Interview with Gov. Howard Dean
July 10, 2002
OPENING QUESTION: Champion land deal.
PART I: Life before politics.
PART II: Political career, lighter questions, and views on leadership and politics.
PART III: Some issue questions.

 

PART II - Political career, lighter questions, and views on leadership and politics.
QUESTION: Somewhere in there you started getting involved in politics.

DEAN: I got involved in politics in 1980 when I was a resident.  I got involved in the Carter re-election campaign, and in 1980 went to the national convention as a delegate for Carter...in New York.

Q: What were you doing for the Carter campaign?

DEAN: Licking envelopes and putting stamps on them and all that kind of--making phone calls.

Q: In Burlington?

DEAN: In Burlington, yeah.

Q: Who was the boss?

DEAN: A woman named Esther Sorrell, who got me into politics.  [Sorrell served as a State Senator from Burlington from 1973-74 to 1981-82].

Q: And there was the bike path?

DEAN: That was going on around the same time.  I teamed up with a lawyer named Rick Sharp, he's a wonderful guy, and an environmental professor from the University named Tom Hudspeth, and we just put together a citizens group to pressure the city and developers into not closing the waterfront off to the public, and then putting a bike path along the entire length of Lake Champlain, which is there today.  If you get a chance to see it, it's an extraordinary thing.  If you go down to the Waterfront you can walk all the way to the Winooski River.  In fact, I finished it off as governor; we're going to build a bridge across that river.  It only took 21-2 years...

Every time a developer came we'd go fight them--get petitions and get on the ballot and all this stuff and try to get the city to develop this bike path, and we finally managed to get them to do it.  Twenty years later we connected to Colchester and it runs all the way to Montreal essentially.  Today you can ride from Montreal to Burlington if you want to.  I didn't have anything to do with all that piece of it.  Basically I just did the Burlington piece. 
 

QUESTION: So in the 80's you were a state legislator and you basically learned the ropes of Vermont politics.  Is that an accurate way of characterizing that?

DEAN: Yep.  I was also the assistant majority leader in my second term.

Q: Under Ralph Wright?

DEAN: Yep.  Quite an experience.

Q: What did you learn from Ralph?

DEAN: Hah!  How tough politics can be.  He's a very tough guy.

Q: Former military?

DEAN: Former Marine, but just as tough as nails.

Q: I had a chance to get a couple of chapters of his book All Politics is Personal.

DEAN: Yeah, a lot of that stuff in there is entertaining, but not much of its true.

Q: It's kind of contradictory.  He praises you for being a warrior, and then at the end he talks about how you abandoned health care, how you walked away from that.

DEAN: Well that's just entertainment.  Ralph is a very entertaining guy and his book is like he talks.

Q: Did you have a reasonable relationship with him?

DEAN: It was difficult.  It was difficult to have a relationship with Ralph; he was controversial, and he could be very loyal and very helpful and he could also really stick it to you.  He once reduced the person who worked for me to tears by having her job removed from the state budget.  I thought that was pretty bad.

Q: He writes about that.

DEAN: That's the kind of guy he was.

Q: Although he denies that he had anything to do with it.
 

QUESTION: You're now governor and you're actively involved in health care.  Do you have any insights on why Clinton's health care plan failed?

DEAN: ...was very complicated and it alienated every interest group in Congress all at once, who then financed the Harry and Louise ads, who managed to convince the American public that they were going to lose quality and choice, which they value in our health care system, if we radically reformed it.  And the lesson I took is do universal health care first, don't fight about the means with the Democratic Party, with others in the Democratic party, first.  And second of all, build on the existing system so you don't have to explain it to the American people.  And that's what we're going to do.

Q: You've got Congress though, you've got people who have been working on this issue for 20 or 30 years, and I don't think they even tried to work with Congress [in developing the plan].

DEAN: I agree with that.  My first year in office, the first thing I'm going to do is to get people like Henry Waxman and Pete Stark and obviously Gephardt and Daschle if they're still in the positions they're in, and whatever Republicans we need to get, Bill McCrery would be one that appeals to me the most because of the Atlantic Monthly article, Jim McCrery I mean from Lousiana, and sit down with them and try to hammer out a solution that we can all agree on.  It doesn't have to be my way or hit the highway but we've got to have something we can sell to the American people.
 

QUESTION: As governor you've also been active in the Democratic Governors Association, and I understand you're in charge of recruitment since '95.  What does that mean?

DEAN: It means I've been going around the country since '95 trying to help Democrats get elected governor.  Sometimes you have to go and get them to run.  We got Jim Hodges to run in South Carolina, which I'm very proud of.  And sometimes it just means you support them and you call them and give them hell and ask them if they're doing the things they should be doing, which they never like at the time, but they're glad for afterwards, and sometimes they don't need any help at all.  There have been plenty of people who have been elected who don't even know who I am probably.  We tend to work in the mid-size and smaller states because the big size states tend to pretty much do it on their own.

Q: Was Hodges difficult to persuade?

DEAN: No he's a great person.  I mean he was a lot of fun and his wife really wanted him to do it and that was great too.  He's one of my favorite governors, so he was just a delight to work with.  And he was really serious about it.  He really did what you have to do to win in a difficult state for a Democrat.
 

QUESTION: A few lighter questions.  Do you like to read, when you're on vacation?

DEAN: I never take vacations.

Q: I think I read that you were on vacation recently at some point.  But do you read books?

DEAN: I do.  They mostly tend towards being political books--Fat Man in the Middle Jack Germond.  Gosh.  I've read all of those books about the different presidential campaigns.  All by Myself, about the Dukakis campaign.  I've forgotten what the last one was but I tend to read political--  Actually, I'm in the middle of a book called The Tipping Point right now, which you've probably heard of.  It's a really interesting book and I'm trying to remember who the author is.  I probably have it there someplace.  But it's basically about how movements get started and what the critical instances are in those movements and how decisions get made and so forth.  And then the last two books that I read before that were both defense books from the Brookings Institute; obviously I have a little work to do there.

Q: How about movies?

DEAN: I hardly ever see movies.  The last one I saw was "Beautiful Mind," which was wonderful.  It is so good I actually saw it twice.  But I don't go see many movies.  But I have to say I did see the Harry Potter movie, we all four went to that.

Q: You got talked into it or--?

DEAN: No I kind of wanted to see it.  The kids read the book; they said it was great.

Q: And physical activity?

DEAN: I don't do as much as I'd like to.  When I can, I really love outdoors.  My kids and I have canoed the entire length of the Connecticut River which is 400 miles.  We've sailed the entire length of Lake Champlain, which is 1x0 miles.  I've hiked the entire Long Trail, which is about 270 miles.

Q: In sections?

DEAN: Oh yeah.  In sections, not all at once.  And I ski.  But I don't tend to do sustained physical activity every single day; I don't jog or anything like that.

Q: Art.  I saw that your mother was an art appraiser.

DEAN: She is. 

Q: And I'm wondering if you yourself have any preferences?

DEAN: I love Impressionism.  I like opera, although I don't get to go.

Q: Impressionism.  What would be two or three--

DEAN: Monet, Manet; I actually, I like Gauguin; that kind of stuff... I like J.W. Turner--J.W.M. Turner.  He's not an Impressionist obviously.  His seascapes and things of that sort.  My tastes are very eclectic.

Q: When you were growing up did you go to art galleries or the Met?

DEAN: No, I don't think I really started to like art until I went to college.
 

QUESTION: Back to more serious-- You've been compared to Paul Tsongas and John McCain in terms of being a straight talker.  Did you ever meet Tsongas?

DEAN: Yes.

Q: What was your impression of him?

DEAN: Tsongas was a good guy and he was a very good writer. 

Q: The follow up to that question--his "Call to Economic Arms," the booklet that he had on his campaign was great.  Have you given any thought to writing a book?

DEAN: Yeah, I've given some thought to it [laughing somewhat dismissively].
 

QUESTION: Some broader questions.  On leadership, do you have a favorite definition of leadership or some thoughts on what are the key elements?  What makes a good leader?

DEAN: I think it's a balance.  You've got to have long term vision and then you've got to be willing to take short incremental steps to get to the long-term vision, and then you've got to also explain to people sometimes why they have to do things that they don't want to do and get them to do it.  But you also have to also listen to people and figure out what it is they want to do and figure out how to get them what they want. 

Being a leader is not always being 25 yards out in front of everybody else, it's a balance of sometimes being 25 yards in front of everybody else and sometimes being 5 yards behind and making sure that they get what they need. 

Every year after the legislature used to adjourn I used to go around the state on this tour to sort of absorb what people were telling me they were worried about and that would create the legislative agenda for the next year.  And there would be a lot of different things in that agenda, but the constants, the three constants were fiscal discipline, programs for children, including health insurance for everybody, and conservation, environmental conservation.  Those were my themes that I wanted, but I don't get to do just what I want in this job.  I'm hired to make sure that I can do what the boss wants and the boss is 200,000 voters. 
 

QUESTION: How about the state of politics in America today.  In Washington, DC it seems that the order of the day is posturing, photo ops and polls.

DEAN: And partisan bitterness.

Q: Bush was going to change the tone.  That didn't happen.

DEAN: He's engaged in it himself; that's the problem.  The biggest problem with the president's leadership style is he comes from one far end of the political spectrum.  So he can't be a healer by definition because his program is not a healing program.  He's a healing personality, certainly a very pleasant person, but he's at the far end of the political spectrum and so he has an agenda that he has to advance and sort of a base with a lot of hateful people in it that he serves from time to time.  So he can say all the nice things he wants about compassionate conservatism, but his agenda is not a compassionate agenda; it can't be by definition.  That's why he has failed to unite the country.  September 11 has united the country but he has not united the country on the domestic agenda.  There's a lot of people really hurting.   You've really got to have somebody who's going to listen to all spectrums or all parts of the spectrum and then sort of be in the middle of the road and the president's not in the middle of the road. 

Q: So someone who comes from the center can--

DEAN: I think so.  I think Clinton was much better at uniting the country.  What you heard form Clinton was the shrill right also magnified by his own foibles, which were significant.  But Clinton really had his ear to where the public was; the president's [Bush] about spinning, with Rove running the show, and about spinning and advancing a conservative agenda and trying to dress it up in a more moderated way. 

Q: But Clinton was known for being poll-driven.

DEAN: But he always ended up in the middle.  And somehow Rove has got this thing about satisfying the base, and if satisfying the base comes first then you're never going to succeed in bringing the country together because the base by definition is at one end of the extremes.  The same is true with the Democratic party.  That's why Clinton was successful in fighting off his own liberals.  President Bush has not been successful infighting of the right wing.  I mean look at his judicial appointments.  Imagine making membership in the Federalist Society a criteria for whether you appoint somebody.  That's appalling.  It's all short-term political driven; it makes no sense long term.

Q: A follow up on the way campaigns are conducted--30-second spots, very long campaigns--

DEAN: Well I sort of get this feeling that people really do get a sense of who you are through the media.  And I agree that the media manipulates and this and that and the other thing but in the long run.  I think people have a sense of who you are.  Now if you make a lot of mistakes, you know people are going to be trying to spin you and you've go to be willing to fight [inaud.] back.  I mean Dukakis was sort of a victim of not fighting back really more than anything else.  But I think people get a sense of who people are, even in a presidential race.

Q: But so much money goes into these 30-second spots which are really confections.

DEAN: If I had my choice I'd give everyone five hours of time and let 'em do what they want with it, but life's not like that and we're not going to get that kind of campaign finance reform any time real soon.

Q: How do you envisage a Dean campaign would like like; would you be driving around...?

DEAN:  I don't know.  We haven't got there.  I can't tell you.  I mean right now I'm just simply meeting key players around the country and key constituency groups.  What the campaign will look like a year from now I couldn't possibly tell you.
 


 
OPENING PART I PART II PART III

Copyright © 2002  Eric M. Appleman/Democracy in Action