure you're right. ...though it would take some giant steps to get to that point. In fact people aren't pacifists in isolation. They are pacifists and (for example) for universal healthcare and for an increase in availability of and spending on higher education and etc. etc. So one is "selling" a package, not a single position. Taking that back to the earlier discussion about race and the presidency, I think the same applies.