Howard Dean - One year ago

[killbotfactory]

(Posted this in the politics forum, but was asked to post it here, so here you go.)

Interesting to see how the press has changed since Dean started running over a year ago. The biggest thing that's changed is not Dean's message of balanced budgets and universal health care, but the media's schizophrenic coverage of him.

Invisible Man

Unlike his better-known competitors, he has argued explicitly, even enthusiastically, for repealing part of the Bush tax cut. He has also placed universal health care, beginning with children, at the center of his nascent campaign. Although risky, these proposals could move the political debate back to the issue on which Bush is most vulnerable: his administration's decision to squander Clinton-era surpluses and sacrifice vital government programs in order to give wealthy Americans a tax break. All Dean must do is show that his ideas resonate with voters.

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But if Dean battled state liberals over the ensuing years, particularly during budget season, he also gave them plenty of reasons to support him. As unwilling as Dean was to raise taxes, he cut them only once, in 1999, and then only moderately. In the late '90s, when the state suddenly had large surpluses on its hands, Dean opposed larger tax cuts and called instead for paying down debt and for onetime public-works expenditures. Over the years Dean won over environmentalists by passing laws restricting the development of open spaces; he impressed feminists by opposing occasional legislative efforts at restricting abortion. Most of all, even as he kept the state's finances sound, Dean doggedly directed what money the state did have to the cause closest to his heart-expanding access to quality health care.

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Today nearly 90 percent of new mothers in Vermont accept the at-home visits--one reason, Dean says, that child abuse rates for children through age six have declined 50 percent. Dr. Dynasaur's results are more impressive still. According to the governor's office, just 4 percent of the state's children are without health insurance, among the lowest rates in the nation. The state's overall uninsured rate, 8 percent, is also among the nation's lowest--in part because Dr. Dynasaur allows adults in families with incomes below 150 percent of the poverty line to "buy into" Medicaid for a small fee. Even taking account of Vermont's small size and relatively low poverty rate, these are substantial achievements, and all the more so because Dean has remained committed to the programs despite rising medical costs and recent budget pressures. Indeed, even those Vermont Democrats who consider Dean too fiscally conservative concede that his devotion to Dr. Dynasaur is genuine and ironclad. "That was his vision, his persuasive capacity, his tenacity," says state Senator Nancy Chard, one of the governor's regular sparring partners on the left. "It's an absolute given in this state that you do not in any way diminish or reduce what Dr. Dynasaur does. We as a state have accepted that obligation. That's Howard Dean. He deserves one hundred percent of the credit for that."

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Even today some supporters of the bill accuse Dean of cowardice, complaining that he signed the measure "in the closet." Peter Shumlin, a Democratic state senator, disagrees. By his account, it was Dean who ultimately pushed reticent legislators to pass the bill: "We went up to the governor and said, 'We need to appoint some commission on how to deal with this court decision and come back next year and pass a bill then.' He looked at us and said, 'This is the right thing to do, and we happen to be at a place in history where we can make it happen. We're not going to run from our responsibility.' ... And he knew the consequences. He knew there would be political fallout, that people would lose their jobs over it; but he knew it was the right thing to do for civil rights."

He's gone from being a socially liberal fiscal conservative who won't be able to get his message out, to fringe ultra-liberal dove who's the second coming of McGovern, to a socially liberal fiscal conservative who's not really a dove and not liberal enough for the fringe ultra-liberal activists who support him and is peaking too soon. Interesting.