An old-style centrist - The Word Washington - Howard Dean - Brief Article

Progressive, The, May, 2003 by Ruth Conniff

Dean's political role model is Jimmy Carter. He got interested in politics while licking envelopes on Carter's 1976 campaign. "Jimmy Carter got me into politics on the notion of connecting human rights and foreign policy," he says. "Now we've got to connect human rights and trade policy." By that, he means attaching labor and environmental standards to all trade agreements.

Dean is not a member of the Democratic Leadership Council, the group founded in 1985 to promote centrism within the party, but he reads their literature and says they have some good ideas.

"At the beginning I think it was very good, because I think the party wasn't winning elections because we were too far to the left," he says. "Now I think the party has moved too far to the right."

Dean says Bush has been something of a stealth conservative.

"George Bush governed Texas as a relative moderate--not a super moderate--but then when he came into the White House he started espousing all this super rightwing stuff," says Dean. "And I think this country is headed in an extreme direction. I think it's painful for a lot of middle class Americans who are trying to make ends meet, and I think it's painful for a lot of our former allies who've discovered that America's woken up to be a bully."

Dean may not have a progressive track record like Wellstone or leftwing candidate Dennis Kucinich, but at least he is raising issues that once constituted the core of the Democratic Party's message. He could act as a healthy corrective to a party that seems to have trouble distinguishing itself from the Republicans, even as the Republicans move further and further to the right.

"Harry Truman first introduced the notion of health insurance for all Americans in 1948," Dean points out. "Now people consider it a socialist plot. That shows how far to the right we are. I think it's too far right, and I think most Americans agree with that."

Ruth Conniff is Political Editor of The Progressive.