Reply #7: He is not really truthful and above board. That's the problem. [View All]

[kerry-is-my-prez]

If he were all of us here would be lined up for him... His rhetoric does not match his actions OR his record. He claims to be open, honest, anti-corporation, anti-lobbyist but has a lobbyist running his campaign. He tooks money from energy PACs at the beginning of his campaign.

He was extremely pro-corporation in Vermont when he was Governor.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_32/b3845084.htm

.....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.

......Business leaders were especially impressed with the way Dean went to bat for them if they got snarled in the state's stringent environmental regulations. When Canada's Husky Injection Molding Systems Ltd. wanted to build a new manufacturing plant on 700 acres of Vermont farmland in the mid-'90s, for instance, Dean greased the wheels. Husky obtained the necessary permits in near-record time. "He was very hands-on," says an appreciative Dirk Schlimm, the Husky executive in charge of the project.


-snip-

Still, Dean had a knack for positioning himself and never lost an election. Those who know him best believe Dean is moving to the left to boost his chances of winning the nomination. "But if he gets the nomination, he'll run back to the center and be more mainstream," predicts Stenger. Says Garrison Nelson, a political science professor at the University of Vermont: "Howard is not a liberal. He's a pro-business, Rockefeller Republican."....While balancing the budget and keeping defense expenditures intact, that would leave precious little room for new liberal programs. What it more likely would leave are a lot of dashed expectations among the crowd that so fervently wants the doctor to be in.