To Deans opposition to the Democrats as Governor.
YOu guys have merely been spoiting Deans campaign drivel.
Enough people bought the stuff that Gephard publisjed about Denas opposition to Democrats in vermont, his cuts to social program, that Dean lost in Iowa bigtime:
"The joke among a lot of Vermont Republicans was that they didn't need to run anyone for governor because they basically had one in office already," said Harlan Sylvester, a conservative Democratic stockbroker and longtime adviser to Dean.
It’s Business As Usual,
Starring HOWARD DEAN
(St. Petersburg Times, July 6, 2003)
* * * * * *
In Vermont, said John McClaughry, Dean was such a centrist that some in his own party considered him "a Republican in drag." McClaughry, a Republican who heads the Ethan Allen Institute, a public policy think tank in Kirby, Vt., said: "A lot of people in Vermont look at Howard Dean today and they don't see the Howard Dean who was governor. He has reshaped himself to appeal to a faction of the Democratic constituency." (Los Angeles Times, June 1, 2003)
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles9/DVNS_Howard-Dean.htm* The View From Vermont Is of a Different Dean (posted 11/12)
Washington Post, August 17, 2003
The tone of the current race for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination was set 12 years ago last week when a little-known Republican governor of a state with fewer people than Baltimore dropped dead of a heart attack while cleaning the filter on his swimming pool. . . . Truth be told, the former governor never aspired to be a liberal maverick because, well, he wasn't one. The good doctor -- born, after all, into a solidly Republican family with a homestead in the Hamptons -- could never have been a flaming liberal and remained at the state's helm for very long. . . . As most close observers of Vermont politics note, Dean the Democrat continued to pursue much of the agenda established by Snelling the Republican. Dean worked at balancing a deficit-plagued budget, resisting urgings from the left to abandon Snelling's tightfisted ways. As he told Vermont Public Radio in an interview two years ago, "I think there was an expectation among some of those on the farther liberal ends of my own party that I was going to come in and now things were going to be different, and the facts were that we had a big serious financial crisis and somebody had to deal with it and that somebody happened to be me by chance." In other words, Dean was trying to be true to his pledge to govern as Snelling would have -- as a progressive Republican
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A1216-2003Aug15¬Found=trueHoward Dean: the Progressive Anti-War Candidate?
Perspectives from Vermont
I know that a lot of you are going to vote for Dean -- he talks a good game; he can be charismatic and charming. But I'm warning you. This man will tell you what you want to hear, or at least tell you something that has some little kernel of something that you can interpret as support for the things that are important to you. But when the time comes to stand up and lead on the issue, to take on the money interests and backsliders in his own party, that stiff little spine will turn into a slinky.
If you vote for him, it's your job to stand behind him with a poker and keep him headed in the right direction. Don't give him any honeymoon period, either--keep the pressure on from the second you drop that ballot in the box. The minute you relax, he's going to turn right back into what he really is...a privileged, arrogant, middle of the road republican. Put your political energy into getting some truly progressive folks into the House and Senate, and into State legislatures around the country so that there will be more pressure from more directions. We need to get together our sophisticated progressive thinkers to develop policy ideas in every area, so that we're ready with real, well-thought out counter-proposals for the incremental changes a Dean administration might put forth. If you feel you must, support Dean, do--but then go do the work necessary to make real change.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles8/Bister-Estrin-Jacobs_Dean.htmDemocrat laces up a liberal exterior
As Howard Dean lays claim to the left in 2004, many in Vermont recall a more conservative governor.
By ADAM C. SMITH, Times Political Editor
© St. Petersburg Times
published July 6, 2003
BURLINGTON, Vt. - Pausing from hawking his organic beets and strawberries, David Zuckerman grinned when asked about the new hero of liberals across the nation.
"Most Vermonters I know chuckle about Howard Dean as the most liberal presidential candidate," said Zuckerman, a pony-tailed farmer and Vermont state legislator.
He once likened a group of liberal Democrats to communists. He publicly said he hoped one fellow Democrat would lose shortly before her election.
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/07/06/Worldandnation/Democrat_laces_up_a_l.shtmlDean's No Wellstone
by Jim Farrell, The Nation, May 26, 2003
While Dean may share some measure of Wellstone's passion, his record and his agenda are very different. As governor of Vermont, Dean targeted for elimination the public-financing provision of the state's campaign finance law--a law similar to the one Wellstone pushed in the Senate. In February 2002, Dean said his big donors are given special access. While Wellstone fought for people on welfare, Dean said some welfare recipients "don't have any self-esteem. If they did, they'd be working" and scaled back Vermont's welfare program, reducing cash benefits and imposing strict time limits on single mothers receiving welfare assistance. Dean advocated sending nuclear waste from his state to the poor, mostly Hispanic town of Sierra Blanca, Texas. Wellstone called the proposal "blatant environmental injustice" and fought to delay the measure in the Senate. It ultimately passed but was later determined unsafe. Just last year, Dean proposed deep cuts in Medicaid, which were blocked in his own legislature. Now he calls Representative Dick Gephardt's healthcare proposal, which would roll back the Bush tax cuts in order to provide a tax credit for employers mandated to deliver health coverage to workers, "a pie-in-the-sky radical revamping of our healthcare system." Dean has said that a constitutional amendment to balance the budget "wouldn't be a bad thing" and that the way to balance the federal budget is "for Congress to cut Social Security, move the retirement age to 70 and cut defense, Medicare and veterans' pensions." In the name of fiscal conservatism, Dean's final-year Vermont budget also cut portions of the state's public education funding
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030526&s=farrellWho's the Real Howard Dean?
As Vermont governor, the liberal firebrand was a fiscal conservative with close ties to business
Howard Dean has fought his way to the front of the Democratic pack jostling for the 2004 Presidential nomination partly because he has won the hearts of so many liberals with his antiwar rhetoric and shoot-from-the-lip style. But who is the real Howard Dean? Is he the left-of-center insurgent being portrayed in the press or the business-friendly fiscal conservative and pragmatic moderate who governed Vermont for 11 years?
Many who worked with Dean are astonished at his current image and comparisons to liberal icons such as George McGovern. "The Howard Dean you are seeing on the national scene is not the Dean that we saw around here for the last decade," says John McClaughry, president of the Ethan Allen Institute, a conservative Vermont think tank. "He's moved sharply left."
Conservative Vermont business leaders praise Dean's record and his unceasing efforts to balance the budget, even though Vermont is the only state where a balanced budget is not constitutionally required. Moreover, they argue that the two most liberal policies adopted during Dean's tenure -- the "civil unions" law and a radical revamping of public school financing -- were instigated by Vermont's ultraliberal Supreme Court rather than Dean. "He was not a left-wing wacko," says Bill Stenger, a Republican and president of Jay Peak Resort, who says he supported Dean because of his "fiscally responsible, socially conscious policies."
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_32/b3845084.htmDr. No and the Yes Men
New York Times Magazine, June 1, 2003
If Dean ever belonged to the ''Democratic wing of the Democratic Party'' before this year, he must have kept his membership secret. During his five two-year terms as governor, Dean was proud to be known as a pragmatic New Democrat, in the Clinton mold, boasting that neither the far right nor the far left had much use for him.... Then, last fall, Dean opposed the Congressional war resolution that Kerry, Joe Lieberman, John Edwards and Dick Gephardt all supported. And it didn't take long for Dean to see that he had stirred something powerful in the depths of the Democratic Party. Liberal resentment had been building since the mid-1990's, when liberals had to swallow Bill Clinton's strategy of ''triangulation'' on issues like welfare reform....In the space of a few weeks, Dean became the antiwar candidate, the new Gene McCarthy. Dean, an instinctively shrewd politician, recognized an opportunity when it presented itself. He began using the ''Democratic wing of the Democratic Party'' line and broadened his attacks on Bush and his fellow Democrats.... Dean is clearly aware of this predicament, and he doesn't want to be seen as a peace candidate. ''It's kind of a sad commentary that I'm the most progressive candidate running, out here talking about a balanced budget and a health care system run by the private sector,'' Dean told me at one point. During another conversation, he said: ''I was a triangulator before Clinton was a triangulator. In my soul, I'm a moderate. I know no one believes that.'' I asked Dean whether he is worried that his liberal supporters might be disillusioned if they heard him talk this way. He shook his head. ''I've met people in the peace movement, and I've said, 'Look, I appreciate your help, but you have to take a hard look at me, because I'm not a pacifist,''' he said. ''In fact, I'm far more hawkish than the president is on terrorism.''
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles9/DVNS_Howard-Dean.htmWhat Liberal Messiah? Howard Dean, left-wing impostor.
Monday afternoon, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean announced that he was running for president to promote health care, child development, and fiscal responsibility. "But most importantly, I wanted my party to stand up for what we believe again!" shouted Dean. To his legions of supporters, he pleaded, "You have the power to take back the Democratic Party!" Those are good lines, and they got the applause he wanted. But they're for show. Dean isn't nearly the left-winger his fans or critics imagine.
For months, Dean has accused his Democratic rivals of caving to the right. He scolds them for supporting the Iraq war resolution, accepting $350 billion in additional deficit-era tax cuts, and voting for President Bush's underfunded education bill. Dean claims to stand for "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," unlike Bob Graham, who purports to represent "the electable wing of the Democratic Party." But how exactly do Dean and Graham differ on the war resolution, the tax cuts, and funding the education bill? Not at all.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2084735/Mental breakdown: Embracing change, Vermont neglected its state hospital (posted 11/12)
Boston Globe, October 20, 2003
When federal inspectors emerged from Vermont's tiny state mental hospital this summer, they described conditions that can best be called archaic. Patients paced the halls, or sat in isolation, while staff members ignored them. One woman had not bathed in more than four months. A man had not had his psychiatric evaluation updated since he was admitted -- in 1980. When night came, patients on one ward were ordered to bedrooms that were locked from the outside, with no access to bathrooms. During the review, the situation got worse: Within a span of six weeks, two patients committed suicide in their rooms. One, a 19-year-old woman whose treatment plan specified that she be stripped of her shoelaces, hung herself with a shoelace, according to an advocate who had represented her in grievances against the hospital. The revelations, shocking anywhere, came as a particular surprise in Vermont, a state much admired for its progressive mental health policies. . . . In his run for president, former governor Howard Dean moved early to stake out the territory of mental health for himself, delivering a speech Sept. 12 that promised "real solutions to the mental health care crisis" and holding up the Vermont system as a model. But the state's neglected mental hospital shows the limits of the Vermont success story. . . .Peter Van Vranken, who was Dean's health policy adviser when he was governor, said he "really
have an answer" to how the hospital was allowed to deteriorate
http://www.boston.com/yourlife/health/mental/articles/2003/10/20/mental_breakdown/
Past haunts Dean on Medicare issue (posted 11/12)
Boston.com, September 30, 2003
HAD DICK Gephardt been more politically correct last week, he would have rebuked Howard Dean for standing with Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico on proposed Medicare cutbacks in the 1990s or with then-Representative John Kasich of Ohio. To those bosses of the newly Republican budget committee in Congress, he could have added the GOP revolutionaries running the House Ways and Means Committee -- Bill Archer of Texas and Bill Thomas of California. Newt Gingrich, however, was a lightning rod for disbelief -- a distraction, really. Dean expressed wounded shock and horror that anyone would link him to the former speaker, who in turn tried to link slashes in eligibility and other restrictions on Medicare beneficiaries with a whopping tax cut for high-income Americans. The truth, however, is that as a conservative Democratic governor, Dean really did do what Gephardt says he did, and his shifting attempts to wiggle off that hook have made his conduct an issue in a Democratic race that grows more serious by the week. . . . Dean will plead guilty to having supported a slowdown in Medicare's rate of spending growth (from 10 to 7 percent annually) -- an innocuous-sounding, almost accountant-like budget position. In fact, the proposal he supported would have restricted eligibility, called on some retired people to pay more, and used force more than incentives to require participation in managed care
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/dean/articles/2003/09/30/past_haunts_dean_on_medicare_issue/
Crisis in Agriculture in Vermont: A Special Report about Governor Howard Dean's Agriculture Department From Vermonters for a Clean Environment, Inc.
Vermonters for a Clean Environment, March 20, 2002
Agriculture has been a mainstay of Vermont's economy and culture for centuries. The state of Vermont does and should take an active role in supporting agriculture. However, in recent years, support for agriculture has been twisted by our state government so that it no longer means what it once did -- support for family farms and sustainable way of life. Instead, support for agriculture has come to mean support for practices that generate the most dollars in the shortest time with the least concern about their impact on other Vermonters , present and future
http://www.vtce.org/deancrisisagvt.html
* For the Defense
Rutland Herald Editorial, August 16, 2001
Dean has made no secret of his belief that the justice system gives all the breaks to defendants. Consequently, during the 1990s, state’s attorneys, police, and corrections all received budget increases vastly exceeding increases enjoyed by the defender general’s office. That meant the state’s attorneys were able to round up ever increasing numbers of criminal defendants, but the public defenders were not given comparable resources to respond…
http://rutlandherald.com/Archive/Articles/Article/31792
Dean's Law and Order Views: The representative of the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," is on some constitutional issues at odds with many in his party's base
Time Magazine (on-line edition), October 30, 2003
Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean has rarely missed a chance -- in debates and smaller forums, as well as on his website -- to hammer the Bush administration's handling of civil liberties since the 2001 terrorist attacks. He's even taken other Democrats to task: "Too many in my party voted for the Patriot Act," he said last June in a not-so-veiled jab at some of his opponents in the presidential race. "They believed that it was more important to show bipartisan support for President Bush during a moment of crisis than to stand up for the basic values of our constitution." But on Sept. 12, 2001, Dean had quite a different reaction. He told the Vermont press corps he believed the terrorist hijackings would "require a re-evaluation of the importance of some of our specific civil liberties. I think there are going to be debates about what can be said where, what can be printed where, what kind of freedom of movement people have and whether it's OK for a policeman to ask for your ID just because you're walking down the street…I think that's a debate that we will have
http://www.time.com/time/election2004/article/0,18471,535358,00.html
On the campaign trail with the un-Bush
by Jake Tapper, Salon.com, February 19, 2003
He gets a deluge of phone calls from reporters asking him to clarify his position. Which is -- "as I've said about eight times today," he says, annoyed -- that Saddam must be disarmed, but with a multilateral force under the auspices of the United Nations. If the U.N. in the end chooses not to enforce its own resolutions, then the U.S. should give Saddam 30 to 60 days to disarm, and if he doesn't, unilateral action is a regrettable, but unavoidable, choice. "Dean is stirring up antiwar people," a senior advisor to one of his Democratic opponents says. "They are against all war, not just against war without U.N. support. When we do go to war, and Dean says he's with our troops and president in time of national crisis, the antiwar activists he's cultivated will turn on him quickly." .
http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2003/02/20/dean/index_np.html
The Dean Deception: The lying S.O.B.
By Justin Raimondo, Anti-war.com, August 27, 2003
As Dean barnstorms the country and charms the left-wing of his party with his brand of pernicious guff, he is turning into a disaster for the anti-war movement, and an embarrassment to his supporters. If we're lucky, Dean may derail his own campaign with his careening instability long before he gets anywhere near the White House
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j082703.html
Short-Fused Populist, Breathing Fire at Bush
Washington Post, July 6, 2003
Garrison Nelson, a professor of political science at the University of Vermont and a frequent Dean critic, says the Different Dean has been fascinating to watch. "Howard Dean pounding the podium taking back America is a new Howard," he says. "Now, whether the new Howard is the real Howard is a matter for speculation. Is he taking the left as a campaign strategy?" Dean says he doesn't mind being called a liberal and welcomes progressives to the campaign. ("I'd be delighted if the Greens supported me!") But he chuckles at the liberal label, considering that "I am probably the most conservative of the candidates when it comes to gun control." It's a states issue, he says, and his state, with its low crime rate, doesn't need it. "I think it's pathetic that I'm considered the left-wing liberal," Dean said. "It shows just how far to the right this country has lurched." Over and over on the campaign trail, he tells audiences that he is a fiscal conservative who believes balanced budgets serve the cause of social justice. "Here's why," he'll say. "When you balance the budget, you have money in hard times to pay for the things you need." Yet if he generally sounds more like a Paul Wellstone progressive than a Bill Clinton centrist on the stump, even borrowing the late Minnesota senator's line about representing "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," well.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11710-2003Jul5?language=printer
The Appeal of Howard Dean
SEVERAL YEARS AGO an obscure Democratic governor from the politically inconsequential state of Vermont was the guest speaker at a Cato Institute lunch. His name was Howard Dean. He had been awarded one of the highest grades among all Democrats (and a better grade than at least half of the Republicans) in the annual Cato Fiscal Report Card on the Governors. We were curious about his views because we had heard that he harbored political ambitions beyond the governorship...
You folks at Cato," he told us, "should really like my views because I'm economically conservative and socially laissez-faire." Then he continued: "Believe me, I'm no big-government liberal. I believe in balanced budgets, markets, and deregulation. Look at my record in Vermont." He was scathing in his indictment of the "hyper-enthusiasm for taxes" among Democrats in Washington.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/073ylkiz.asp
This is just a short list going over Dean's activities as governor, his support for the war in Iraq until he sawc the opportunity to tke advantage of the anti-war movement, and lost of other indications of Deans own consevatism, his cuts to social programs, his support for cutting social security and medicare, and how he was vieewd as governor. This is only a TINY portion of what is available about Dean record.
No one can find anything that can indicate that Dean ever did anything that remottely resembles the type of candidate he was trying to represent himself as while running for office. Notice the article about the Cato Institute. Cato is oneof the most ultraconservative porganizations in the U.S.. They gave Dean one of their highest ratings as a conservative, and rated him higher than half of the Republican in the U.S. in conservatism. The Cato Institute was started by the Koch brothers, two ultraconservatives who found ways to give George W. Bush 25 million dollars by bundling funds. By the way the Koch Brothers are the sons of the founder of the John Birch Society. They decided that this organization and there father were not conservative enough so they founded the Cato Institute to support their ideas on conservatism.
So like Dean all you want, but he is no "real Democrat" his entire record is a denial of most of the main principals of the democratic party.
P.S., myscreen name has nothing to do with Dean but Ho Chi Mihn, who was called Uncle Ho. But given how much you actually know about Dean, I shouldnt expect you to know that.
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