The Dean Deception: Keith Rosenthal

Reprinted with permission from the International Socialist Review

We must face the appalling fact that we have been betrayed by both the Democratic and Republican Parties.
–Martin Luther King, Jr., in Facing the Challenge of a New Age, 1957

WITH more than a year remaining before the presidential election of 2004, the former Vermont governor, Howard Dean, has stolen national attention for his criticisms of the recent unilateral war on Iraq by confidently arguing on the campaign trail: "We’re gonna’ beat George Bush!"

He has called for universal health care, environmental protection, the shredding of the "Bush Doctrine" of preemptive attack, a reversal of the tax cuts and has even called out the leadership of the Democratic Party for cowering before Bush’s right-wing onslaught.

But Dean has done much more than simply grab the attention of the national media. He also has many antiwar activists, progressives and former Ralph Nader voters excited about his campaign. Gary Younge described Dean in the Guardian (UK) as "the great red hope."¹ In the Nation, Katha Pollit recently wrote, "My fingers itch to write Dean another check." She continued, "Howard Dean is Ralph Nader’s gift to the Democratic Party."²

An even broader number of people on the American left–those who are weary of some of Dean’s proclamations in favor of Israel’s targeted assassinations of Palestinians, the occupation of Iraq, welfare reform and the death penalty (to name a few)–have simply concluded that Dean has the best chance to win the election.

Others have been driven so far by their hatred of Bush that they are launching preemptive strikes against any third-party candidacy. "A third party presidential challenge from the left would be reactionary and traitorous in the 2004 election," wrote Vermont liberal Marty Jezer.³

It is easy to understand why progressives want to eliminate George W. Bush after three years of attacks that included a war on Afghanistan and Iraq, massive tax cuts for the rich, racist scapegoating of Arab-Americans, the invocation of Taft-Hartley against West Coast dockworkers and billions of dollars poured into the colonial occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq while the number of people in poverty in America has steadily risen. For many, "Anybody but Bush" appears to be the only alternative.

With Howard Dean currently leading in the polls in the key election primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire, the choice for voters in 2004 could very well be between the man from Vermont and the man from Texas. The question is: Does Dean deserve your vote and your hope? His record as governor of Vermont holds some clues.

Though he has been dubbed a "raging liberal" by admirers and critics alike, Howard Dean governed Vermont strictly within the framework of the conservative Democratic Leadership Council.

Many people on the Vermont left see Dean’s current posture as politically motivated. "The notion that he is a liberal is ludicrous to those of us who worked with him in Vermont," said Terrill Bouricius, a former state representative.⁴ Dean admits that he recognized early on that the popular anger at Bush is "a raw energy, an energy that I know could be channeled."⁵

Back in February 2003, Dean candidly admitted to Salon magazine that if he were to win the nomination of his party he would "probably dispense with some of the more rhetorical flourishes. One time I said the Supreme Court is so far right you couldn’t see it anymore. Next summer I won’t be talking like that. It’s true and I’m not ashamed to have said it, but it doesn’t sound very presidential."⁶

But such political maneuvering is nothing new for Dean. Upon becoming governor of Vermont in 1991, after the sudden death of then-Republican Governor Richard Snelling, Dean made a sharp turn to the right and pursued that course ever since. In his 11 years as governor, Dean would shift rightward on one position after another, all the while claiming to be concerned for the needy and less-fortunate, and disappointing all who thought they were getting someone who would govern from the liberal end of the political spectrum.

Dean inherited a massive deficit in the state budget from Snelling. Refusing to raise taxes on wealthier Vermonters (and rendering the tax system more regressive than previously), Dean declared in his first State of the State address that it would be his mission to balance the state budget with some "tough" cuts. Even though Vermont has no law requiring a balanced budget, Dean promised, "The pain for Vermonters will be real."⁷

Dean slashed millions of dollars from all sorts of social programs, from prescription drug benefits for Medicare recipients and heating assistance for poorer Vermonters to housing assistance funds. In defending his cuts to social programs, Dean said, "I don’t think I have to shy away from that just because I’m supposed to be a liberal Democrat."⁸

Throughout the 1990s, Dean’s cuts in state aid to education ($6 million), retirement funds for teachers and state employees ($7 million), health care ($4 million), welfare programs earmarked for the aged, blind and disabled ($2 million), Medicaid benefits ($1.2 million) and more, amounted to roughly $30 million. Dean claimed that the cuts were necessary because the state had no money and was burdened by a $60 million deficit.⁹

But during the same period, Dean found $7 million for a low-interest loan program for businesses, $30 million for a new prison in Springfield, VT, and he cut the income tax by 8 percent (equivalent to $30 million)–a move many in the legislature balked at because they didn’t feel comfortable "cutting taxes in a way that benefits the wealthiest taxpayers."¹⁰ By 2002, state investments in prisons increased by nearly 150 percent while investments in state colleges increased by only 7 percent.¹¹

Indeed, Dean’s mix of "fiscal conservatism and social liberalism" seems to be not much different than Bush’s so-called compassionate conservatism, and certainly paralleled Clinton’s signature combination of liberal "I-feel-your-pain" rhetoric with neoliberal policies.

Politically, Dean moved into the outstretched arms of the Republicans and the business community of Vermont. As Elizabeth Ready, Vermont state auditor and former legislator during the Dean administration said, "His top advisers were all money people, brokers and bankers."¹² When Dean boasts on the campaign trail that liberals "hated him" for his "fiscal conservatism," he is not lying.

People on the left who think they will get a friend in the White House if Dean were to be president are sorely mistaken. As Sam Hemingway of the Burlington Free Press recounts, "At times he loved to pick on the extreme liberals in the state sort of as a foil, to build allegiances as a moderate and to pull in Republican supporters. He knew they’d have nowhere else to go."¹³

Dean red-baited and smeared even those in his own party who would criticize him for his conservative policies. In 1992, when assailed by Democrats for jettisoning his support for single-payer health care, Dean responded: "The progressive wing [of the party] needs to take a look at what works and to discard ideas that in many cases have been discarded by history, including the history of what happened in Eastern Europe."¹⁴

Most of the Democrats in the legislature rebelled against Dean over the budget cuts, and he ended up depending on Republican votes to pass most of his proposals. At the time, a local Vermont newspaper wrote, "The biggest items on Dean’s agenda for next year are likely to provoke more opposition from the Democrats than the Republicans. Nevertheless, Dean said he feels no particular pressure to deliver the goods to his party or to promote the Democratic agenda."¹⁵

In the mid-1990s, Dean even aligned himself with the likes of Republican Newt Gingrich on his stance on cutting Medicare. He opined at the time, "The way to balance the [federal] budget is for Congress to cut Social Security, move the retirement age to 70, cut defense, Medicare and veterans pensions, while the states cut everything else."¹⁶

On two separate occasions, once in 1993 and again in 1995, hundreds of welfare recipients, and elderly, impoverished, disabled and progressive Vermonters poured in to the capital, Montpelier, from all over the state to protest Dean’s cuts, comparing him to Newt Gingrich. In 1995, the protesters carried a banner reading: "Dean/Newt Robbing Poor Kids to Spare the Rich."

The Rutland Herald described how one protestor, Henrietta Jordan of the Vermont Center for Independent Living, "said it would be much fairer to raise taxes on people with expensive homes and cars, children in private school and a housekeeper at home than to cut programs that helped the 66,000 Vermonters living with disabilities."¹⁷ Dean responded callously, brushing off the pleas of Vermont’s most vulnerable by saying, "This seems like sort of the last gasp of the left here."¹⁸

Dean went above and beyond a "fiscally conservative" agenda when it came to welfare reform. He proudly boasts on his Web site that Vermont was the first state to implement a workfare program, which includes mandatory work requirements for welfare recipients. Dean complained at the time that people on welfare "don’t have any self-esteem. If they did they’d be working."¹⁹ After the first three years of Dr. Dean’s treatment, demand for food stamps and emergency food aid in the state reached record levels.²⁰

Moreover, Dean was the most devout business advocate in Montpelier, always supporting corporate interests regardless of the cost to workers or the environment. For IBM, the state’s biggest employer, Dean bent over backwards. The manager of government relations at the Essex plant commented how "[Dean’s] secretary of commerce would call me once a week just to see how things were going."²¹

IBM in Vermont is notorious for slimming a workforce that has been trying to unionize with the Communication Workers of America for some time. Nonetheless, IBM never got anything but "kid-gloves treatment" from Dean.²² IBM also happens to be one of the state’s biggest polluters, but receives consistent environmental praise from Dean.

Few people in the labor movement in Vermont would be willing to characterize him as a friend of labor. The Vermont section of the National Education Association (V-NEA) endorsed Dean only once in 11 years.

Dean did support the union drive of nurses at Fletcher Allen Hospital in Burlington in 2002 (though, this was only after he had announced that he would run for the presidency). But he is more memorable for his actions during the 1998 strike of nurses at Copley Hospital in Morrisville, VT, when he repeatedly refused to talk with the union, agreeing only to meet with management.

When Dean was governor, he was a staunch supporter of NAFTA, the WTO, the IMF and World Bank. While he is now distancing himself somewhat from certain aspects of these institutions (most likely a calculated move to win in the primaries), he still fundamentally supports their spirit–free trade, open markets and the pursuit of profits. And he still maintains that NAFTA was good for Vermont even though the state suffered 6,000 trade-related job losses in the 1990s.²³

Dean openly admits that he was a conservative budget-cutter and that he governed in Vermont as a "centrist." But there is much on the campaign trail that he is simply not being honest about. For all his talk about Bush lying to the American public, on issue after issue Dean seems to be quite skilled at it himself. Below are some examples.

Dean claims to have a health plan that will guarantee insurance for all Americans modeled on the system he set up in Vermont. In reality, according to his own Web site, his plan would leave at least 10 million Americans uninsured. And that is only if he actually implements his plan–he is determined that "nothing will happen on health care…until he works out a plan to balance the budget."²⁴ If he does model the national health care system on Vermont’s system, it won’t be pretty.

Vermont actually doesn’t have universal health care. It is true that almost all children under the age of 18 are covered, but U.S. Census Bureau figures show that 10—12 percent of Vermonters remain uninsured. This is only a little better than the national average of nearly 15 percent uninsured.

For those Vermonters who are insured under Dean’s plan, their access is extremely limited. Dean’s plan requires families to pay monthly premiums for government-subsidized health care. Because services are provided through private insurers, however, premiums have been steadily increasing while care has been steadily deteriorating. Over the past 10 years, employee health insurance costs have increased by 400 percent.²⁵

Dean has also cut basic services from the health plan such as X-rays, dental services, physical therapy, psychological care and cheap prescription drugs. As Dean explained to the Rutland Herald in 1991, one of the main assets of his health care plan is that "it definitely keeps people out of the emergency room."²⁶ It seems his main concern was not so much universal coverage as cost-cutting. In his first State of the State address he moaned:

In other words, health care under Dr. Dean means paying more for less.

Dean has positioned himself as a friend of the women’s rights movement because of his support for abortion–even late-term abortions. But Dean’s "fiscal conservatism" often got in the way of his "social liberalism." When cutting the budget in the mid-1990s, Dean’s axe managed to find itself aimed at battered women’s services.²⁸ And his welfare reform forced single mothers into mandatory jobs, hurting both the mother and the child. Moreover, although Dean himself is pro-choice, he has stated that he wouldn’t accept Dennis Kucinich’s challenge to make Roe v. Wade a "litmus test" for appointing federal judges.²⁹

While it is true that Dean signed a civil union bill into law while governor of Vermont, it is not something for which he can claim any credit. In 1999, the state Supreme Court unanimously ruled that gay couples were due the same legal rights of marriage as heterosexuals, and ordered the legislature to pass a law codifying that right. During his 1998 reelection campaign, Dean refused to talk about the issue publicly, saying he was waiting for the Supreme Court’s decision.

When the legislature began to formulate a bill, Dean made it clear that he would not sign anything permitting gay marriage. The compromise was the civil union legislation, which Dean signed "in the closet," privately, away from the cameras. At the time of signing, Dean "was going around the state telling folks he was only doing it because the Vermont Supreme Court made him."³⁰

Dean says he will not push for national civil unions, but will let the states themselves decide (in other words, he shares the same position as many Republicans). This is like being opposed to Jim Crow laws but willing to let the states decide whether or not to impose segregation.

Dean has lambasted Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act as a fraudulent misnomer. But Dean is no champion of sweeping education guarantees. When he was making his budget cuts, financial aid for higher education was first on the chopping block. According to Ellen David Friedman, organizer with the Vermont National Education Association, Dean was not necessarily sympathetic to teachers. Friedman recalled in an interview with the ISR how during contract negotiations, "Dean would make public statements encouraging school boards to shift more of the cost of health care onto teachers."³¹

While Vermont’s school system is funded relatively equitably through a general fund set up under the Act 60 legislation, this, like the civil unions, has little to do with Dean’s efforts. It too was born of a Supreme Court ruling that had virtually no previous support from Howard Dean.

According to information released by the Vermont State Colleges office, during Dean’s tenure, from 1991—2000, state funding per Vermont student decreased by 13 percent.³²

As president, Dean promises to "bring [his] commitment to our environment to the White House."³³ Many environmentalists in Vermont simply ask: What commitment? Dean boasts that he preserved over 400,000 acres of forests and farmlands while promoting renewable energy. But aside from those 400,000 acres, the rest of Vermont seemed to be fair game for development.

"Dean’s attempts to run for president as an environmentalist is nothing but a fraud," said Annette Smith, director of Vermonters for a Clean Environment. "He’s destroyed the Agency of Natural Resources, he’s refused to meet with environmentalists while constantly meeting with the development community, and he’s made the permitting process one, big dysfunctional joke."³⁴ Tom Elliot, the former political director of the Vermont Sierra Club said that "Howard Dean’s environmental record in Vermont is toxic."³⁵ The club has never endorsed Howard Dean in his five campaigns for governor.

Dean supported major mining operations by the Swiss-based company OMYA, despite the protests of environmental grassroots organizations; he stood by the massive pesticide use of Vermont’s mega-farms; and he awarded major energy contracts to two highly questionable endeavors: the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant and the Hydro-Quebec electric company, which had been damming up and flooding the James Bay, threatening the livelihoods of the indigenous Cree people who live there.

In 1998, Dean pushed for a natural gas plant and pipeline project that would have required large-scale clear-cutting. It took a two-year fight with a grassroots citizens’ group to force Dean to back off. During that same year, Dean had struck a deal with George Bush, then-governor of Texas, to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor, mostly Hispanic community in Sierra Blanca.³⁶

Dean’s administration did adopt strict air pollution guidelines, but according to Marilyn Miller, the executive director of the Vermont Auto Dealers Association, the rules were never actually enforced.³⁷ At one point, the Dean administration even petitioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to increase the amount of air pollution that can be released by Vermont industry.³⁸

Mark Sinclair, director of the Vermont office of the Conservation Law Foundation, noted, "the governor’s willing to be an environmentalist only when he thinks it’s politically important for his re-election campaign."³⁹

Howard Dean criticizes Attorney General John Ashcroft’s shredding of the Constitution with his USA Patriot Act and has even compared Ashcroft to the notorious Joseph McCarthy. But Dean’s record and stances on the justice system and civil rights are not very good.

Shortly after September 11, Dean said that the U.S. "needs a reevaluation of the importance of some of our specific civil liberties."⁴⁰ He currently does not oppose the Patriot Act, but says he only opposes the expansion of the Patriot Act and certain specific items in it. Dean also wants to repeal a portion of the Bush tax cuts in order to increase spending on homeland security.

Howard Dean thinks that the justice system is flawed, but not because it is racist or targets the poor. He says it doesn’t work because "it bends over backwards to help defendants and is totally unfair to victims."⁴¹ In 1994, Dean stated, "I am one of those people who believe that 95 percent of the time that police arrest somebody they are guilty." He went on to say that "the criminal justice system should deal more rapidly with people who are arrested, and convicted criminals should only be given one chance before being incarcerated for life." Dean has also said that it is acceptable for police to lie to the public during the course of their investigations.⁴²

In 1997, Dean changed his stance on the death penalty and declared that he now favored capital punishment. His reasoning was that, "Until life without parole means life without parole, the public is not safe without a death penalty. Until we have a judicial system that can adequately protect us, the only thing that will is the death penalty."⁴³

In keeping with Dean’s position that the legal system is unfairly weighted in favor of defendants, during his tenure he made major cuts to the Vermont Legal Aid budget and even refused to accept a federal grant offered by then-U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno to assist defendants in Vermont who have mental disabilities.⁴⁴

Dean also had a penchant for favoring judges who had little respect for the technicalities of civil liberties. Several of his judicial appointments are now awaiting hearings before the U.S. Second Circuit Court in New York City for violating the first amendment, right to counsel, double jeopardy and due process.⁴⁵

By the time Dean had left office in 2000, Vermont had experienced its fastest rising rate of youth incarceration, and according to the Drug Enforcement Agency, the imprisonment of women had increased by over 140 percent.⁴⁶

Although Dean proclaims on the campaign trail that he is very sensitive to racial issues because he lived in a Yale dorm with two African-American roommates, his stance on racism and discrimination in Vermont was, at best, negligent. In 1999, the Vermont Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights released a report concerning racial harassment in Vermont public schools in which it described widespread acts of racist violence, including instances of a 13-year-old African-American boy being "beaten with a baseball bat," and parents testifying that, in Vermont (one of the whitest states in the country), "Racism is not a problem or an issue; it’s a way of life."⁴⁷ The report ruled that:

Dean didn’t follow through with any of the recommendations advised in the report, and instead offered the tepid solution in his next State of the State speech–Vermonters simply need to listen to each other more.

Perhaps the deception runs deepest concerning Dean’s stance on the war on Iraq and the current occupation. The evolution of Dean’s position over the past year reveals a foreign policy conceptualization that is not fundamentally different from Bush’s, though there are some tactical disagreements.

Dean is by no means a "dove." He supported the war on Afghanistan and the first Gulf War in 1991. On February 21, at the winter meeting of the Democratic National Committee, Dean drew headlines by asking, "What I want to know is why in the world the Democratic Party leadership is supporting the president’s unilateral attack on Iraq."⁴⁹ But just four days prior to this condemnation, Dean sang a different tune at a Drake University speech:

In the end, Dean’s main criticism of the war was that the U.S. did not work hard enough to get the other major allies on board–but he never disagreed with the general premises of the "regime change" dogma. Presumably, Dean would have fully supported a UN or NATO-backed war on Iraq.

And he is as hawkish as Bush about the occupation. He wants to send 30,000—40,000 more troops to Afghanistan and 50,000 troops–albeit foreign troops–to Iraq. Defending a long-term occupation under U.S. control, Dean warned in the Washington Post,

bringing democracy to Iraq is not a two-year proposition. Having elections alone doesn’t guarantee democracy. You’ve got to have institutions and the rule of law, and in a country that hasn’t had that in 3,000 years, it’s unlikely to suddenly develop by having elections and getting the heck out…. [the constitution] would be American with Iraqi, Arab characteristics. Iraqis have to play a major role in drafting this, but the Americans have to have the final say.⁵¹

Beyond Iraq, Dean’s perspective on the Middle East is outright belligerent. Dean supports Israel’s policy of targeted assassinations of Palestinians, and supports the current construction of the apartheid wall that will separate Israel from Gaza and the West Bank. At times he claims we need an "even-handed" approach to the conflict, and at others declares that there will be no negotiations until Palestinians stop the terrorist attacks. He has never uttered a critical word in public against Israel’s attacks on the Palestinians.⁵²

Dean has also shown himself to be a staunch supporter of Bush’s "war on terror," leveled strong criticism at Bush for failing to confront other Middle Eastern nations that he says support terrorism around the world: "We must have a president who is willing to confront the Iranians, the Syrians, the Saudis and others who send money to Hamas, and finance a worldwide network of fundamentalist schools which teach small children to hate Americans, Christians and Jews."⁵³

In 2000, Anthony Pollina ran on the Progressive Party ticket against Dean in the gubernatorial race getting close to 10 percent of the vote–clearly tapping into a broader feeling among ordinary people that there was a need for a real alternative to the twin parties of the status quo. Far from being the lesser-evil in Vermont, Dean was the evil that many working and poor people in Vermont felt very tangibly. Illusions in Dean and the Democrats as a lesser-evil to the Republicans only served to mute the necessary struggles that were needed to fight against his right-wing policies.

In the end, that’s what the debate between the Democrats and Republicans comes down to. We automatically lose every time if we accept a framework for this debate that says we must, to be "realistic," always vote for the lesser of two evils– the least awful of two pro-business candidates.

Thinking that the Democrats are any better for us than the Republicans is like thinking that the bully who pushes you down and steals your money is worse than his friend who helps you up but shares in the bully’s spoils.

What happens if Dean gets elected, puts all of his electoral rhetoric aside and pours more money into fighting terrorism, takes his axe to American social programs and dispatches more troops to Iraq? Will the left stand by its "antiwar" candidate and refrain from fighting against cuts at home and war abroad because "at least he’s better than Bush?"

That Dean will prove to be a conservative in office of is frankly admitted by BusinessWeek, which assessed Dean’s politics this way:

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 [Vermont Repubican businessman Bill] 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."⁵⁴

If Business Week can see Dean clearly, so should we.

Real change in America has always come when masses of people take to the streets on their own initiative–the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, the labor movement, the Vietnam antiwar movement. The problem so far is that these kinds of movements have never coalesced into a lasting political party that could offer an alternative to the twin parties of American capitalism. Rather than argue for a vote for someone who is sure to repay our support by cutting our living standards and promoting American power abroad, progressives and socialists would do better to argue for a break from the Democrats, focus on building the struggles that make all real progress possible–and create the political alternative that can embody them.

The sooner we break our illusions in the Democrats the better. If Dean is attempting to transfer his policies from Vermont to the entire nation, I would propose that the example of the Progressive Party be transferred too.

Keith Rosenthal is an activist in Burlington, Vermont. He can be reached at keithmr81@yahoo.com.