Dean: He Just Won't Give Up

By Nathaniel E. Ward | Monday, April 26, 2004

Even though he soundly lost every primary in which he participated save that in his home state of Vermont, former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean remains on the campaign trail. Governor Dean said his work will not end "until we fundamentally change the country" and remove President George W. Bush from office in November's election.

— Howard Dean wants to stir up his base. —

He even threatened—albeit jokingly—to rejoin the race if he received further accolades like the one that welcomed him to Kellogg Auditorium on April 14th.

Governor Dean, speaking to an enthusiastic crowd of mostly elderly Vermonters who liked his spiel during the campaign, cited an extensive list of problems, most of them allegedly the fault of President Bush. He then presented himself and his ideas as the solution, though he grudgingly admitted that likely Democratic nominee John Kerry may well be the one to evict the incumbent from the White House.

Though his campaign for president may be long over, his fight against the President is ongoing. As during his campaign, Governor Dean emphasized the need for the Democrats to move away from the political center, which he said the Republican Party did to great success. The Governor hopes to visit not only those states contested in the polls but even staunchly conservative areas to drum up support from the radical left. "We don't need to move to the center" and create a national consensus as former President Bill Clinton did, he said. "We need to excite the daylights out of our base."

He also said he created a new website, called Democracy for America, "to keep this grassroots movement going." Governor Dean said he hopes the new website will keep liberal activists connected to one another and let them affect real change. Mr. Kerry's campaign, following the lead of his former rival, has adopted many of Governor Dean's Internet strategies, which raised millions for his doomed run for the presidency.

While never supporting outright the policies suggested by Mr. Kerry, the Governor did several times indicate his support for the leading Democrat. In particular, he congratulated Mr. Kerry's recent college tour—which did not stop at Dartmouth—for "sending a signal to young people that they matter." Youth, he said, "want to beat George Bush just as much as a 55-year-old man like me."

Early in his lecture, Governor Dean focused on America's dearth of long-term thinking, especially in its leadership. President Bush made a number of decisions—lowering taxes and removing despotic leaders, for example—that will have detrimental consequences. The job of the government is not to promote capitalist growth and enrich the nation, he said, rather it is to offset capitalism's consequences. "This president is congenitally incapable of doing any long-term thinking whatsoever," Governor Dean exclaimed to hoots and hollers from the crowd.

Other elements of society are not immune to this focus on the short-term, he said. Voters themselves bear much of the blame for America's many problems, since "democracy is not a spectator sport." Too many people neglect even the most basic aspects of civil society, especially voting, because they feel it does not affect them, he elaborated.

This apathy stems in large part by the media, led by Fox News Channel, he said. That organization is bad "not because it's Rupert Murdoch and the organ of the American right wing," he said, but because "the people at Fox News are so much better at what they do." News in America has grown increasingly commercialized, encouraging networks to "dumb down the news" for ratings, he said, adding that "nobody would pretend there's any intellectual content at Fox News."

Fox played a large role in ensuring his campaign's destruction, Governor Dean asserted, since the network played his so-called "I Have a Scream" speech after the Iowa Caucuses as many as 635 times. "It was just entertainment, and that's what the news has become."

Alternative news outlets on the Internet could help bring down these establishment sources, a fact America's youth is already well-aware of, he said. He noted, however, that not everything on the Internet can be believed, but it is nevertheless a "terrific development that the Internet bypasses the media."
Switching topics, he asked the audience if they wished to continue down the path of mediocrity: "Do we continue our status as a second-class economic power?" Governor Dean did not cite the source of his claim; most estimates suggest that the United States accounts for roughly a quarter of the world's gross domestic product, with China trailing a distant second.

His vision for a new American economy, he explained, embraces the rhetoric of open trade without any of the problems associated therewith. Professing his adherence to the school of free trade, he exclaimed that "free trade has failed" in not protecting international human rights and labor protections. The North American Free Trade Agreement and other such organizations have not improved the lives of the most miserable, and are thus impotent. For example, he noted that "we have not raised the standard of living in Mexico."

The Governor did not miss the opportunity to lampoon President Bush. He said that "free trade" as a concept displays the President's "fundamental misunderstanding of economics."

Concluding his discussion of economics, Governor Dean suggested that the United States enact protectionist measures—without labeling them as such, he cautioned—in order to protect against what he called a "protectionist backlash" against globalization.

In his closing remarks after a question-and-answer session, Governor Dean again emphasized that the Democratic Party must move to the political left. "The Democrats for too long have assumed ninety percent of African Americans will vote for them," he said. "Nobody can be taken for granted."

Governor Dean's harangue last week marked the first of several scheduled appearances on campus, including two visits during each summer month. Such speeches form part of his responsibilities as a Class of 1930 Distinguished Fellow, a title the Rockefeller Center bestowed on him April 5th.

Dean: He Just Won't Give Up

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