Reply #81: Sorry

[Nicholas_J]

Uncle Ho was what Ho Chi Minh was called. I just decided to bouble up on the Ho's

I have been around DU for several years and studies Dean record as Governor for most of them.

There is not one thing that he supported or claimed he would do as presidential candidate that bears much of a resiemblence to his tenure as governor where his tax cuts favored the rihj (the poos and middle class payed 50 percent more in statesa taxes that the rich) The major environmental organizations like Sierra Club all oppsed his environmental ideas, He opposed virtually all politically progressive legislation that Democrats worked for, and never met a big business that he didnt like. As governor, the liberal democrats considered him arrogant and totally unwilling to compropmise on anything. Overall his health program was a simple shift ofcoverage from disabled people and elderly people on a fixed income, to the children of familes more able to afford insurance. Overall Dean is the quintessntail politician who will say one thing to one group, and someting else to another. Even his stance on civli unions was based on attemptoing to ge political capital and avoid harm to his career. The history of his decision is fraught with political opportunism and based on hbeinbg given few chouices but to sign the legislation and then worry about how to minimize its effects on his next run for office.

The fact are that while Republicans are a minority party in Vermont, they have won every election because of the bad blood Dean created on the left. It is something that will take decades to fix, if it is ever repaired.

In personality Dean resembles George W. Bush in is completel unwillingness to compromise with liberals and progressives. A lartge amound of Deans support in Vermont came from moderate Republicans rather than progressive Democrats. REpublicans for Dean was an organization established by 30 of the states leading Republicans.many of who were high ranking executives in the energy industry and the pharmaceutical industry. These people managed to rape the state six ways from Sunday in the Hydro Quebec Dean which was a Vermont scaled Version of the Enron rip off in California. They overcharged Vermont for energy to the point that the stte will be decades in paying it off. Deanveven had his Cheney like secret meeting with the Energy industry in Vermont with a Ken Lay like figure named William Gilbert.

When the fiscal problems ohit the state in 2000, Dean fought to prevent raising taxes on the rich, and the solution he offered was simply to cut social benefits to the poor and the elderly. Deans response to Democrats who called this unjust was that the rich were already taxed too much in Vermont.

Ther is simply nothing in Deans pat that in anyway resembles the very cleverly politically packaged platform he used to get the young to support him. It was very similar to Bush's "compassionate Conservatism".

Even the methods by which Vermont got out of its deficit problems whgen Dean took office were not due to anything that he came up with. The tempoaray rise in taxes was passed by his predecessor. Governor Snelling, who didnt want to pass it, but was outflanked by Democrats and progressives. It worked very well , but Dean let it expire rather than follow the recommendations of his ownparty to keep it going. From that point on Dean could only keep the budget balanced by mare and more cuts to social spending. Vermont Democrats fought Dean with th repeated statements that they were not going to balance the budget of the state on the back of the poor and the middle class so that the rich and large corporations could benefit.

In the end, given the fact that Goverment was swewn up by the REpublicans with Dean help,, as Dean favored every pieve of Repuyblican legislation put up to be voted on, many of th most liberal and progressive Democrats simply left office to start lobbying organizations to fight Dean, as he had prevented Democrats form being able to function in Government.

Before supporting any candidate by simply listening to the screed they are selling., it is a very good idea to look at what they DID. And not by listening to them tell you what they did.

Onoe of the key oppoents to Dean as Governor was the liberla political scientist, Garrison Nelson. He gives an accurate history of Deans legislative agenda in one sentence:

s summer, many news stories have identified Howard Dean with the left. But Dean's actual record verifies this assessment from University of Vermont political science professor Garrison Nelson: "He's really a classic Rockefeller Republican -- a fiscal conservative and social liberal." After seven years as governor, the Associated Press described Dean as "a clear conservative on fiscal issues" and added: "This is, after all, the governor who has at times tried to cut benefits for the aged, blind and disabled, whose No. 1 priority is a balanced budget."

http://www.leftwatch.com/articles/2003/000056.html

Lets seem what Busineswekk said about Dean during the election:


AUGUST 11, 2003 • Editions: N. America | Europe | Asia | Edition Preference







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GOVERNMENT

Online Extra: No Longer the OMB's Invisible Man

Who's the Real Howard Dean?

Online Extra: Dr. Dean on the Record

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GOVERNMENT

Who's the Real Howard Dean?
As Vermont governor, the liberal firebrand was a fiscal conservative with close ties to business

Howard Dean has fought his way to the front of the Democratic pack jostling for the 2004 Presidential nomination partly because he has won the hearts of so many liberals with his antiwar rhetoric and shoot-from-the-lip style. But 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?...


AUGUST 11, 2003 • Editions: N. America | Europe | Asia | Edition Preference







STORY TOOLS
Printer-Friendly Version
E-Mail This Story
Sponsored by:


GOVERNMENT

Online Extra: No Longer the OMB's Invisible Man

Who's the Real Howard Dean?

Online Extra: Dr. Dean on the Record

• Find More Stories Like This


GOVERNMENT

Who's the Real Howard Dean?
As Vermont governor, the liberal firebrand was a fiscal conservative with close ties to business

Howard Dean has fought his way to the front of the Democratic pack jostling for the 2004 Presidential nomination partly because he has won the hearts of so many liberals with his antiwar rhetoric and shoot-from-the-lip style. But 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. "He was not a left-wing wacko," says Bill Stenger, a Republican and president of Jay Peak Resort, who says he supported Dean because of his "fiscally responsible, socially conscious policies."

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.

And when environmentalists tried to limit expansion of snowmaking at ski resorts, "Dean had to show his true colors, and he did -- by insisting on a solution that allowed expanding snowmaking," says Stenger. IBM (IBM ) by far the state's largest private employer, says it got kid-gloves treatment. "We would meet privately with him three to four times a year to discuss our issues," says John O'Kane, manager for government relations at IBM's Essex Junction plant, "and his secretary of commerce would call me once a week just to see how things were going."

Dean also wins accolades for his handling of fiscal policy. "He is a very frugal man," says A. Wayne Roberts, president of Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce, who worked in the Reagan White House in the '80s. "There is no way in heck he would tolerate a deficit." In fact, Dean resisted pleas from more liberal Democratic legislators to hike spending while pushing through two income tax cuts, paying down the state's debt, and funding the state's "rainy day" reserves. As a result, "we are now one of the few states that is in good shape financially," says Jim Douglas, Dean's Republican successor as governor. In fact, Vermont closed the books on its 2003 fiscal year with a $10.4 million surplus, even as California, Massachusetts, and many other states battle huge deficits

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


The rest of the article goes on to report about how Dean much self praised heath care program was rather underfunded, and recieved at best mixed reviews


During most of Deans tenure as Governor, he was largely the target of liberal democrats and progressives who could find little good to say about him, though he was the darling of Republicans. The Ultraconservative Cato Institute, gave Dean one of the highest ratings they every gfave to a Democrat, calling him "one of the few good ones" in the Democratic Party. I dont think we need someone worthy of the praise of the Koch Brothers ( largely responsible for helping Bush steal the election 1n 2000). to revitalize the Democratic party and set it on its feet agains after this election. We need sometone who actually is a democrat.


Someone who as has some record of working for the middle clas and the poor, and not someone with a record of favoring mega corporations.