Globe interview with Howard Dean
On December 10, 2003, the Globe editorial board interviewed Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont. The following is a complete transcript of the interview. M = Male questionerF = Female questioner
HD = Howard Dean
M: Thank you for coming south!
HD: South to Boston, sunny climes!
F: Yeah, I just wanted --
M: Warm weather.
F: -- very quickly to give you the ground rules. Obviously there are members of the editorial board here, primarily, so you're appealing to us for our endorsement. And there are also news reporters here who are looking for a scoop, so you have competing constituencies to satisfy. We just wanted to get your statements on the record. We're going to give you a few minutes to open up with a little crystallization of the case for Dean, and then open it up to questions.
HD: The case for Dean is actually not about all the issues, but we're going to hopefully spend the rest of the hour talking about it. It's about change in the country. It's about remobilizing people and giving them hope again. About a year and a half, almost two years ago, I was in Iowa. First trip to Iowa I went to the back of a coffee shop with twenty Iowans, sober-minded people who don't rant and rave and jump up and down about issues. And basically, what they told me was they didn't think their employers valued them anymore. They didn't think anybody cared about them. They didn't think American companies were really American anymore because they'd moved their jobs, their assets any place in the world and to maximize their bottom line, and there wasn't any human connection. That's what the campaign is about, is restoring the human connection, really. Distill it to -- I mean, I don't talk about it very much because it's not the kind of thing you talk about in rallies, although I'm starting to some. But what's happening in this country under this President is, I think, a slavish devotion to whatever large corporations and wealthy individuals want and need, and a complete absence of real concern about ordinary Americans. This President's much more effective and much more politically attuned than his father was, but his interest in ordinary people is about the same, which is to say, not much. And he's less, he has much less of an aptitude for foreign affairs. Actually, I had some admiration for his father in terms of diplomatic matters, and this President has managed to strike out on the two things that you have to do well. One is foreign policy, and the other is economics. And the people know it. The people are really worried. So the great promise of this country is, and I hate to use the hackneyed phrase, but really is a beacon of hope for the rest of the world because it's the country in which cynicism has not really ascended. There is some, but most people believe in this country that if you work hard you can overcome any obstacle in your path. That's not true in most other civilizations around the world, including Europe. It is true here, and it's rapidly becoming not true under what I think is the most cynical, manipulative administrative that I've seen in my lifetime. So, you want change in American you have to have a real change in America. This is not about let's see who's in the White House, a Democrat or Republican. This is about who could really energize and give hope back to the 50 percent of Americans who have given up on voting because they don't think there's any difference and what they do doesn't make any difference.
F: Wow. You know, your language is so different from the other candidates that have been here that I hesitate to ask a conventional question, but I'm going to anyway.
HD: Please do! I have to prove I'm electable and conventional!
F: Well, exactly. (laugh) I don't know that the world was necessarily any less perilous on September 10th 2001 than it became on September 11th, but certainly the perception of most Americans is that it became a more perilous place. So how you convince the voters or us that your relative lack of experience in foreign affairs given the reality of being at war now is not disqualifying.
HD: I'll repeat the point that Al Gore made the other day when he endorsed me. We all took the information the President was giving us, we all put it through the same filter. They all decided to go to war and I didn't. And I think my approach to what we would've done based on the information we all had plus a little different approach in terms of judgment and patience was the right approach. I don't think we ought to be in Iraq right now. I think we're paying a big price for it and I think the President had no idea what we were getting into, or didn't want to know, which I think is actually more likely, since I think the President's actions are principally driven by ideology and not factual concerns. I think the most important attribute of any President in terms of foreign policy and defense is patience and judgment, and that's what was lacking when we supported the President's entry into Iraq. I'm not a dove. I supported the first Gulf War. I supported the war in Afghanistan. That's for perfectly obviously reasons, the first Gulf War I supported because it was very clear that a sovereign nation which was allied with the United States was overrun and really not much choice unless we wished to encourage that kind of behavior elsewhere. But in this case, I thought the facts didn't justify the intervention. We had contained Saddam indefinitely. We could've contained him indefinitely. We had successfully contained him for twelve years with overflights and the occasional strafing at his anti-aircraft. He had no air force of any kind to speak of. I believed at the time that he did have weapons of mass destruction but I didn't believe he was a danger to the United States. And so my conclusion was that if he was going to be taken out -- and certainly, he was a dreadful person, nobody would make a case of anything other than that -- but he should be taken out by the United Nations in concert, or a real multinational alliance, not the Ukraine and Eritrea as part of the "willing coalition." Or that we could alternatively have hemmed him in for as long as we chose. There is a case to be made for force to stop genocide. I supported President Clinton's intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo as well. But in this case, the genocide really took place shortly after we departed Iraq for the first time, so the justification would've been to go in after we got out, not twelve years after the Shi'ite massacre. So there really was no justification for us going in unilaterally. I think that was a terrible mistake as subsequent events have proven.
M: Governor, if you were President tomorrow, what would you do if two countries (inaudible) Afghanistan?
HD: In Afghanistan, I would actually bring in significant numbers of new foreign troops so that we could begin to nudge the warlords out of power. The idea that we're going to construct a democratic Afghanistan by turning four-fifths of the country over to the warlords is ludicrous. I think, in fact -- I talked about this a little bit yesterday in the debate. In fact, the process that we used in Afghanistan was very sensible. Both the military piece and the forming of the Constitution, and the forming of the government. The problem is it needs some sort of central government in Afghanistan, and we don't have one because four-fifths of the country has been closed, is controlled by people who really are not, have only the most tenuous connection with the federal government, but the question is do they actually have more power than the federal government does and I think that's the case. Afghanistan -- excuse me, in Iraq...
M: (inaudible)
HD: Sure.
M: (inaudible)
HD: I've always preferred troops in Muslim countries from Muslim nations. Now, that's not going to be so easy because you can't use Pakistani troops. You could conceivably use Indian troops, although that might cause quite a problem with the Pakistanis. The likely source, other than Egypt and Morocco, which I prefer to save for Iraq, would be Indonesia. But there may be others, as you know, this isn't an exhaustive list of Muslim countries. Some of them could be suitable and some of them could not.
M: (inaudible)
HD: This is a very rough estimate. The estimate that I would have would be a total of 45,000, since we already have 9,000 over there, and since you have 7,000 NATO troops on the way and I don't know how many NATO troops (inaudible) there now. But it would be whatever. It would be whatever, it would be 45,000 minus 9,000 minus whatever number of NATO troops there is. We're not asking for a huge commitment.
M: (inaudible)
M: Sorry, wait a minute. Let's get your hand (inaudible).
F: Iraq.
HD: The second half of the question is, we need the same kind of process. We'd have elections so as to elect a council. Yes, the Shi'ites would have a majority. Yes, you would have to have some sort agreement where -- I mean, the genius of our Constitution is not all the bells and whistles and checks and balances. The genius is the protection of minorities. That's what hardly any other Constitution in the world has, the protection of the minority rights against the tyranny of the majority. You have to have a situation like that, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq and everywhere else that you want to have a safe, successful democracy. So you'd have to have some sort of elections in Iraq to form the kind of council that you have in Afghanistan -- I don't know if it has to be 250 people -- so that the Iraqis feel that there's some sort of self-governance going on. Which I don't think they feel right now. I mean, in my view, to have Ahmed Chalabi in there is sort of a joke. I mean, he's this corrupt businessman who was feeding probably false information to the CIA in order to encourage an American invasion for his own purposes. I think that kind of thing is really not the kind of way to demonstrate that you're interested in restoring Iraq to self-government. So I would like to see an elected council that will begin to write a constitution. Hopefully the Constitution would end up somewhat like the Afghan Constitution. It'll have to be some sort of Islamic something-or-other because the Shi'ites and mullahs will insist upon it, and hopefully that can be mostly cosmetic. And then there'll have to be significant protections for women and minorities, which will be everybody other than the (inaudible) Shi'ites. And the question is how much autonomy do they have, and that's going to be a very tricky question. I spent a lot of time on it. I meet once a month, I have for the last two years, in a Washington townhouse with experts on foreign affairs, particularly Iraq, and we've had a lot of debates about how to govern Iraq after the war. And I do not subscribe to the notion that we ought to divide Iraq into three and the Kurds and the Sunni and the Shi'ites. I think that's a big mistake. But it's not clear how strong the central- the traditional Arab mode of government is to have a very strong central government put down anyone in the periphery that disagrees. I think if you can loosen that centrality some without allowing the country to be torn apart with centrifugal force, that's probably going to be a good thing in order to give people like the Kurds some more autonomy than they currently have. Or excuse me, the kind of autonomy they had in the last twelve years of the no-fly zone, but not so much that they end up breaking off into their own republic.
F: Who are some of those people you meet with in the Washington townhouse?
HD: Some of them are actually in the Bush administration, so I can't tell you who they are. I'm sure they'd be very disappointed if I did, and probably the President would be and they wouldn't have a job. All kinds of people -- the Israel ambassador, a group of Palestinians and Jordanian, usually at the same dinner because my style is to try to get people of different points of view and let them go at it and let me ask what I hope are penetrating questions, at least ignorant(?) questions, whatever they are, until I --
F: (inaudible)
HD: I just like to get to a place where I'm comfortable with the answers to the questions. The person who can make the most cogent case is usually the person I end up siding with. And then there are some people whose names you probably know. Tony Lake, there's a woman named Susan Rice who was the Deputy Secretary of Affairs for Africa under Clinton, Ford Halprin(sp?), a guy Fred Kramer from the Pentagon who's (inaudible) Bill Cohen, (inaudible) Bill Cohen (inaudible) Madeline Albright was one of them (inaudible) signed on as an official person. A lot of these people, Sandy Berger(sp?), I get a lot of advice from him, but he's not endorsing anybody. So --
F: So everyone's list(?)?
HD: That's right.
M: (inaudible) into Afghanistan (inaudible)?
HD: That's a hard question to ask, I mean, to answer because I don't have access to the intelligence reports.
M: Well, we knew al-Qaeda was there. (inaudible) base camp. He was obviously being protected (inaudible) by the government there. They were there, (inaudible) knew that.
HD: Yes.
M: But we didn't know what they were planning. We knew they were planning terrorism. They bombed the (inaudible) Embassy, they bombed (inaudible). They were a threat, they were there.
HD: All I can tell you is that I would've considered it, but that's not the kind of decision you make in the editorial boardroom of the Boston Globe. I mean, I would go through the process that I just described. It would take some time, where you get everybody who knew everything about the whole situation to make some decisions, balanced against what my criteria are for the appropriate use of force.
M: (inaudible) to going early?
HD: In medicine, we have a phrase for that. It's called using the "retrospectascope." ----: (laughter)
HD: And it's always easy to make the diagnosis using the retrospectascope or at the autopsy table. The trick is to figure out how to make the right diagnosis before you get to the autopsy table. So the answer to your question is of course it would've been better, but how would I have known? The question is what would you have done at the time, and I don't know if I would've been so smart. It's why I've never criticized any of the people who voted for the Patriot Act, even though it's obviously a mistake because how do I know what I would've done in that traumatic atmosphere a few weeks after the World Trade Center had been blown up and three thousand people had been killed. It's easy for me to criticize. I've never been a President. I mean, it would've been easy to whack these guys for voting for the Patriot Act.
M: George Bush said in Iraq I believe that we should go in first rather than wait. (inaudible)
HD: As he did say?
M: Well, I think as he might say.
M: Are you talking about Iran?
M: Iraq. I'm saying George Bush says I'm not going to win. If I go in --
HD: And that's why he went in?
M: I went in because I thought there was a threat to (inaudible).
HD: And my response is Mr. President, your judgment was flawed. In fact, there was no threat. You tried to make the case that Saddam had something to do with 9-11. That was clearly fraudulent and he admitted so weeks, months later. You told people in your State of the Union that Iraq was buying uranium from Africa. That turned out not to be true. Secretary of Defense said you knew exactly where the weapons of mass destruction were. There was no evidence to that. And the Vice President to this day insists that Iraq was about to develop nuclear weapons, contrary to every reported document that I've ever seen. Mr. President, you simply did not make the case and (inaudible).
F: But was the problem with the specifics of this particular intervention, or is it with the whole doctrine of the pre-emptive strike?
HD: I think American has always had an unspoken doctrine of pre-emption. The question is do you have a spoken doctrine of pre-emption. If we had known that Osama bin Laden, with reasonable certainty, was going to attack the United States, of course we would've done something about it. No President in their right mind wouldn't have done something about it. To lay out a doctrine of the right of the United States to pre-empt any time they think is a threat is pretty much an international outrage, and it certainly has not stood us in good stead in our relationships with the rest of the world, which are fairly well poised and confined now to 63 countries that are currently allowed to bid on the Iraq construction contracts.
F: (inaudible) because you brought up an interesting thought about how you'd make a decision, particularly in the light of your own background and not to bring your (inaudible) wife up to you, but --
HD: She said archly.
F: When I spoke with her she said that one of the things about doctors is that they make decisions on the point of what is. In other words, they don't say, oh, why did you smoke? He were are, you smoked, you have lung cancer. Or whatever. From the point of view of what is. HD: That's exactly the way I am.
F: And I was saying that -- she was talking about you, but can you describe a little bit more your decision making?
HD: That's fair, that's very fair. I mean, she's been with me a long time and she's a very smart woman, so I'm sure that's exactly how it works. I mean, the two of us are different in that she oddly enough proceeds more logically from spot to spot to spot and I tend to be more intuitive. So appearing to bypass things, which gets me in a little trouble on the campaign trail because I often shorthand things and don't explain them fully, which after I've looked at my answer about Senator Clinton saying we ought to have more troops and I disagreed, I realized somebody said, "Well, it's a very confusing answer." It wasn't confusing to me, but I left out several steps as I was thinking through it. But that doesn't mean the thought doesn't get done. Here's what I do. It is based on what is. I mean, "what if" is good for let's never let this happen again. That's important. But in terms of an immediate, emergent problem, you line up all the facts and you get the smartest people you can get your hands on and put the facts in a cogent order and let different people put them in different orders. When we were talking about Iraq and the Middle East in general in these Washington townhouse dinners, there were a lot of hawks in the Clinton administration. I'd say at least half the people that were in the room for the Clinton administration, or over half, favored going to Iraq. It's not the conclusion I came to, but there were a lot of people in the room who advised me to do it because they had had some very bad experiences with Saddam earlier on, where he was (inaudible) deal with him, and his judgment was deeply flawed so that he was a little out of touch with reality and so forth. But anyway, you line up everybody with their best expertise, get them each to put their most cogent view of the facts on the table and arrange them in some cogent theory, which leads you to a course of action. Then you've got to deal with a course of action, and that's a whole other set. In other words, you make the diagnosis first. You decide what the problem really is and what the most reasonable explanation is for what's going on. And it's tough because I didn't see any classified intelligence that I know of -- there may have been some people who told me some stuff they shouldn't have, but they didn't tell me it was classified. But I knew enough to know that the evidence wasn't clear, that you would have to make a leap of faith someplace to fill in some blanks that we didn't know about because there were conflicting pieces of intelligence in the public around, whether they should've been there or not. So you basically put together your best guess about what the problem is, and then you choose an array of options given what you think the problem is, and to do that you have to know what the risks and rewards are of each option. It really is, it's an amazing parallel to medicine because first you've got to figure out what the problem is and you hope you're right. And then you've got to figure out what the highest-reward, least-risk option is, and there are some values involved. One of the things that astonishes me is the President's willingness to build tactical battlefield nuclear weapons. It's ridiculous. It's preposterous. There's no logical reason to do this. It's not a weapon against terrorism because terrorists are shadowy people. You don't drop atomic bombs on them. And here's why it's ridiculous. The rationale for it is we need a big bunker buster. Well, we've got some pretty good ones, but let's just suppose you can get a marginal advantage using nuclear bunker busters. They didn't think ahead. This is what these people never do that are in charge of this country. Think ahead. Put yourself in the position of being the first country, since Hiroshima, to use first-strike nuclear weapons. Is that worth is in order to develop a capacity to go down another 6,000 feet, or whatever these things do, to blow up the bunker that Saddam is in? I don't think so, and I think any rational person would say the overturn over 50 years of a policy on nuclear weapons is not worth it to get the extra thousand feet, or six thousand feet, or whatever it is they think they're going to get. That's what never goes on in this administration. They never think down to the end about the consequences. When I get to a really tough problem, I go to the end first and figure out what we want, and then I work backwards. And I do this, we do a lot of gaming on North Korea. First question I asked was not, I mean, and after you get through what you think the North Koreans have, was not "Oh, well, what should I do from here, the negotiations." The first question I ask is are you willing to use nuclear weapons in North Korea. The reason I ask that question is because whether you are or not makes a big difference in terms of how you're going to negotiate because if you're not willing to do it, you should never pretend that you are. But if you pretend that you are and they call your bluff, then you have no credibility anymore. Whenever I was in the legislature in the governor's office, I never, ever bluffed, ever. I let my aides do it sometimes. (laughter) But I never did it because I knew that if I ever got caught doing it, I'd lose.
F: Can I just follow up by asking a question about decision making? When you first (inaudible) talked about patience and judgment as being the key things that (inaudible) demonstration (inaudible) be a leader and make the right decisions about foreign policy, whatever. Patience and judgment are the two things that I have seen your opponents say that you don't have, and some of it, I think may come from the fact that you speak really fast. I'm not, you know -- I don't know if you breathe every ten minutes (inaudible) a lot in there. You speak very quickly, and that --
HD: I only have an hour!
----: (laughter)
F: (inaudible) too. That does give a feeling of impatience. Can you give (inaudible) and maybe an example of the decision that took patience and judgment and how you approached it that will demonstrate those two qualities?
HD: It's a hard thing to do. I mean, budget decisions -- budget decisions take patience and judgment. You have to make some really tough decisions about what you're going to plunder and what you're not going to plunder and why. And sometimes that takes a few days to kind of work through to make sure you have all the information. The civil unions decision didn't take any time at all because it was a matter of human rights and you can't tell somebody they have to put their rights off because it's a matter winning an election (inaudible) unions. I can't think of one off the top of my head. I'm sure there are lots of them, but (inaudible) off the top of my head.
M: A minute ago you mentioned North Korea. And as far as I know it hasn't been a topic so far in the campaign, but as soon as we get the nomination it might (inaudible). We've been writing that the Bush administration has made a blunder by creating a (inaudible) could've had a unilateral, direct negotiations with (inaudible). If you were in charge of North Korean policy, what would (inaudible).
HD: Let me finish off on why I talk so fast before I get to that.
F: (laughter) It's nothing negative! (inaudible)
HD: No, no, it's fine! Let me explain.
F: (inaudible)
F: (inaudible) It reminds me as Barney Frank, that's all. (laughter)
HD: (inaudible) if that's good or bad. There's another aspect to this, and it is confusing and it does cause consternation among people who don't know me. I often think I'm (inaudible) and in the process of my decision making I'll probe and think this way and end up over here. And I do that because I'm trying things out as I do it. I'm trying this out, and I want to see what gets pushed back, and I try something else out and see if it gets pushed... Sometimes I do that in public, which is not always a good thing, at least politically. It's actually very helpful, it's like floating trial balloons. And on to North Korea. I would agree with half of your proposition. I think it is a good thing to have created a multilateral task force but I think it's a terrible, terrible mistake and a very foolish one not to have entered bilateral negotiations with the North Koreans. That's what they want. We're the most powerful nation on the face of the earth. I think we're giving in to blackmail to decide that we have to argue essentially about the shape of the table in order to prove we're not -- we have nothing to prove, believe me. So from everything I know about the North Koreans, I've spent a lot of time with Bill Richardsons on the North Koreans because he's extremely knowledgeable about those negotiations in particular. From everything I know, I think they're very difficult to deal with. It's a long, difficult negotiation. But the right thing to do is to negotiate with them bilaterally. I believe in the end the Chinese are the key to disarming the North Koreans. I believe they can get the North Koreans to disarm. But in the meantime, we're going to have to be there, and here's what I think is the problem. I've been told this by -- Ash Carter's(sp?) actually also on our team, who's (inaudible). He's the person that helped me with all this stuff. That -- the problem with North Korea is that we can't make up our mind what we want because we're divided into hard-liners and the kind of people who would make the sort of deal, which I don't agree with but you just suggested. And there's a group of people in the White House saying don't put anything on the table for the North Koreans, and there's another group saying let's make a deal. The Chinese don't know what to do. Ash thinks, and I think I agree with this, that the Chinese would prefer not to have a nuclear-armed North Korean on their doorstep, not because it's essentially much of a big threat to them, although that's an aspect of it, but because they're very worried about the Japanese and South Koreans developing nuclear arms. So it seems to me what you need is a coherent administration policy which says to the Chinese, OK, go ahead and pull the trigger on these guys and get them to tell them they've got to give up their nuclear arms, and then yes, you can put some stuff on the table for us. But there's no harm in a non-aggression pact, as long as it preserves our right to defend South Korea and Japan and any of our other allies, and as long as the results are a verifiable disarmament. If it's not verifiable, it's obviously not going to work. And I also think that should we be able to make such a deal, that one of things that we can dangle at a later time is kind of readmission to the community of nations because in the long run I believe it's better to engage in what clearly works, that keeping people in the tent despite their misbehavior makes it easier to control misbehavior in the long run and excluding them from the tent they have nothing to gain, or to lose rather. I think there is something to the theory that the behavior of the North Koreans now was aggravated by the President's presumptuous dismissal of the Clinton policy and the announcement of Kim Dae-Jung(sp?) without notice ahead of time that they were certainly going to change their policy and reisolate North Korean. First of all, I think it was a foolish policy. Secondly, the way it was done was foolish. Thirdly, it was calculated to embarrass the North Koreans. (inaudible) has a way of trying to spite people; I think deliberately humiliating people is a very dangerous game. Even your enemies might turn out to be people that you eventually have to do business with.
M: (inaudible) to restore the U.S. (inaudible)
HD: I think the principal reason that we've lost our moral authority in the world is because of the President's behavior and apparent lack of need or desire to work in a cooperative fashion with people who don't agree with him on every issue. And so, and this is a President who's sort of out of the Fifties. If you hold up a big enough stick and make things mean enough, people will eventually do what you want, and I don't think the world works that way anymore. So, if I become President between the time I'm elected and the time I take office, I'll go on a foreign trip and begin the healing of the relationships between heads of state that's going to have to take place. I actually believe that despite the fact that people are angry at Americans in general that the person they're really angry about will hopefully be out of office on January 20th, 2005, and that (inaudible) really will be and opportunity to begin to rekindle the relationships. What you really have to do is show people respect which is the first (inaudible) the President hasn't done. If you expect other people to respect you, you have to respect them. Otherwise, your relationships end up in a very complicated dance of resentment and need. And so I believe that to rekindle our moral place in the world which we're going to have a claim on again should we (inaudible) change in administrations. (inaudible) begin to rekindle or show respect early on, before I take office. But you're willing to do business -- you know, the foreign (inaudible) is extraordinary, and they'd really like -- if I could transfer this election to Europe I'm sure I'd win in a moment because they just desperately want somebody to understand. They want an American to say good things about Europe and say they understand Europe, and I do (inaudible) and that's what they want. (inaudible) respect for the (inaudible).
F: Like Dukakis used to say, that if he ran for President in Canada he would've won. The universal health care and --
END OF SIDE
M: What it is about your personality that is either going to make you warmer or fuzzier than Bush, or cuts through mythology that many Americans, if not most Americans have (inaudible) is certain. Whether or not he's right or wrong, Americans have the perception that he's certain.
HD: Well, I think one of the reasons we're doing well is that so are we, and the Democrats haven't been. The Democrats rolled over and died before our President. They got 500,000 fewer votes than their opposition. The Democrats behaved as if they'd had an eight million vote mandate.
F: The Republicans.
HD: No, the Democrats did! As if the Republicans, as if Bush had an eight million vote mandate. The President said, "Let's have a $1.2 trillion tax cut." This is the first round. The Democrats' response in the House is no, it should be $900 billion. Well, if that's the opposition, it's not a big surprise if the Democratic base thinks that the Democratic party in Washington's pretty far out of touch. And on it goes. Then it goes to the Iraq War. If the Democrats hadn't voted for that resolution, we would've be in Iraq right now because Bush wouldn't have been able to do a partisan war that's (inaudible) supported by Democrats. No child left behind, which has turned out to be somewhat of a disaster for many states. There are some good things in it. The Title One funding is very good. The disaggregation of scores is essential. But mainly, it's a huge federal intrusion into local school districts and it's costing people an enormous amount of money. The Democrats voted for all that. The Medicare bill. This was a farce. $85 billion for the insurance companies, charged to our grandchildren's credit card. 38 percent increase in drug company profits, which at last estimate I saw was something like $130 billion, charged to our kids' credit card. Seniors who get cut off after they spend $200 a month, which is just when they really need the help. Now, not every Democrat voted for this. Ted Kennedy led the opposition. But enough Democrats voted for this so that it passed significantly. What the Democrats want, the reason we're doing well, is because we're willing to out-assert Bush. And they desperately want an assertive point of view that's going to represent what they believe. You can't sell something to the American people if you're not willing to talk about it, and the Democrats haven't talked about anything except reacting to a Republican agenda and then coming in second place when it gets passed. So I don't know that I can be as warm and fuzzy as Bush, but I can at least be as assertive and maybe more so. That's why I chuckle every time about the McGovern stuff. That's going to disappear as soon as the primaries disappear. Well, maybe not because the Republicans are pushing that stuff too, now. Now, George McGovern was a genuine war hero, but he wasn't particular assertive. I'm not a war hero, but I'm very assertive.
M: Governor, you've talked mentioning taxes, you talked about rolling back not just the taxes on the very rich but taxes on the rest of us too. This is going to be portrayed as Mondale Two, I'm sure, by the Republicans. What are you hearing on the campaign trail that makes you think that your idea resonates with the American public?
HD: It's very effective when I get to make my case, and here's my case.
M: Make it.
HD: The case is, one percent of the people got a $12,000 tax cut. If you make over a million dollars, you've got a $112,000 tax cut. 60% of us got a $304 tax cut. Tell me -- and I'd actually do this, it's a lot of fun in front of big crowds -- tell me if your college tuition for your kids has gone up more than $304 in the last three years because the President cut Pell Grants in order to give tax cuts to huge corporations. Tell me if your property tax has gone up because the President chose not to fund No Child Left Behind or special education with it, instead he gave huge tax cuts. Et cetera, et cetera. Tell me, what your property tax has done because the President cut fire and police support, so you had to make that up on your own. Tell me what's happened to your health care premiums in the last two years, three years, while the President cut Medicaid so fewer people were being taken care of by the federal government. Of course, everybody (inaudible) rhetorical question, have they gone up more than $304 dollars? And they go, "Yeah." Then I connect. Then I say this President has given us the largest middle-class tax increase in the history of the United States of America. Because what he's done, is of course, he's not cut taxes at all for the middle class. What he really did is have a tax shift to local government and local government had to make up the difference, and not only did he do it through the property taxes and the local tax system, he also did it by cutting things that were paid for in the private sector by shifting more burdens onto them. In other words, if you had more uninsured people going to the hospital, that ends up in the private insurance system and somebody has to pay for that. In order to sell what I want to do, which is to rebalance the budget which you can't possibly do with three trillion dollars out there, six hundred billion in debt to pay(?) the interest costs, and 3.4 trillion in debt for the tax cuts. You can't balance the budget, which is one of the things I want to do, if you have those kinds of irresponsible, essentially, spending (inaudible) because that's what tax cuts are, is spending. It's just spending on a different group of people in a social program. So I try to make the case to the American people they did not get a tax cut. And you know what? They don't think they got one.
F: But you're making the case at the moment to Democrats.
HD: That's right.
F: In the primary, obviously, that will change, and I've noticed that you've said many times that you don't want this to be about wedge issues, you want it to be about core issues, whereas (inaudible) the control over what (inaudible) wedge issues.
HD: That's why we dropped out of the public financing system. Because we think we can get two million people to give us a hundred dollars and then we will have some control. We won't have more money than Bush, but we'll be competitive. You can't compete with George Bush's $200 million if you only have 45 to spend. And the down side of taking the public financing money is that you have 45 to spend and then you're broke. So you have to rely on other people to make your case, which I think is always a problem.
F: But on the wedge issues, do you think you can win?
HD: I just got back from a trip to the South, to Virginia and South Carolina with Jesse Jackson, Jr. and Bobby Scott, who's a Congressman from Norfolk, Virginia. And everything I said down there, actually I'm starting to say it elsewhere. (inaudible) Because the general election's starting; Bush already has ads up against us in Iowa and New Hampshire. And the case that I try to make is this is not about wedge issues. Every time they say "guns," we're going to say, "jobs." When they say "gay rights," we're going to say, "health insurance for your children." When they say "race," we're going to say "education for everybody." And there's a succinct case to be made that I make when I -- actually, I made it the night in Boston when the Confederate flag (inaudible) due to my own clumsiness. But I made the case later on, as I tried to explain what I meant by saying this, and it's true. 102,000 children in South Carolina with no health insurance, and most of those kids are white. The legislature cut about $70 million out of the school system because of Bush's horrendous economic, what he's doing to the states, and most of the kids in the public school system are white in South Carolina. You say education, you're talking about white kids and black kids in the South, and actually brown kids, (inaudible) the Hispanic population. When you say "health care," you're not just talking about the black kids. You're talking about the white kids. What we've got to do in the South is force the issues that brought the original coalition that FDR had together. That is, so let them say "race," because they'll do it a million times in every way. That's what a quota is. "Quota" is a racist term, essentially. It's a race-colored word intended to signal the white people that you're really on their side in case anybody thinks about taking their job away or (inaudible) color. So every time they do that, which they're going to do, we're going to say, "Education. Isn't that something that everybody needs?" John Payne(sp?), who's a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, once said to me, "You know who the most underrepresented people in America are?" And I didn't know, but I knew he was going to give me the answer so I didn't say anything. And he looked at me and he said, "It's Southern whites because the always vote for the right-wing Republicans, and they always win, and they're out of luck for the next six years." He said, if somebody who's black comes to us, but we're in the minority but there's thirty of us and we can do something about it in Congress. But a Southern white person, working-class white guy who votes for these right-wingers and then they go down and vote for all these corporate tax breaks and their kids lose their Medicaid...
M: Can I ask you on the tax thing, you think the broad average (inaudible) in Washington you look at the urban information, families with children, 40 percent (inaudible) in 2000, somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000. But (inaudible) somewhere between 1,200 and 2,000. These are people who are not making a lot of money (inaudible) health insurance. You're going to be going into a general election saying, well a lot of people (inaudible) children, we're going to raise your taxes (inaudible) appreciable way. But one thing, a lot of people look at you and this is just a (inaudible), this is (inaudible) prescription for a national disaster because even though the governor says most people who (inaudible) a tax cut (inaudible) about that. (inaudible) the tax cut was a good deal more than we represented (inaudible).
HD: First of all, I've heard those numbers because John Kerry uses those numbers when he goes after me.
M: (inaudible).
HD: Right.
M: It's pretty credible.
HD: But the interesting piece is how many of those are families who make more than $100,000 to $200,000 (inaudible) children? I don't know the answer, but you've got to know the answer to know who you're really going after. Because everybody had said we're going to get rid of the tax cuts for people who make more than $200,000. The question is, how many of those are already getting the child deductions (inaudible). I don't know the answers to that. We'll have to figure that out. In the end, I've always said that we're going to have some approach to the middle class tax (inaudible).
M: Would you do something beyond what you've talked about? You're going to announce some sort of plan?
HD: Not for a long time, but eventually we will.
F: (inaudible)
HD: Well, here's the problem. (inaudible) patience and judgment.
F: Patience and judgment.
HD: The problem is that we've got to make -- we're having a big fight about how fast we can balance the budget.
F: (inaudible) prerequisite.
HD: Yeah, we need to balance the--
F: (inaudible)
HD: You need to balance the budget. You can't be giving tax cuts if you can't balance the budget. And so we have to figure out how fast we can balance the budget. The argument is between five and seven years, and we know we can't do it in the first term. And then, you know, what kind of tax changes to the middle class are you going to have, that we can afford if you can employ them. That's why we're not announcing anything right now because we don't know what we can afford or if we can afford it. And the trouble is the debt, as it keeps getting worse because Bush keeps adding 400 billion dollars to drugs, with no way of paying for it, 87 billion dollars for Iraq with no way of paying for it, (inaudible) maybe everyone else is going down the pipe.
F: I just needed to make sure I understand this. What Bush has done, you know, sort of bluntly, crudely, is shift taxes from wealth to wages.
HD: Right.
F: But you're saying that before you would correct that you would first want to balance the budget.
HD: Right. What I'd really like to do is go back to Clinton's tax rates. (inaudible) go to Bill Clinton's tax rates. Nobody I know is complaining much about Bill Clinton's tax rates. If you do that, a lot of the budget is fixed.
M: Do you now? Because a lot of it is generated by capital gains, bonuses, and those are not around anymore.
HD: That's right, but you repair a huge hole in the budget. Do you balance the budget simply by doing that? Of course not, of course not.
M: Clinton had talked (inaudible) tax cut, and (inaudible) had his own. (inaudible) had his own tax cut and it (inaudible) in the neighborhood of five, six hundred (inaudible) tax cut.
HD: (multiple conversations; inaudible)
M: It's not a retrograde idea, necessarily.
HD: Look, I need to balance the budget. It'd be pretty hypocritical of me to propose a $600 billion tax cut if I couldn't even -- I'm going to be lambasting the President over his incredible lack of anything resembling fiscal responsibility. I mean, I'll tell you one thing. If you go to Vermont and look through my record, you're going to find one thing that everybody agrees on. I am a real tight-fisted S.O.B. when it comes to balancing the budgets. We have to balance the budgets.
M: Why is that so important (inaudible)?
HD: It's not important every single year to do it. (inaudible) deficits are not anathema to me. But it's important not to have -- somebody asked me this question actually today. I'd forgotten who it was. We were talking about oil, and I was talking about the Saudis role in funding the training and the teaching of terror, the hatred, the small children of the Islamic world. And he said, "How would you stop it?" And I said, well, when I start to pull back on oil, and this and that, and he said, what about all the T-bills the Saudis own? We have made ourselves vulnerable, and weakened America, not just from an economic point of view with these enormous deficits, but allowed a lot of people like the Chinese and the Saudis to have a little choke on us. So we can't afford chronic deficits. We can't afford it. The result is that if the dollar collapses, or doesn't collapse but it gradually continues to do what it's doing now, interest rates ultimately go up. But the real result is it weakens our ability to do the things we have to do to maintain order in the world and maintain our own interests. And I think large deficits are really bad for the national security of the United States.
M: A follow-up question, you mentioned the Chinese. The point where (inaudible) and the jobs you were talking about intersect.
HD: Yes.
M: You recently said in a radio interview, if people go to Wal-Mart and buy products, they can't complain about jobs going to China.
HD: Well, buy products made in China. Right. The quote was actually, I think, buy products made in China.
M: If they go to Wal-Mart.
HD: Right, to buy products made in China.
M: If you go to Wal-Mart, 95 percent of what's in there is made from China. HD: Probably.
M: I'm just curious. Were you being provocative? Hyperbolic? Do you want a boycott of Wal-Mart?
HD: No, no. The point I'm trying to make is, if you are worried about the shifting of our manufacturing jobs overseas, think about that because it's hard to complain -- what I'm trying to do is reduce the dissonance between people's behaviors and people's statements. People will rail against jobs going to China, which I think is a significant problem, and then they'll go buy the products of the jobs. All I'm trying to do is make people think about that.
M: Right, but I'm asking you, from the point of view of doing something about, where do you intersect the problem? Are you talking to the folks who need to buy the cheap diapers, or are you talking about corporate responsibility, or trade here? I'm unclear.
HD: The statement itself is designed to get people to think. If you want to know what I think about Chinese trade, I can tell you.
M: Well, tell me about Wal-Mart, though. I mean, is that a bad thing for folks to be able to buy things cheaply?
HD: I'm trying to figure out what you're asking? What are you asking me? Are you concerned about Wal-Mart, or are you concerned about China trade policy? What are you trying to get at here?
M: Well, I'm trying to -- it seems odd to me to say that people somehow should forego the advantages of trade if it's--
HD: I didn't say that. I said, if you buy products made in China, then you can't complain that our jobs are going off-shore because that's where they're going.
M: But that's putting it up to the consumer. It's on the market, so (inaudible).
HD: Well, that's what I'm trying to figure out. If you want me to talk about my trade policy, I'm happy to do it. I'm trying to figure out what you all want me to tell you. (inaudible) questions.
F: To me, this goes to something you said earlier.
HD: What I'm trying to do is, the reason I said what I said is because I want people to be aware of their own personal responsibility for the problems in this country. It's not all evil corporations and inept administrations.
M: But I guess my question is-
HD: We also...
M: --what do you want people then to do with that observation? What's the take-home?
HD: I'm happy to tell you what I'm going to do about it. They can do what they want. I just want to connect in their minds their purchasing behavior with the results of their jobs or their neighbor's jobs going offshore. If you buy imported products, don't complain about your job going someplace else. Now, if you don't buy imported products, complain all you want. If you want to buy imported products and complain, be my guest, but it's like not voting and complaining. You have an opportunity with your behavior to change what happens in this country. I just want to make that connection. I do believe that people have personal responsibility for what goes on in this country, and one of the whole things I'm trying to do in this campaign is empower people. But we do it in kind of a hope way, that you do have the power to change this administration. Personal responsibility, the consequences of your own behavior, have an effect on what happens in this country, even at a micro level. Don't complain, for example, about air pollution if you don't recycle your garbage because you create more opportunities and more need to make things that you could be not throwing out with recycling.
F: Not to belabor the point, (inaudible) but--
M: Impenetrable. (laughter)
F: I think what he was saying -- I don't shop at Wal-Mart, but I do go to Target.
HD: Same idea. I just picked Wal-Mart, that's all.
F: OK. I go to Target because I can afford to buy certain things there. I'm better off than a lot of people because a lot of people wouldn't have -- I might be able to have a sense of social responsibility and say "Yeah, I shouldn't go to Target because these products are made in China." Even so, I still can't afford to go to Neiman-Marcus and buy (inaudible) stuff there. He's saying, you know, the individual is not just -- it's responsibility, but it's also what they're capable of doing with the money they have. So whose responsibility is it, and what would you do about it?
HD: Now, that's exactly the right questions that lead into what I would do in terms of changing the policy. I agree. We're in this spiraling cycle where people are making less money but their dollars don't go as far, therefore they buy the cheapest goods, therefore the market becomes more competitive of consumer pressure on prices, therefore everything gets outsourced. That's where the government has to do something about it. Here's what I'd do. I think globalization's here to stay. I supported NAFTA and the WTO when it came out. But I'm now seeing that the incredibly destructive consequences of globalizing only the rules for multinational corporations so they can do business elsewhere in the world without globalizing worker protections. The lesson we learned in this country a hundred years ago was that if you allowed working people to insist on protections for them, including better wages, through the trade union movement, you can work in a factory or work in a mine or a nursing home or school or whatever, a hospital, and hope that you might live something like a middle-class lifestyle and your kids would be able to do better than you, at least in terms of job security. We discovered that in this country a hundred years ago. In my view, it saved capitalism because capitalism is a great system, but capitalism without rules is an incredibly destructive system. And what we did with NAFTA and the WTO was to globalize the rules so that multinational corporations can do business reasonably safely without much risk of loss of capital everywhere in the world, or most places, the members of the (inaudible) or the WTO. What we did not do is globalize the rights of working people, environmental rights, and human rights. You've got to do that if trade's going to work. We essentially subsidize or encourage businesses to leave the United States because our environmental standards are higher than they are in developing countries. If you have a factory in Massachusetts and let's just say you make a toxic byproducts of something or other and it costs you a million dollars to dispose of them, you can go down to China and you throw the stuff in the river -- you've just saved a million dollars worth of your cost. Doesn't seem quite right to me, unless you think that we ought to degrade our environmental standards to that Chinese level. The same is true of labor rights. I don't believe you can have an international minimum wage. I (inaudible) but I do believe that you can have similar labor standards, real enforcement of child labor, real enforcement of basic occupational safety and health, real right to organize. If you don't have the right to organize, I don't see any compelling agreement to say we should be able to import your duty-free. Now, what would happen if we're able to do this, in Mexico, they'd agree. It would be tough. It would be long and difficult. But if Mexicans have a real reason to want to be in a true economic union with the United States it would democratize Mexico which is why I supported NAFTA in the first place because I thought that NAFTA was going to actually result in women going into the work force, becoming economically independent. When the women achieve equal status with men, that's the most likely conditions under which a democracy will succeed. So that's what I thought was going to happen with NAFTA. The problem is the process is incredibly slow, and the hemorrhage of jobs and the pain this is causing in the Midwest, in particular, is so great that I don't think we can wait until the process over 25 or 50 year time eventually results in the development of the kinds of protections that we have for working people in this country. I think Mexico will agree because essentially NAFTA is a form of constructive engagement. Mexico is in the game, they have a lot of trade with us, now they have a choice of either having that trade cranked down a little bit or have some pressure on it because they're not going to comply with any of these standards, or over a period of time comply with those standards. The problem is China because China will not permit open and independent trade unions because it threatens their central authority. The Chinese government is never going to let anything threaten its central authority. Now you're got a big problem because it would be fine to say, well, by God, we're going to cut off these terrible Chinese jobs because they're low environmental standards, et cetera, et cetera. But there are two huge problems with that. One, it's in our best interest to have an economically stable China, and they're much more stable than they were fifteen or even ten years because of the jobs we've sent over there and the fact that it's become a manufacturing center for the world, and two, we need their help in North Korea. So if we're busy with one hand saying we're going to cut back on the number of jobs you have because we're going to attach duties to your products, and by the way, would you help us get rid of the North Korean nuclear arms, I don't think that's going to work. So with the Chinese it's going to be a much more difficult process to try to get international labor standards, human rights standards, and environmental standards.
M: You don't (inaudible) the Chinese, the biggest economy in the Third World. You going to beat up on the Indians? How are you going to...?
HD: The Indians present a separate problem and I don't have a solution to what's happening there that's causing us pain. The pain in India is principally not manufacturing jobs, which is what it is in China. The pain in India is a new phenomenon which (inaudible) in Boston are trying to figure out, and that's the export of all the jobs that we were promised we were going to accrue to us if they only signed on to the WTO. What we were promised as a country was if we only signed NAFTA and the WTO, we'd lose some manufacturing jobs but we'd make up for them by having jobs that depending on intellectual capital and education. Now, those are going out over the Internet, software programming and even engineering, to a huge continent in a country of a billion people which many of them speak English. That's a huge problem, and I unfortunately don't have an answer for them because regulating the Internet has been proven to be practically impossible, and it's a serious problem.
M: Governor, have you thought about (inaudible) talk about much in the debates, but do you have a (inaudible)?
HD: Yes. I would undo most of No Child Left Behind because I think it's prescriptive, it's expensive, and you get very little for the investment. Ohio and Texas and I think Michigan have already dumbed down their standards to remove the number of schools from the failing school list. This is a ridiculous bill. There's a few good things in there that we talked about, but by and large this is a very destructive bill. Second, what would I replace it with? Well, I strongly believe in accountability. What I'd replace them with is a federal test, which we have, which is a National Assessment of Education and Progress. I'd expect some efficiency in that test because it's very slow (inaudible). We paid for all of it, every dime of it. We put in assessment in our state, mandatory assessment and accountability. We told the school districts we were going put the test, we'd pay for every nickel. We will not -- we do second grade reading, we do fourth, eighth, and tenth grade tests, and we pay for all of it. Third, instead of taking money from schools that are failing, we'd add resources and additional accountability. And add the ability to try to help them improve, technical assistance. Third, fully fund special ed. In the first year of my budget, it's expensive, it's a 25 billion dollar. Here's why I'd do it in the first year instead of doing what Jeffords(?) wants to do and take it another six-year period. If you do it in a six-year period, all the resources will be sucked up in the school system. That may be a great thing, it may not be. You do it in one year, the school board now has a chance to make multiple choices and dispersements of that (inaudible). And here's what's likely to happen, given the school boards are made of community members who have different constituencies. They are likely to do what every politician dreams and often talks about and never gets to deliver. They will probably be able to improve services, maybe improve salaries and be able to cut taxes all at the same time because there'll be $25 billion new dollars in the system. Special ed, you may all know this in which case I apologize -- the way special ed works is that special ed is a mandate required by the federal government, so everybody does it. And since they don't have the money because the federal government funds only 14 percent when they're supposed to be funding 40 percent, they take the money from other programs and raise taxes over and above what they ordinarily would be in order to meet demanding. So if you full funded special ed, at the 40 percent level, you would have a lot of room in those areas where the money's coming from. We could do a little bit better job in special ed. But mostly, you'd have twenty-five billion dollars in the system that is now coming from someplace else -- programs, salaries, taxes, all of which could be revived. Maybe some districts will say fine, let's blow the whole thing on new programs, but that's an elective and open decision. I'm very comfortable that education would be left there. And then you've still got the National Assessment of Educational Progress to put up on the board every single year -- we do it school-by-school. We put every test in the newspaper, county by county, school by school so everybody knows which schools got the best scores in the county and which schools got the worst scores in the county. It's public information, on the front page of the newspaper every year. I think that's fine. There's nothing the matter with accountability. But then you've got to figure out how to improve those scores and there are ways to do it. And believe me, the President seems to have this idea that 95 percent of parents, teachers, and administrators have to be hit over the head to do a good job. My attitude is, given the information, 95 percent of the people in this world want to do a better job, if you give them a little resources and a little guidance about how to do it. That's what we've done in our state.
F: Do you have a federal curriculum that goes with the federal test?
HD: No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. Besides, I've discovered in Vermont, as I knew it would be in the first place, the test drives the curriculum anyway, and that's not all a bad thing. I mean, there are some things you ought to know before you leave school. I mean, nine times nine is 81 in Montana and Massachusetts, and why shouldn't people know that in both places?
M: Would you (inaudible) for Head Start?
HD: Absolutely, and we're going to fully fund the Zero to Three program, which gets me to another piece of my agenda, is prevention. I said in one of my inaugural speeches that -- actually, Jim Hunt said it better than I. He once said that ninety percent, of all the things I do --
M: Edwards quoted Jim Hunt as well, too.
HD: Did he? Ninety percent of all the things that I do, ten percent are important. That's true. That's everybody in public life. Right? So five-year plan, right? You've got to talk about the budget, and you talk about jobs, and you talk about education funding. The twenty-year plan, invest in small children. Do not ever expect the public schools in this country to improve unless you do something between the ages of zero and three because the reason the public schools graduate kids who can't read or write is because they come into the system at five years old unable to learn because we will not invest in small children or families. We do that in our state. We've dropped our child abuse rate by 43 percent in the last ten years because we ask every mother in the hospital if they'd like a home visit. 91 percent say yes. Most of those people don't need any help, but the ones that do get childcare, health care, parenting skills, job training skills, and programs to keep the dads interested in the kids in the case of a single mom. Mothers are like everybody else. We assume that every mother wants to do the very best for her child whether she's a crack addict or has an abusive boyfriend or whatever her problem is. So we give them the necessary resources so that they can succeed. Do they all succeed? No. If they had, then our child abuse rate would've disappeared. That's 43 percent of the kids that have a much better chance of doing something when they get to school, and going to college instead of going to prison. And I've got into this because of prisons. When I was in the first Bush recession, the prison budget went up 14 percent, up to the ceiling! I was trying to do a level funded budget, and I had to cut something else out of everything that was worthwhile. I promised myself that 20 years later, nobody was every going to have to do that, so we started this program and ten years later our foster care for under twelve had dropped precipitously. I hope that ten years from now our prison incarceration rate will drop precipitously. If you want to do something for children, you start now for something that's going to happen 20 years from now. And, if you can't think that way, then you shouldn't talk about children. And that's why the Government's education programs don't work very well. Because they think they can fix a problem and 13-year-old comes in with a history of 13 years of abuse. Not so easy. An enormous numbers of resources, very low success rate. If you want it fixed, fix the one-year-old, because the return on investments is a whole lot better.
M: Governor, you said that the Civil Union Law was an easy decision for you because it was a human rights question?
HD: Mmm.
M: Why wouldn't the same thing applied to a -- to civil marriage -- which does carry benefits but some of them do not.
HD: Oh no, it doesn't. Name one?
M: Social Security Benefits.
HD: No, only if the Federal Government recognizes it.
M: (inaudible)
HD: Which they wouldn't do right now. My commitment in Vermont -- Civil Unions carries every single legal benefit that marriage does. Every single one -- in the State of Vermont -- that the State of Vermont grants. So, what I've said -- as President, is that we will not -- it is not the Federal Government's right or job to recognize marriages, or say who can get married, or who can't. That's why I did not support (inaudible) (Delmar?) It is the Federal Government's obligation to make sure that everybody has equal rights under the law. So, what I have said is that -- and which is actually, oddly -- something very similar to what Dick Cheney said. I think that these -- that relationships should be done on a state by state basis. And it is the job of the federal government to recognize the relationships -- whether it's civil unions in Vermont, or domestic partnerships in California, or gay marriages in Massachusetts -- if that's what you all decide to do. What we have to recognize is the rights -- if there's a partnership, you should be entitled to the same -- immigration, taxation, social security rights as everybody else. So, that the Equal Rights is what we focused on, not the -- not whether somebody's married or somebody is in a domestic partnership in a Civil Union. We chose not to do gay marriage in Vermont, because there was an enormous difficulty in sorting out what the institution of Marriage was. Because the history of the institution of Marriage as you are well aware is a religious institution, which gradually as the rule of law evolved, because sort of a quasi-religious, quasi-civil institution -- even though it's a civil institution for a lot of Americans, most people think of it as a religious institution. That's why we chose not to do marriage with it. But invented, essentially, a parallel track -- a parallel track, which would ensure equal rights under the law for every single person. But there's not one right bestowed on anybody by the State of Vermont that's not available to a gay person.
M: Can I just get the -- unrelated question. On the Social Security reform -- there was a bit of a flack on Monday too, about statements that you had made.
HD: Mmm hmm.
M: Or you were quoted in or out of context in the past, which indicated some -- some different thoughts on how long-term Social Security might be made solid. Including, perhaps, pushing back the retirement age a little bit. Two questions. One is -- the last major reform of Social Security did include a pushback of the retirement age. And, that was politically tough then, and it ended up getting accepted. Why isn't that a legitimate thing to look at again? And, secondly, did your -- did your thinking on this simply change at all? It seemed like you were ended up denying that it had changed at all? What's wrong with thinking things through with change over time?
HD: It did change some. Because what Clinton showed is that if you have a strong economy, you generate more payroll taxes. And Social Security does pretty well. The question was a little out of context. Basically, somebody said -- oh, well, Senator Packwood says this. Do you think that's a good idea? And I said, "Oh yeah, that's a terrific idea." Or something. And it was sort of this hodge-podge of things that were being thrown out. But I'd hate to say that I was taken out of context, unless it was really blatant. Because it sounded like a lame excuse -- and it usually is.
----: (laughter)
HD: It's true. Yeah, you know, I don't think Social Security is nearly in the amount of trouble that it was before. And Clinton showed us how not to get it in trouble. And I don't think you need to push back the retirement age. The other thing is that the opponents are pushing that. I support 67. I think that's reasonable. I don't think we ought to push it back to 65 on that. I know Dennis Kucinich says we should do that. But, the people who are opposed to having it go to 70 make a pretty interesting point. And that is, if you have a job where you are under a significant amount of stress -- you are working manual labor, or you're working -- say you're working for the Department of Public Works in Boston -- or, whatever the agency is that fixes the street. Pretty tough job to work in if you are 65 years old. Now, I understand that's probably a union job, so they have 30 years and out -- or something like that. So, in that case, they're protected. But there are a lot of places where that is not true. So that -- I think we ought to see how the 67 retirement age works, before we jump to do something different. I've always said that -- well, I have not always said --but I've said in this campaign that the reasonable thing to do is if you need more money in Social Security's -- A) first see if you can't start generating more payroll taxes by simply turning the economy around, and more people go to work and they can make more money. And secondly, if you really have to have more money, you get much more bang for the buck by raising the cap on the Security -- on Social Security. But, right now, I think I'd leave Social Security as it is, and just leave it alone. I think -- I don't think it's in drastic shape right now.
M: Governor, can you talk a little bit about (inaudible) piece the other day in Iowa talking about your plan to start advertising in the February 3rd States. And will that plan blow the spending cap for the Democratic -- primary cap limits of the individual States?
HD: No, that one won't. But, we're going to blow the cap in -- I forgotten what -- somebody's already blown the cap. Kerry's already blown the cap someplace where -- I imagine. I forgot -- it might be Iowa. I can't remember. This is something that frankly I don't pay a lot of attention to. Because I don't keep track of what we're spending, other than to make sure -- I have a guy who's supposed to enforce budget discipline.
M: Of course Kerry's pointing "cap" in response to you -- saying that you were going to move outside the system. You were the initiator.
HD: Well, that's what John would probably argue, and I'd probably take a different view on why he's blowing the cap and why he wasn't. But, in any case, the other problem with all this stuff is that Bush is already in these States attacking us. So -- and I knew that this was going to happen. Bush has ads up both in New Hampshire and Iowa -- attacking us as big spending liberals and all these kinds of stuff. His attacks arguments, actually this year. M: Bush? Or the corporate growth?
HD: Corporate growth --but, it's all the same stuff as actually the right wing of the Republican party. And so, we've got to respond to that. Then, we've got the ads that we are also responding to -- and, so is Kerry. That essentially say that the Democrats won't stand up against terror. Well, you know, we're not going to let that pass either. So, we're fighting essentially, not only the eight other Democrats -- most of them, except for John, are constrained by the cap. But also a guy who has never promised them anything but a cap. So, I can't imagine that we're going to be able to within the caps.
M: So you think you'll blow the caps on all through the process then?
HD: I have no idea about that. We have actually never had a discussion in our Campaign about whether we're going to blow the caps or not.
F: Well, so --
HD: It's not something we're planning. It's just that we're going to spend what we have to spend.
M: All right.
F: Interesting.
M: We're actually getting past time.
F: Oh.
M: But, do you have --
(overlapping dialogue; inaudible)
HD: Yeah, but no but I've got a whole bunch of other places to go.
F: Right. (laughter) Oh, OK. This is --
HD: I'm really generous with mine, but there are other people who won't be so generous with theirs.
F: (laughter) All right. But, just as a quickie. You spent a lot of time with the eight other candidates. Is there something you've learned from one of them that's changed your thinking?
HD: Actually, I've come to respect them and like them quite a bit.
F: Hmm.
HD: You know, you get to know people. You -- it's kind of -- it's kind of fun -- Oh, I wouldn't say it's fun --because it's hand-to-hand combat.
(laughter)
HD: But it's -- you know, you develop a certain fondness of them. There's only eight people in the -- nine people in the country --
F: (inaudible) is there something you've learned from them? (laughter)
HD: I'm sure -- I'm sure there is. I mean, I'm sure. You don't go through a process -- I often have to sort that stuff out later on. It's hard to add later fray.
F: Do you think their "respect" and "like" is mutual?
HD: I have no idea. You'll have to ask them.
F: OK. Raise your hand, if you think so.
(laughter)
(applause)
M: Thank you very much.
HD: Some more than others, but (laughter) (laughter)
F: Thanks so much.
HD: I know we're all going to the list of "Who"?
