Reply #5: Great Interview

[Armstead]

Ol' Howard really does understand what's going on and what is needed to solve them.

It makes me mad that the real Dean hasn't been able to break through "the filter."

God I hope we don'ty end up with an election of empty platitudes after the candor and insight of Dean and Kucinich.

Here's an example of how Dean sees beyind the cliches, and really understands a positive progressive approach:

"I look at centralization versus decentralization. If you centralize, you will have mediocrity everywhere; if you decentralize, you will have a few programs that are disasters, but a lot of programs that are really successful when innovated at the local level .... The Republicans always like to talk about running the country like a business. I want to run the country like a really successful business. The Republicans around the country run the country like Enron. The businesses that are incredibly successful have been the businesses that allow local people at the entrepreneurial level to make decisions for themselves (and) understand that some of them are going to make mistakes. No terrorizing them to think if they make one mistake, then they are fired. That is exactly the worst way to get the best out of people. The way to get the best out of people is to support the 95 percent of the people that really want to do a good job of getting the resources they need to succeed. If you terrorize people, everybody will be so afraid to make mistakes, they will never do the constructive and creative things they could do to create really good programs. That's basically what we did in Vermont (support the people), and I think that is a great model for the rest of the country."