Howard Dean

...Q: What do you see yourself doing...

...Q: What is the goal of Democracy for America...

...I had the following telephone interview with Dean on April 19...

...Dean: Politicians are basically free to do what they want...

...And he said he doesn't want to be a "redistributionist Democrat...

...Interestingly enough, Kerry's plan and my plan are very similar...

...I really don't...

...I think the older supporters may feel that way...

...And the second problem is that entertainment has supplanted news value...

...The fact is, Israel has a right to defend itself, first, and secondly, in the long run if you want peace, the Palestinians have to feel that they've been fairly dealt with...

...And he distinguished himself with his candor...

...For those of us who believe in supporting the environment, Kerry's record is far better than George Bush's on the environment...

...Nor will I. I think that would be a big mistake...

...DemocracyforAmerica...

...I'm really not...

...Then we can talk about changing it...

...We have over 400 people running for office: school board, county commissioner, mayor, state legislator...

...But this can be done within the context of what we have now...

...Why are you advising activists to vote for him instead of considering Ralph Nader or whomever the Green Party puts up...

...Q: But don't you think people have the right to vote for whomever they want...

...They're not average Americans themselves...

...And they are just poorly served by their leadership, and Washington's very much out of touch with the struggles of ordinary Americans...

...It's funny...

...It was a progressive, grassroots campaign that was anti-war at its core and anti-establishment in its orientation...

...Q: You disagree with Kerry on that...

...The election was clearly not won by George Bush in Florida, and then the Supreme Court put politics above loyalty to the country...

...The former Vermont governor may not have been as progressive as his followers, but he seemed to move toward them during the run-up to the primaries...

...I think there are different views in the media, from Fox News to The New York Times, from The Weekly Standard to The Nation...

...I'm trying to get John Kerry elected...

...I'm not a subscriber to any of that stuff being what hurt the campaign...

...Do you think there's any legitimacy in that...

...Interestingly enough, I agree with the Israeli assassination policy because I believe Hamas is a terrorist organization, but I strongly disagree with the Israeli policy on keeping large chunks of the West Bank...

...The younger supporters tend to ignore the press...

...Q: Are politicians free to chart out an independent course on another issue: Israeli-Palestinian politics...

...He would be a far better President than George Bush, so whatever differences we may have are very small compared to the differences I have with George Bush...

...Q: Is going negative a response that doesn't work anymore...

...Is Kerry going in the wrong direction...

...Obviously, I want to support Democrats, particularly progressive Democrats who supported us...

...There's a lot of opinion pieces under the guise of news, and once one person comes up with it, it gets repeated...

...com will be around a lot longer than November, one way or another...

...Dean: That was pretty silly...

...It hopes to elect candidates around the country and it vows to promote grassroots democracy, to campaign for progressive policies, and to fight against "the far right wing and their radical, divisive policies, and the selfish special interests who for too long have dominated politics...

...I'm not sure it would have made any difference...

...Some of us thought the media didn't like you not because you were bristly but because you were too far left...

...I'm sure there were personal factors involved, but I'm not one who buys the notion of a media conspiracy...

...And I think we clearly have to deal with the voting machine issue: The Diebold voting machines have been undermined by their own chairman, who said he was going to do everything he could to get George Bush reelected...

...That's one of the problems with the media...

...Q: What happened to your campaign in Howard Dean: Oh, I haven't spent a lot of time delving into all that...

...But the biggest problem with the media is first that 90 percent of Americans get their news from eleven corporations so that the loyalty in the editorial staff and higher up is principally to the shareholders rather than to the public...

...This is one election where a vote for Ralph Nader is essentially a vote for George Bush...

...And I want to support them...

...Dean: People absolutely have the right...

...And certainly two weeks later they certainly thought that was right since we had just lost an additional thirty troops...

...Dean: I've spoken to John Kerry about that, and he's going to have some legal teams in Florida...

...And then I'm interested in doing whatever I can to see that Democrats retain Democratic values...

...The ones who aren't going negative get the benefit...

...Though his campaign foundered in the cornfields of Iowa (with a push and a shove from the mainstream media), Dean did not give up his hope of establishing an enduring organization to carry forward some of his goals...

...And the thing I'm most interested in is health insurance for everybody...

...For those of us who believe in health care for every American, it's very clear that John Kerry is going to bring us closer to that than George Bush is...

...The pitfall of what's happening in the media is if you're under thirty, you get your news from the Internet and The Daily Show, and there's not much discrimination between what they find on the front page of The New York Times and what they find on the Internet...

...Dean: Yeah, I think they do...

...We're the only country in the industrialized world that doesn't have that, and we need that...

...Dean: I don't really think that hurt me all that much...

...Do you agree...

...The concerted attacks of the other candidates in the media didn't help, but I think it was more a function of, first of all, Iowans not wanting to be told who the frontrunner was by the media and others, and second, the Gephardt attack, and then the mistake we made by responding to it...

...Most people in America knew it was true...

...Dean: My biggest fear is that the election will be stolen again as it was in Florida by the elimination of large numbers of the African American community from the voter rolls by a private company contracting with the state...

...He was his old blunt self...

...Do you have any fear that he would not go quietly...

...He attacked us, and we chose to respond to him...

...Kerry seemed to be papering over differences on that question, and also on the Iraq War, his position doesn't seem drastically different from Bush's...

...We should get everybody in the system first, and then worry about changing it later...

...The legacy of George Bush will be far worse than any President in my lifetime, and we can't afford another four years of this...

...And I think that taking large chunks of the West Bank is not going to resolve the problem...

...Q: How scary is the prospect of another four years of George Bush...

...You said the United States should play "a neutral role" and then all the other candidates dumped on you for that...

...Dean: I don't think there's much legitimacy to that...

...Q: What do you make of the way the press treated you...

...Q: Can any candidate tell the truth on a controversial topic like the capture of Saddam Hussein and not get burned...

...Q: People often ask me, "Will Bush give up power if he loses...

...So that's my greatest fear: not that George Bush won't go quietly according to the law, but that before the law gets enforced there will be a great deal of fiddling with it...

...Q: A lot of your supporters feel the press had it in for you, or did you in...

...Dean: You know, I don't know...

...Q: Looking back on the campaign, what did you learn...

...We really can get there...

...Dean: It's not hard...

...Q: Or they've got to think it's right now...

...When I said that I didn't think the capture of Saddam Hussein made us any safer, though I congratulated the troops for doing it, average Americans thought to themselves, yeah, that's probably right...

...And I don't think they relate to most ordinary people...

...Dean: I think the press in general is a failed institution in this country...

...Dean: Well, you know, that's up to John Kerry, not up to me...

...Dean: I'm certainly not going to spend my time criticizing John Kerry...

...I've played no part in trying to keep Ralph Nader off the ballot...

...I'm interested in getting John Kerry elected President...

...Dean: Because the stakes are too big...

...Dean: My goal is to elect as many grassroots candidates around the country as possible...

...Q: But Kerry doesn't excite a lot of people at the progressive grassroots...

...What we did was based on what we did in Vermont...

...But I don't think there's an ideological conspiracy in the media to keep certain candidates out...

...Sometimes from the point of view of the activist, the perfect becomes the enemy of the good, and I think there would be a huge price to be paid by America's working people and by small children and by minorities if George Bush is reelected for a second term...

...Q: How do we get it...

...I would have said so if I was still a candidate...

...Most of that started out in gossip columns in The Washington Post...

...Dean: It always works, but never in a multicandidate race...

...The idea that someone is going to spend two years and $50 million and doesn't really care is pretty silly...

...Q: The Daily Show may be savvier than some of that other stuff...

...That's not a bad thing, in the sense that people don't get spoon-fed anymore...

...We don't have to take away people's choice of doctors, or any of those things that Harry and Louise talked about ten years ago...

...We've tried to do it in the reverse several times, and it's failed...

...Many in the mainstream media believe the conventional wisdom that the Democrats need a centrist candidate, so the closer you came to getting the nomination, the more panicked they became...

...Q: What can be done to stop that...

...Our campaign was not about crafting positions in order to win...

...Dean: It's devastating for the country: a half-trillion dollar deficit for every single year, God knows what additional military adventures are being planned that we're not being told about, the worst environmental President since the League of Conservation Voters has been evaluating them, half a million children have lost their health care...

...Matthew Rothschild is Editor of The Progressive...

...Dean: Oh, I don't know, I don't get to watch The Daily Show...

...That organization is Democracy for America...

...Dean: I learned that the American people are pretty great people...

...We're not done trying to change that...

...Everybody makes mistakes, but probably the biggest one was the spat with Gephardt at the end...

...For two reasons...

...I think the media is very much like the inside-the-Beltway crowd...

...Politicians who believe they have to craft every position in order to win will lose...

...And if we can, to take back the House and Senate, which we're not that far from doing...

...Q: There is some speculation, perhaps idle in the press, that you were self-sabotaging, that you really didn't want to win, and the closer you came to getting the nomination, the more gaffes you committed...

...Q: You should...

...Are you interested in joining the Kerry Administration if offered...

...And I plan to vigorously support Kerry...

...The only person who can be President other than George Bush is John Kerry, so it makes no sense to vote for Ralph Nader...

...This has nothing to do with the race...

...That's not going to lead to peace...

...Certainly, Clinton's attempt to get universal health care didn't work...

...But I do plan on playing a vigorous part to convince these people to vote for John Kerry...

...My hope is that we'll have a Democratic Administration, and then we'll hold their feet to the fire so they start performing for people who put them there...

...Q: You said on March 17, "To defeat George Bush, the Democratic Party and its nominee must stand up strong for our principles, not paper over our differences with the most radical White House in our lifetime...

...We've got to have legal advice, and we've got to have technical advice to make sure that those voting machines, which cannot be recounted, are used properly...

...Dean: I do, I do...

...They're under a lot of pressure from editors and publishers...

...And I don't mind saying that...