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4/02/2003 12:28:00 AM | Timothy

Howard Dean event
Ok, so I get this note that 5 columbia students are needed to help out a Howard Dean event in the Manhattan. But when we get the place, we see it is being held in this bar with the word 'mod' in its name. I had expected some campaigning event, but this looked like a yuppie fundraiser. Living is grad school land, I was not used to such hip clothing and cool 'messed-up' hair-cuts. They let us in without paying the $100 and for the first time I got to see Dean speak, shake his hand and ask him some questions. I had three reactions to Dean: wow, can this man speak; wow, this man is short; and wow, can he talk straight in answering questions.
P.S. The south could be rough going though; As Dean left, I did get to tell that he should say, "LIKE Paul Wellstone said..." rather than "AS Paul Wellstone said, I'm Howard Dean, an I'm here..." He got it and wen 'ah!' Be on the lookout to see if the Dean campaign adopts that oh so crucial word change.
Dean began with his line "As Paul Wellstone said: I'm Howard Dean and I here to represent the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party!" (I thought to myself... no one but Dean would say 'I'm Howard Dean!' Hmm... I assumed Dean was trying to placate critics who said he was using Wellstone's line without crediting him.)
Dean said some interesting things during the speech: he said Harry Truman was "not exactly a big liberal" yet he still called for universal health care. He claimed "If you want to have social justice, you have to have a balanced budget. Here's why." His explanations seemed more to have to do with debt than the budget. He argued that tax cuts during the good times made it so school funding and services would have to be cut during a downturn, the very time when people need them most. It seems to me that this is not, however, an argument for having a balanced budget during a downturn. It is an argument for using extra tax revenues to reduce our debt so we can afford to deficit spend during a downturn. Dean also made the argument against tax cuts during a recession, saying that rich people were not going to change their spending habits. (I only realized later that he didn't mention the conservative argument that tax cuts for the rich are meant to lead to changes in investment and saving. Clever of him to frame it that way.) He is right-on when he said he wanted to get rid of most of Bush's tax cut. (I wonder which specific part he wants to keep?)

Dean said "I did not support the President on Iraq and I'm not ashamed [of that]. I do support the troops.... We are not obligated to support the President's policy because this is not Iraq. This is the United States! Dissent is patriotic." Dean said that in order to talk about homeland security we had to talk about oil: "We've got to stop being dependent on foreign countries in the middle east for... oil."
Dean also had strong words against two things in Bush's state of the union. The first was on his promise on HIV/AIDS: Dean noted that the administration had pushed to eliminate references to 'condoms' in U.N. work to stop AIDS. Dean said that as an M.D., he could tell us "you don't fight HIV/AIDS if you are afraid to talk about condoms." (I think he even said this was frankly disgusting. Somewhere in the speech, maybe around here, he dissed fundamentalist preachers).
The other thing Dean was passionate about Bush's use of the word 'quota' to describe Michigan's affirmative action policy. Dean called 'quota' a "race loaded word" designed to invoke in poor white people a sense they were going to lose their job. Dean did not mince words: "We have to have affirmative action in this country and we've got to stand up and say so..." (He had this tale of how, when he was Governor, his chief of staff was a women. Chiefs of Staffs do the hiring, and Dean said the "office was a matriarchy." Dean said that when a position in the policy office opened up, Dean suggested that maybe a male could be found to help correct the gender imbalance. Dean says the Chief of Staff sort of sighed and ernestly said: "It's really hard to find a qualified male." Dean said the lesson from this was that we all kind of tend to hire people like ourselves because we are comfortable having people who are like us around. He told a version of affirmative action in his state that worked to counteract that-- actually it was merely an effort to ensure that qualified women lawyers were encouraged to apply to a committee that reviewed and suggested possible judge nominations-- a committee of eminent lawyers who were mostly men.)
Dean said, if nothing else, he wanted to restore a sense of community in seeking the nomination and if he were to become President. He said we should not allow children to go hungry 25 blocks away from here, and that we should be concerned and responsible for each other. We should not just care about educated our children, but all of our children.
He had an interesting twist on the American ideal being about inclusion: "That is what the essence of the America has always been to the rest of the world." Interestingly, it seems to me that he was doing something slightly different by implying that inclusion also meant social and economic justice, not just toleration and a chance to make it. He ended with saying 'I want our country back': "I want to be proud to be an American!" I think he's really encapsilating the feelings of the electorate (in the primaries at least).

When I shook his hand I told him I worried that if he won the nomination but lost the election, that might hurt the chances of 'the Democratic wing' of the Democratic party in 2008. He told me he had thought about that and said he thought it was going to be a close election and it was important to change the discourse for '08. The Columbia student with me was impressed how he answered the answer. I was too. I'll tell you, he did a great job of calming my fear about this and I suppose I couldn't have asked a better person about it! I did not ask him whether this might another situation like McGovern, though. But honestly, I'm thinking now that if we cannot start standing up for more 'progressive' positions now, I don't know when it will happen Dean doesn't call himself a progressive perhaps because of the third party in Vermont; but he has an admirable willingness to use rhetoric they love while still being sensible and moderate. It's a nice combination. Bill Bradley had some of that strange mix, but he was aloof and not the best campaigner. Dean is willing to fight. (But if only he had some of Bradley's height!) I asked him whether he thought he had the best chance of any of the other candidates of beating Bush and whether standing on principle and changing the discourse might make up for having slightly less better odds. He said he thought that standing on principle was the best way to beat Bush and noted that the other four guys running from Congress had voted for the war resolution and the so-called 'leave no child behind' act. I also asked him how much he thought he might pick up in the South and rural areas from his position on guns versus how much he thought he might lose because of his support for civil unions. Dean told me that the West was libertarian: they would vote against you if you supported gun control, but they didn't much care that much about people's lives (he mentioned states like Montana: he doesn't expect to win in Utah).

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