On Wednesday, April 12, we held our third Prospect breakfast, this one featuring Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean. Journalists in attendance included Michael Tomasky and Mark Leon Goldberg from The American Prospect; Jane Mayer, The New Yorker; James Fallows and Josh Green, The Atlantic; Thomas Edsall, The Washington Post; Ari Berman, The Nation; Walter Shapiro and Michael Scherer, Salon; Jules Witcover, Tribune Media; Amy Sullivan, The Washington Monthly; Ellen Ratner, Talk Radio News Service; Terence Samuel, AOL.com; David Grossman, politicstv.com; Matt Stoller of MyDD.com and Josh Orton, Air America Radio. A full transcript follows:
Dean: Let me just do a brief overview of what's been going on in the last year at the DNC. We've basically rebuilt the DNC with a different emphasis on what we're doing. We're primarily now a grass-roots organization. We've raised $57 million in the last year, which is 20 percent more than anybody had in previous years, and we're going to report a little less than $18 million in this quarter, which is a record for any off-year election in the first quarter.
We are spending that money, as has been evident in some of the newspapers, because we think there's an enormous investment that has to be made. We're way behind where the Republicans are. They for a long time have had four-year campaigns. We've had 10-month campaigns. We now have four-year campaigns.
We have people in all 50 states, paid for by us, hired locally. There are four requirements that we have in order for the states to qualify for this. One: the people they hire have to be diverse, because states have not done a particularly good job. At one point, we had one Hispanic employee in the Texas state party. You can't run politics like that. Two: They have to be trained by us -- multiple times. So we bring them in, five states at a time, train them and then they'll come back and we'll keep doing that. Three: They have to sign on for four years. They can't get good at what they do and run off and do something else. They get paid decently and they get good benefits, which most political enterprises don't do. And four: By the 2008 election, they have to have a Democrat responsible for every precinct in their state, which means every precinct in the country -- someone willing to stand up and say “I'm a Democrat -- I'm organizing this precinct,” no matter how Republican that area is.
I won't go into all the technicalities of the Voter File, though it may be of interest to the reporters here. We're building a different kind of a Voter File. The problem is, because campaigns have not been continuous on the Democratic side in this country, you get a Voter File that you develop and pay a lot of money for and it disappears after the election. And candidates generally are very protective of their voter files. That may be good for the individual candidate, but it's not good for the Democratic Party. Voter Files do well and get better and better the more you use them. So we're building an online Voter File. We're going to give it away for free to the state parties. They'll set the rules about who gets it and how it can be used in their states. But in return, the candidates never actually possess the Voter File the way they used to in the past. We build it online. They can download it and then every night when they put in the uploads of who their IDs are, we get those -- they come to the DNC. So, there'll be some agreements about who can use what when, but the point is that after the election we still have all that information at the DNC. And then the mayor's race and the city council and Congress and the governor and the Senate and the presidential ultimately all get to use it. So if every city council all across America is using this Voter File, which is the ultimate goal of this, by the time we get to run the presidential race, we don't have to build a $20 million Voter File.
The last piece of this is that it's working. Haley Barbour decided he was going to take over the Mississippi House in between elections by appointing conservative Democrats to various state boards and commissions and then running Republicans in their districts and trying to win. We beat them four special elections in a row in Mississippi. We won the mayorship of Mobile, Alabama. We won the mayorship of Tulsa, Oklahoma, last week. We've won races in Utah and Missouri. This is really grass-roots stuff. These are not high-profile races; sometimes we'll put a little money into the state party to help them, but usually that's just grass-roots organizing. So my philosophy is you can't win the presidential if you can't win the city council and the mayor and the school board. And it's a four-year effort and it's a continuous campaign.
The other thing we're changing fairly dramatically is fund raising. We are still doing a lot of work with big donors. We just did a great event Monday night with President Clinton and Vice President Gore where we raised -- well, the official number is $1.3 [million] but it'll be higher than that. And that's great, but what we're really pushing is something called Democracy Bonds. We are getting folks online to give us ten, twenty, thirty bucks a month from their credit card. And I think we have, I don't know how many people, 30,000 now or something like that.
Dean was asked to explain Democracy Bonds
Dean: Democracy Bonds. If we have 30,000 people, which I think is the number now, that means we get $600,000 on average. The average gift is about $22 a month so we have $660,000 a month just coming in without having to do anything about it other than communicate with folks.
We have bloggers now, and we have online -- some of the folks from my campaign came over to do this. So we communicate two ways because the big secret of the Internet, of course, is not that it's an ATM machine but that it's a way to listen to a large community and kind of take cues from them and keep your finger on the pulse of what's going on in the country. The big thing about donors is that you have to respect them. You can't just simply go out and say, “Hey, give me money because George Bush is a terrible person.” You've got to listen to them, try to understand what makes them tick and be part of the community because as most of you know but most people in Washington don't, is that online fund raising depends on understanding that the online community is a community. It's just that they don't happen to be in the same geographic place.
The last piece I'll talk about briefly is diversity. I think we have a whole different way of approaching race in this party and diversity, and I'm working very hard for this. I think much of the party, intellectually, has been mired in the late 60s for a long time. We're now building organizations of young professionals in the African-American, Hispanic, and Asian-American communities. We just had a fantastic Asian-American summit in San Jose two weekends ago. It was unbelievable. The place was completely sold out. We had, I think, 450 or something Asian-American officials from all over the country. We're making big inroads in places. People are getting elected to city council in places like Austin, Texas, and Boston. The first Asian-American city -- I forget what they call it there, city council or whatever it is -- it was an at-large position in Boston. I think the day of the Democrats going in and talking about civil rights and Martin Luther King -- you know, those are important, but half the people in the audience weren't alive when Martin Luther King was assassinated, so we have to reach out in a different way than we have before. The other thing that's really exciting is that the staff now at the DNC … we've totally remodeled all the staff, we've flattened the organization, there's a tremendous amount of diversity at the senior levels, not just at the junior levels. Decisions don't get made at the DNC, either hiring decisions or strategic decisions, without people of color in the room, which I think is important.
But the other piece of this is that there's a new paradigm in the country. Of course, the voters figured this out frankly before we did. The new paradigm is that candidates of color are getting elected by white voters not just by … the usual thing is you have an African-American so they come from an African-American district, or an Hispanic … we're seeing people in Tennessee -- that's the example I always use -- a guy named Nathan Vaughn got elected in a 99 percent white district in northeast Tennessee. So things are dramatically changing. I said to him, “How did you do that?” He said, “I spoke about my values.” Voters are more and more interested in values and less and less interested in ethnicity and racial stuff. And the electorate I think is ahead of where the party has been. That's the other big piece of remodeling that we're trying to do -- change the way we do this. I think the complaint that we take communities for granted is a legitimate complaint and that's stopped. I spent my whole summer going around to major organizations of various hues in order to reach out and make it clear that it no longer can be a debate about a place at the table, it has to be a debate about a place on the ticket. And one thing I want state parties to do is to really make an effort, now that we have a lot of senior people of color in the hierarchies of state legislatures, I want now to make a real effort and push diversity on the statewide tickets because I think that ultimately in this country the tickets of our party have to look like the people whose votes we're asking for. That's the ultimate test of whether we're serious about diversity or not. And it's going to be a struggle, but I think we can do it and I think we're ready to do it because the voters started doing it before we picked up the trend.
So I think that's a good start, and I'm happy to take questions, comments, or rude remarks as necessary.
Michael Tomasky: Well, I'll ask about something that I read about recently that I haven't seen followed up on as much as I thought I would have. I read in National Journal that you had a meeting with President Clinton in his office, and according to this report, he was a believer, or that he liked you better than he had before. Can you talk about what happened in the meeting?
Dean: Sure.
Tomasky: … Where it took place?
Dean: The meeting between me and President Clinton is not a big deal. We've known each other, we've served together as governors; I spent plenty of time in the White House when I was governor. So, I think this is a little bit dramatic, but we do meet from time to time. I just spent half an hour on the phone with him yesterday.
I think most people would concede, I certainly do, that he's probably the most brilliant mind in politics, certainly on our side of the aisle. So I wouldn't take credit for teaching President Clinton anything about what we're going to do because he often has thought of things ahead of time. I go and talk to him … we do meet from time to time, and a few months ago I met with him in his office in Harlem and laid out what we were doing. And he's right there … he understands completely what we're doing. He was actually very helpful on Monday night because kind of laid out to this very large room of very big donors, mostly from New York but there were some people who flew in from all over the country, what I was trying to do and why he was supporting it. And that goes a long way in being helpful in the party, where some folks have been initially skeptical about the grass roots. He told a great story about a preacher at the opening of his library, who's a good friend of his and who confided that he voted for Bush. And -- of course I can't tell the story the way Clinton can tell the story -- but basically the story goes, Clinton says, “That was because of gay rights and abortion or something,” and he says, “No, that wasn't it.” Clinton said, “What was it about?” and he said, “The thing is, nobody talks to us any more,” One of the things I believe is that if you want it to be socially acceptable to be a Democrat, somebody has to be standing up and asking for people's votes. There's no reason we can't ask for people's votes. Believe me, those people are taking it on the chin because of the Republicans, so we should be asking for their votes. And Clinton completely gets this, as you might expect, and he's been very supportive and very helpful.
Ellen Ratner: My first question is in terms of this database. I have two questions quickly. The database, the Ickes database, and whether that will essentially, obviously it's going to be proprietary, and a lot of people think it's going to go to Hillary Clinton. What are the issues around that? And secondly, what about … I've heard from a person inside the White House that they think that 2006 is going to look like '94 for the Democrats. Are you overconfident?
Dean: I'm never overconfident. I believe if you're overconfident in politics, you lose, so, you know, I never … I believe we can win the House back. Certainly we're not going to pick up 54 seats, but I think we can win the House back. And I think if we win the House back, we have a decent shot at winning the Senate back. The Senate is always more independent because it's more candidate-dependent and state-dependent. The House is more dependent on a wave, and that's what I'm trying to generate, a wave.
As far as the Voter File, I can tell you that Hillary Clinton has nothing to do with any of this, and that was just speculation, which was unfounded. What Harold wants to do, I think, is build a big proprietary Voter File. There's some legal problems having us use the voter file because of McCain-Feingold. And there are some problems because one of the things he wants to do, which I think is a good thing, is to incorporate lists from, you know, sympathetic organizations -- environment, women's rights, so forth. That's a very difficult issue for us. The bottom line is the DNC needs to have a Voter File. And we need to have a Voter File that's available, and we have a relationship with the states, of using the states as substrata for building a Voter File that nobody else has. So we've got to do this, it's got to be owned by the party so it's available to candidates without fear or favor of whomever may be running the proprietary Voter File.
I actually consider myself a good friend of Harold Ickes. We also went through the wars during the Clinton administration. I think he's terrific and, you know, I wish him well in this, but we've got to have our own Voter File and we've got to be able to use it for candidates, and we've got to be able to have the candidates build it and we've got to be able to share it with all candidates. I'd like to make it free. We will make it free -- we're raising the money to pay for it so that we can make it available to candidates from all over the country. Harold, you know, is not going to be running this Voter File forever. And a proprietary Voter File that we have to depend on is not the right way for the DNC to go. That doesn't mean he shouldn't do it. I'm sure this Voter File will be very useful in other capacities -- for example, if there's a sequel to ACT or something like that. But we have to have a Voter File that we build that works, and it has to work the way I described it, which is, as you use it, it gets built immediately. Because we've got to end this 30-year process of the day after the presidential election the DNC goes into hibernation -- unless we win -- and then we emerge three and a half years later. That is not a successful strategy.
Look, my basic job here is to establish a long-term plan for the Democratic Party. Chuck and Rahm need to focus on the '06 races and we're going to be as helpful as we possibly can there, but I'm focusing not just on '06 but '08 and '12 and so forth and so on. There needs to be a permanent, ongoing, well-run campaign organization that's always campaigning. They have it on the other side of the aisle; we need to build it and that's what we're doing.
Thomas Edsall: Will your data file be as sophisticated as the Republicans claim theirs is, with all these consumer lists and being able to develop targeting by all kinds of identities and views and religion and so forth?
Dean: We already have that data. Terry got that data in before. It's all commercially acquirable, and we did all that. The problem was the platform was too small and the folks at the state level weren't trained to use it. And there were some kinks, there was actually too much data. There were about 900 data points per voter, so it became essentially unusable. So we don't have to reacquire the data, we do have to update it. All we have to do is build a different kind of platform so we can make it work, and then we have to train the heck out of people at the state level. Now we have a great relationship with the state parties for the first time in about 30 years and we're going to be able to do that.
Jane Mayer: From technicalities to issues. I was curious about how you think Democratic candidates should take on the Republican Party on national security, since that seems to be the one issue were the two parties are, at best, tied, usually Republicans have the advantage. And, there's been no more attacks since 9/11 and where do you think, in a sound byte, what do you think the Democratic candidates should be saying?
Dean: The President is weak on defense. You can't trust Republicans with your money -- we've already established that -- borrow-and-spend, borrow-and-spend. Now it's clear that you can't trust Republicans to defend America. One: the President has been in office five years, North Korea still has nuclear weapons. Two: the President has been in office five years and Iran is about to get nuclear weapons. Three: it's been four years since 9/11 and the President can't find Osama bin Laden. Four: 80 percent of the chest injuries that result in fatalities in the ground troops in Iraq could have been avoided if they had had proper body armor. And of course, five: we see in the front page of The Washington Post this morning yet another story that the President knew one thing and said something else in terms of getting us into the Iraq War. Then we get into the homeland security piece and I think probably if you had to do it in a sound byte, probably our sound byte is going to be Homeland Security Begins With Hometown Security. I'm talking about chemical plants, ports, nuclear plants, and so forth. We need to be tough on security at the same time as using our brains to convey the message that we will do that. And I think that the polling that we've done shows we're having some success at that. You need a tough message about security, tempered with some competence, which the public believes the President no longer has.
James Fallows: A related question about the security argument as it applies to Iraq. I've found in my own reporting an interesting shift in the last couple of months talking to military people. The same people who would say all the way along that this was an unnecessary war and really really managed badly. And now they're starting to say, “and also, we can't afford to lose it.” So even the ones who were really critical of the war in all its aspects say they're suspicious about just sort of getting out. How does the party and its candidates, how do they handle the what-to-do-about-Iraq? Not the who's-to-blame-for-it, but what-to-do-about-it?
Dean: I think there is some consensus in the Democratic Party, unlike most of the reports. The RNC of course is pushing “they don't have a plan, they don't have a plan, they don't know what they want.” That's actually not true; we've agreed on an agenda, a six-point agenda -- the Senate, the House, the DNC, the governors, the mayors. And here's what we've agreed to so far, which is public, the Senate's already passed this. The transition year is 2006 to when the Iraqis will take over. I think the rest of it is a little nuanced, but there's not a big difference between what Jack Murtha actually said, not what was necessarily reported, and where people like Joe Biden are. Obviously, Joe Lieberman's the outlier in all this, but most Democrats are between Murtha, who did not actually call for withdrawal -- he called essentially for implementation of the Krepinevich plan, and Biden, who is saying there's going to have to be a deadline at some point. He just doesn't want us to say exactly when the deadline is.
The bottom line is that I think that we can't afford to lose. I mean, this is one that by the President's definition has already been lost. The President's own definition of what victory is in Iraq has been sort of transmogrified as he goes along. It's really a meaningless position that the President now takes. So winning, in my view, is simply not making it any worse than the President's already made it. I think the question the military guys are probably raising, although you can certainly correct me because you've talked to them, not me, is the question of whether the whole place disintegrates into civil war and becomes partitioned. One of the things I thought was really interesting, which I don't happen to agree with, is that smart people who know something about foreign policy are now talking about partition as a potential … Leslie Gelb, for instance. Now, I've never thought that was a good idea, and I said that during the campaign when I was raising that as one of the things that could happen, which would be really bad because I think it probably would destabilize the region, certainly eastern Turkey and western Iran, probably eastern Syria. But I do think that this is now about -- and the Republicans won't say this but you can see it in terms of what they're doing -- this is now about how to get out without making it any worse than it already is. I mean, the President lost this one when he got in because he didn't know what he was doing, he didn't have any thoughts about what the consequences might be, they had no understanding of what they were getting into. And the people who did have an understanding, like Colin Powell and some of the CIA folks, were just roundly ignored for whatever reason.
Walter Shapiro: I'm shocked to have been part of a situation where two policy questions were asked back-to-back, and I'm about to try to eliminate this dangerous trend.
Dean: As you know Walter, I kind of like policy questions.
Shapiro: I know, I know. You mentioned a fellow by the name of Joe Lieberman as an outlier. To what extent is the Democratic National Committee doing things to make Lieberman abide by the results of the Connecticut primary, and to quash efforts, talk on his part to run as an independent?
Dean: We're not doing … we don't get involved in primary races, period. We just don't.
Shapiro: But what about candidates who leave open the door if they lose the primary, they will leave the party?
Dean: We don't get involved in that, either. That's all matters for the … we're going to support the Democrat, of course, who wins -- whoever wins is the Democratic nominee. But we don't get involved in that, I haven't made any phone calls about that, we don't … the only role that we play in primaries is to try to keep the discussion civil, because we know there's going to be a winner and we want the winner to win. But we have not, since I've been at the DNC, encouraged anybody, discouraged anybody -- we don't push people out of races either. That's something I feel strongly about. I think the Democratic Party has to work as a democracy, so we just don't get involved at all, not at all.
Shapiro: Can I just ask a follow-up? You say, “We don't push anyone out of races.” Would the Democrats in Ohio have been better off if Paul Hackett were still running in the primary?
Dean: I'm not going to comment on that. He's not running and, you know, there was a blow-up over that, and Paul and I are very good friends, and he's been very helpful to us in terms of campaigning for veterans around the country. So I'm not going to get involved with woulda, shoulda, coulda stuff.
Amy Sullivan: I don't want to disappoint Walter by returning to policy, but I did want to ask a follow-up question about national security now that you've given us the Democratic message, or at least what you think it should be on national security. I'm wondering what you think the party should do in terms of where it prioritizes national security in the election against the other traditional Democratic messages.
Dean: In the list that the speaker-to-be, leader, and I, and the governors and mayors have agreed to, security is a very close second after honesty in government. And the reason honesty and the corruption issue is number one is, first of all, we've managed to elevate it now to the third largest issue that people are going to vote on apparently, and secondly, it's a character and values issue. Values do win races. The last race wasn't about moral values of marriage equality and abortion, but it was about values. It's about a different set of values. As you know, and I think some of you have seen the Cornell-Belcher polling results, we're going to speak about values a lot. And we're going to have issue-oriented pieces later on that are values-based, easy to understand values descriptions, couched in issue-oriented terms. For example, I'm going to push very hard to have either raising the minimum wage or living wage as part of what we want to do because it's a values statement about how we value folks who work. I want very much a balanced budget as part of our easy statement about what it is we want to do because that's a values issue. I know economists think, well, maybe you don't really have to balance the budget, and they're probably right, but a balanced budget is a values statement. American families have to balance their budget, and they think politicians should, too. So, I think we can make progress. Security is very very important, but values are something extraordinarily important, and we have such an enormous ability to capitalize on the lack of honesty that pervades the Republican Party from top to bottom. And it would be a shame not to take advantage of that since these folks got into office by preaching values and we now see that theirs seem to include misleading the public about practically every matter that you could think of from Katrina to Iraq to Medicare Part D, spending money they don't have, spending their grandchildren's money -- this is a morally bankrupt party on the other side of the aisle. We aim to talk about our values so that we can make sure the American people know what they're voting for when they hopefully vote for us in 2006.
Terence Samuel: Governor, you talked about having to do something more than running around saying George Bush is a bad guy. I wonder if you could give me your assessment of the climate now. Is this just the President's terrible numbers? Is this just Iraq? And how much credit do you take for having driven some of the poor numbers that exist now?
Dean: Look, when I got here, I believed that the Bush folks won the 2004 election based on two things. One was his honesty and trustworthiness ratings, which were pretty high at the time, and the other was security. And the way to get to security, which was the top issue of the time, was to expose the President's -- the Republicans' in general -- say-one-thing, do-another. So we set out a year ago with the “culture of corruption” -- to talk about it. And everybody was great; the Democrats all got on the program. You've seen Rahm Emmanuel, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Schumer -- everybody who got on the talk shows incessantly talked about the culture of corruption. Now that's become part of the lexicon. And it's worked its way into the top few issues that people say today they're going to vote on.
Once the President's say-one-thing-and-do-another -- and the Republicans' say-one-thing-and-do-another -- tendencies were exposed and ingrained in the beliefs of the American people, we could then attack the President on security. But as long as people thought that he was honest and trustworthy, it was pretty hard for us to make a case that we in fact were just as tough on security as he was. Now we can make that case because people simply don't believe the President anymore. The majority of people in this country do not think the President is an honest person.
Samuel: That was a strategic decision?
Dean: Yep.
Ari Berman: Governor, Democrats keep saying that 2006 should be a year of transition in Iraq. But what if it's a year of collapse, like we're seeing now, where things really spiral out of control? John Kerry has a plan that he came out with that basically says, “if the Iraqis don't get a government, we should withdraw immediately. Even if they do get a government, we should withdraw within a year.” I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that plan, and two, do you think that Republicans may try or that the military may try to pull some sort of October surprise wherein troops get withdrawn close to the election?
Dean: Well I don't think the military will. I think the military's there doing what their commander in chief tells them to do, even though the commander in chief doesn't seem very interested in hearing their advice on the subject, nor has for a long time, including before we went there. I think that … first of all, I think that John Kerry's piece was very good. Secondly, there'd be some dispute among Democrats about those dates, but I don't think there's dispute about the general tactic that he was advancing. I don't believe he used the word “withdraw,” and this is not about withdrawing troops from the Mideast, well, not all of them. This is about redeploying folks and dealing with this in a different way.
What he is advocating really is some variation of Krepinevich, which is put folks on the periphery, don't expose the troops to daily attacks, don't exacerbate the anger Iraqis have toward us about the search-and-seizure methods we have to use in order to rout out any … air attacks we'd have to use in order to get at insurgents, but do have troops in the region that could respond to really serious threats to either regional security or our national security. It makes sense. Again, you'd get some quibbling about the dates, but I don't think there are very many Democrats who agree with the idea, the President's idea, that this is a problem to be solved by the next President.
The essential problem that the American people realize is that this President got us into this without having any idea how to get us out of it, and now he wants to leave it to the next President. Well, that's really great leadership. And so, I think the kinds of things John Kerry wrote about, and others have written about, are eventually going to be the course that gets pursued. This administration's trying to figure out, I think, how to adopt our plan without making it obvious that that's what they're doing.
Mark Leon Goldberg: I have two quick questions. I'm curious to know your thoughts on offering a censure resolution for Bush in the Senate. And secondly, I want to know if you've received a response from the RNC to your letter, I believe you sent yesterday or the day before, regarding phone jamming.
Dean: I think we did. He did actually give us the name of the poor person who was at the other end of that phone. We did receive it. Now, of course, we want to know what was said. The other thing we want to know is, and again, in regards to the article on the front page of The Washington Post this morning -- we think the President ought to declassify the report that he ignored, that came in two days ahead of time that said those trailers were not bio-chemical weapons factories or laboratories. You know, the President's so big on declassifying information when it suits him for political purposes, how about declassifying this so we can find out if he lied or not.
Goldberg: And the censure?
Dean: Oh, the censure resolution. First of all, I'm a really big fan of Russ Feingold's. That kind of came out of the blue; no one had any idea he was going to say that, which I think is probably part of the reason the response was, shall we say, not as well-coordinated as it might have been. But in the long run, the President's not going to be censured, at least not now because they have a Republican Congress, which doesn't seem to think they have any oversight responsibility, and they're not going to do that. So the question is whether you want to spend two weeks arguing about whether to censure the President, and then lose the vote, or do you want to spend two weeks arguing about whether the President's defending America properly or whether the President's doing anything about jobs or health care. My own view is, given the makeup of the Congress, we're probably better of spending the time talking about the issues that we think are going to be winning issues for the Democratic Party. But I think Senator Feingold's right to bring it up, and I hope … we're really confronting a government which oftentimes has appeared to have deliberately misled the American people, as they appear to have in the Washington Post story. That's pretty serious, especially when people lose their lives because of it.
[Note: That day's Washington Post carried an article reporting that a special Defense Intelligence Agency team had concluded that Saddam Hussein's infamous trailers, which allegedly held biological laboratories, according to the Bush administration, did not in fact have the capability to contain such labs. The article raised questions as to whether the President and other administration officials would have known of this report before they were saying the opposite in public.]
Tomasky: Can I ask a two-part follow-up on today's Post piece? So, will you push your fellow Democrats, Reid and Pelosi and others, to pursue declassification of the report? That's part number one. And part number two: it didn't seem exactly clear to me in today's Post piece that Bush knew on May 29 what had been reported on May 27 to officials in Washington.
Dean: He's either incompetent or dishonest, take your pick.
Tomasky: If it's proven that he knew and that he lied, what happens then?
Dean: I think that's probably pretty serious. Look, I would never say in advance what my conversation … or even after the fact … we do not leak. I have a very good relationship with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and one of the ways you keep a good relationship is by not discussing in the press what you discuss in private meetings. I'm going to disappoint you there. But we are going to call, probably today, for the declassification of the report so that everybody can see what's in the report and make their own judgments about whether the President and his administration are incompetent or whether they're just plain dishonest. But they have to be one of the two, because if this report is correct in The Washington Post, and we have no indication that it's not, perhaps the President, if he thinks it's not, he will declassify the report and leak some more information to make sure it's discredited. But the indication now is, the onus is on the President to prove that he did not mislead the country. And the only way he can do that is declassify the report and show that it says something different from what The Washington Post says it said. If the story is accurate, the President misled the country. He either did it because the administration is incompetent and because they didn't get him the information he needed when he made his statement, or he did it deliberately. And those are both very very serious.
David Grossman: Governor, one question by way of the blog Daily Kos. How concerned are you and others at the DNC about Diebold voting machines, and…
Dean: Very.
Grossman: …other issues of voting fraud?
Dean: Very concerned. I am actually calling Democratic public officials. I called one yesterday to try to head off the use of these machines. We spent half a million dollars after the election with a task force, headed by Donna Brazile but made up of academics that were relatively neutral and very careful, to look at these machines very carefully. We concluded that are easily hackable and cannot be verified and that they are not reliable. And we concluded the best machine you can use is an opti-scan machine because at least it has paper ballots and you still get the rapidity of the counting. There are Democratic officials who still use these because they get huge amounts of money from the federal government to buy these kinds of machines, well, not just … the other machines, the Sequoias and Diebolds and such. I'm not an expert on these machines, although someone did actually teach me how to hack one on live TV once, which was kind of fun. It's pretty shocking -- I know so little about the intricacies of all this stuff so … I wouldn't pretend I … I did change the vote totals on the machines, but I don't know if it was really -- could have been a program that was elaborately programmed to fool me into thinking I was doing something I really wasn't doing.
But yes, our conclusion is that these machines are not reliable and they undermine confidence in democracy. I, as you know, keep in pretty constant touch with lots of people around the country, many of the people who supported me for President are people who are very much involved in exposing this. There have been some success stories in North Carolina, for example, the legislature wrote the bill so that essentially Diebold's unwillingness to provide source codes or any kind of reliability disqualified them from the bidding. So, we're pushing back on this hard. Republican legislators seem to think these are great things. We don't get very far in states that are controlled by Republican governors and legislatures, but we have had some success. We believe it's important to keep talking about these machines. These machines are a problem. This is not some Internet conspiracy; this is a serious problem that faces American democracy. These machines are not reliable and they shouldn't be used. We should not be using machines in this country where the results of the vote can't be verified after the fact. Period. Any machines.
Matt Stoller: Hi, governor. Do you have any thoughts on Sy Hersh's piece on Iran and the plan to use nuclear weapons?
Dean: I have not seen it, so I honestly can't comment on it. I've seen the press about it, but I haven't had a chance to read the piece. Historically, and this is not a comment about the Bush administration, historically American presidents have not said whether they would ever use, under what circumstances they would ever use nuclear weapons, which I think is a good policy. However, historically, it's been understood that threatening to use nuclear weapons, or using nuclear weapons, particularly as a first response is something that could only be done under the most drastic circumstances. I've never heard any President or administration talk about using nuclear weapons as a first option, and so I would just say that I think that the historic policy of the United States is a good one and I think this President better follow it.
Edsall: Governor, looking at the Web and the many supporters you had in your campaign … many of them are very critical of Hillary Clinton. Can you explain this?
Dean: I can't. Actually, I have a moratorium on talking about potential presidential candidates because I now have to be the referee. So anything I say about one will have some impact on what I didn't say about others, so I basically don't comment on that stuff.
Edsall: But you can't discuss why this group that was very supportive of you …
Dean: All I would be doing is speculating and that's probably unhelpful.
Phil Battley: [Battley is an actor, currently appearing in a play about Guantanamo Bay, and was invited on a one-time basis as a guest] Governor, I'm here as part of a cast of a play called “Guantanamo.” We played it in the House of Congress last week. You might imagine what my question's going to be about. What is the Democratic Party's position on Guantanamo, and is it going to bring pressure on the Republican administration to bring a system of justice to those 475 currently detained at Guantanamo Bay and other camps around the world?
Dean: I actually don't think we have a Democratic Party position. I've actually never had a discussion about that with Senator Reid or Leader Pelosi. I can speak for myself. I believe that we ought not to be violating the Geneva Conventions. Period. You know, one of the biggest problems people don't talk about much or write about much is the loss of moral authority in the United States because of President Bush's behavior. You know, it's quite amazing to me -- I'm 57 years old -- even through the Vietnam War, America had moral authority. There were some people who deeply disagreed with Vietnam at home and abroad, but you know, were fighting, theoretically, a communist enemy and things were forgiven. I still think that even in the Vietnam War, which was not a popular war abroad or eventually at home, America had moral authority because people understood what we were trying to do. They may have thought we were misguided, and even through the Watergate hearings, the system worked and the President was forced to resign. For the first time in my lifetime, the first time since the end of World War II, which gave us the moral authority to be sort of this higher moral power in the world, we don't have that moral authority anymore. People don't think of the President, of this President, as the leader of free world abroad. They think of him as a problem that has to be dealt with. I think that's a shame because this President doesn't understand, the Republicans don't understand, that defending the country requires two things: it requires a strong military and a strong national defense, but having moral authority is a great way to help defend the country. And because the President has said … his people have scoffed at the Geneva Conventions and waffled on what our responsibilities were, and have had persistent after-the-fact justifications … the Justice Department, they used to be a relatively independent group of people who also had moral authority. This Justice Department, like every other Cabinet, is simply … just takes orders from the White House. That is not the function of the Justice Department, to take orders from the White House. The Justice Department is supposed to be somewhat independent, and be able to stand up and make moral and legal judgments about what people's rights are.
So without getting into the specifics of Guantanamo, which I am not an expert on, and which we don't have a Democratic Party official policy on, I think it is very dangerous to unilaterally say we are not going to pay attention to the Geneva Conventions because it undermines our moral authority in the rest of the world. One of the President's most tragic legacies will be the undermining and the loss of American moral authority, which we will have to regain at some costly price in the future.
Jane Mayer: If I could just follow up on that. Why doesn't the Democratic Party have a position on this? I was just looking at the national security policy document they put together last week or the week before, and it only has a fleeting reference to respect for international human rights. That's it. Not a mention of torture, not a mention of Guantanamo, not a mention of secret prisons around the world -- none of that, all of the things that have made headlines. And if it's such a transformational issue -- you talked about World War II, you haven't seen anything quite like this -- why doesn't the Democratic Party have a position and why have you never talked to Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid about it?
Dean: There are enormous numbers of issues. I'm not trying to apologize for not being concerned about human rights; we obviously are concerned about human rights. But when you start talking about the things that worry Americans every day, it's health care, it's security, it's whether your government is corrupt or not, it's your job, it's your education. And the truth is, in our core message, at six we may already have too many issues. I mean, you need to really focus like a laser on the issues that you're going to run on. It's like Darfur. Darfur is a terrible terrible breakdown of the world's ability to intervene in what is clearly genocide, clearly genocide. There can be no question about what is going on in Darfur is genocide. It doesn't get on the front page very much because in the immediacy of trying to figure out how to communicate with the American people about why they should vote for the Democrats, it gets dropped.
In some ways, issues like … even the environment didn't get mentioned much either, except for energy independence, which is a big piece of it. Some issues are basically made for campaigns, and some issues are made for what you're going to deal with after the campaign is over, when we have some ability to deal with Darfur and the human-rights violations that the President doesn't seem to worry about very much, and about issues that there is broad agreement on but just aren't high enough on the radar screen. That requires education. I think campaigns in general are not very good occasions for education. I wish it were different, but it's not. So we're going to have to deal with those things after the Democrats take power and we have some ability to deal with it. But it doesn't seem to be very high on the list of what most Americans are worried about.
Michael Scherer: I have another quick two-part question. After a year now at the DNC, what are one or two mistakes that you've made? And second, what keeps you up at night now? Obviously a Republican sweep in 2006 would keep you up at night, but within the Democratic Party, what are the issues that you feel you don't really have a handle on or Democrats don't really have a handle on?
Dean: Well, I think we're getting much, much better at the things we need to do. The key is, I believe we have to have a national message that can play in every district, and I believe there is a national message to be had. If you look at what Gingrich did in 1994 -- and again, we're not going to pick up 54 seats but we only need 20, less than that but it would be nice to have a few extra just in case. What we need is a national message that plays all over the country. And the national message is honesty in government because most Americans want that whether they're from west Texas or New York City; a strong national defense based on telling the truth to our allies, our citizens, and our soldiers, which I think most people would think is a good idea no matter where they come from; American jobs that will stay in America, using energy independence as a new industry to create those jobs; a health-care system that works for everybody, like 36 other countries in the world have; a public education system which allows opportunity and optimism back into American schools again, and a strong retirement system that works, including private retirement systems. That list works everywhere and we need to be pushing that everywhere. That doesn't mean you can't talk about offshore drilling in Florida, but it means there needs to be a core message, because if you don't have the presidency it's incredibly hard to develop a consciousness. I mean, look how much … I just laid out a six-point agenda in about a minute -- that's pretty good. But the Republicans keep pounding away, “we don't have a message, we don't have a message” -- it's repeated in journals of all sorts. It's not true. But it takes a long time when you're not the majority party and you don't have the President to get up and do something in an hour to set the agenda for a week. It takes a long time, and it takes discipline. And I think it takes 435 congressional candidates in 435 districts saying this four times a day for 200 days in a row. That's how you get the message across. It is dull, it is tedious, it requires absolute discipline. I think we're making progress but that's what keeps me up at night. I want to cross the finish line; I want to get a majority in the House because I think that's something we can build on.
Scherer: Mistakes?
Dean: No sense in my listing them. I'm sure you will.
Jules Witcover: Governor, quite aside from the possibility of it happening in the Republican Congress, do you think these examples of the President misleading the people rise to the level of an impeachable offense?
Dean: You can't know that unless you do the investigation. And the investigation's not going to happen unless and maybe, not even if, we have a Democratic Congress. Certainly it's not going to happen now. Now, do I think impeachment ought to be at the top of the list if we win? No. We've got big jobs problems; this President is a fiscal profligate and the Republicans can't manage money -- we've got to deal with that. I'd like to see some health-care legislation. I'd like to see ethics reform, which the Democrats will do and the Republicans have backed away from -- said one thing and done another. I know that the right-wingers are using this, “oh if the Democrats win, they're going to impeach the President.” I suppose that anything is possible, but the truth is, I would hope that's not first on our list. I would think that these other things are more important. But I'm sure there will be plenty of investigations into what the President has done and we'll find out what's really going on and then we'll make some judgments about that at the time. But again, I would not put that at the top of the list. There are some really important things to the American people and I think that what the right-wingers did, and the Republican Party, in impeaching President Clinton shows what happens if you use that tool with little reason. You know, President Clinton had 60 percent popularity ratings throughout that, not because people approved of his conduct but because people strongly disapproved of using impeachment and trivializing the process. Impeachment's a big deal. And again, that would not be on the top of my list.
Witcover: Governor, are you saying that [unintelligible] this is not an impeachable offense?
Dean: No, I didn't say anything like that. We don't know what he's done and we need to find that out first. What I said was that I'm sure there'll be some investigations, but I don't believe impeachment would be at the top of the list unless the investigations show a real impeachable offense. But I, again, I would not want to go down that road lightly because the American people won't tolerate it unless there's really a smoking gun, and if there is, we'll find it. The American people have a list of things that have got to be done, and we've got to deal with that list. And it's putting the financial situation of this country back in order; it's having an Iraq policy that makes some sense, and it's jobs, health-care, education, and retirement security.
Shapiro: Governor, from where you sit, is the fact that there will be two caucuses between the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary a done deal, or is this still open to negotiations as to whether there will be caucuses and/or whether New Hampshire will have its traditional unmolested Iowa-New Hampshire role in American history.
Dean: We don't molest anybody … We leave that to the deputy press secretary at the Homeland Security Agency. I couldn't resist. I can't resist getting myself into some trouble -- there's an example of the mistakes.
[Note: Dean's reference was to Brian J. Doyle, a DHS official who was arrested in early April on charges of using a computer to seduce a minor and transmission of material harmful to a minor. Doyle confessed in interviews with police, according to CNN.]
What the commission has done, the basic work of the commission, the independent commission that was appointed by McAuliffe -- that has been accepted by the Rules Committee in general. Now what's left is to figure out exactly which states might be added to the pre-window. But one of the things, let me underline, that the commission recommended is that Iowa retain its status as the first caucus in the nation, and New Hampshire retain its status as the first primary in the nation. I don't anticipate the Rules Committee, when they get down to the specifics of this, is going to have a marked departure from what the commission suggested. How many caucuses, which primaries, what might be added … you know, there's some parameters in the commission's report, but I think if you look at the report, you can safely assume that whatever is adopted, whatever the DNC adopts, is going to be within the parameters of the commission report.
Shapiro: So there will be an event between Iowa and New Hampshire?
Dean: Well, I think that the commission's report said one or two, and there were one or two, they would be caucuses so as not to disturb the status of the New Hampshire primary as the first primary in the nations. And I think they recommended a later primary after New Hampshire.
Josh Orton: Governor, you've talked about the hard, dull work of campaigning in the midterm election, and you also mentioned that you had not yet seen the Sy Hersh piece. Do you feel that rank-and-file Democrats may feel unsatisfied without some sort of response to what's being called kind of a messianic-complex foreign policy in the White House? I mean, do you think rank-and-file Democrats are going to feel satisfied that that kind of hometown-security message is going to rise to the urgency of…
Dean: Well, I think we ought to have a plan on Iraq, but you know, there were some published reports that said there was a disagreement between me and the leadership, and that's true. You can't just agree to have a plan, you have to actually develop one; I mean, a more specific one than we have already. But we do have a plan on Iraq. I mean, people say, “Democrats have no plan.” That's crap. In fact, the Republicans actually adopted our plan. The Senate resolution that was passed was put forward by a Democrat … they wouldn't pass the one we put forward, but they agreed to the transition language and that's really important. I still think you're seeing the emergence of a specific Democratic plan in terms of how to get out of Iraq, and how to redeploy our troops so that we don't jeopardize our security. And we're not all exactly on the same page but we're pretty damn close. The Kerry piece, the Murtha…the real Murtha piece, he as characterized as saying we should withdraw the troops and that's not what he said -- the Biden piece … all these people who are eloquent spokesmen and who know something about what they're talking about have views on Iraq that are pretty darn close. I would like to lay out a specific here's-what-we-do-under-this-or-that-circumstance, but we're really pretty close to that. So I think that if we have a reasonable plan in terms of how to get out of the situation we're in, then we have a plan and the President doesn't.
Orton: I just want to follow up real quick. Stipulating that the policy is there, because I agree and I think that the “where's-the-Democrats'-plan” is kind of a smokescreen, but my concern and my question is, do you feel that Democrats -- your base voters -- aren't going to be energized or satisfied with just specific plans, that they feel the Bush White House is so dangerous that they feel they need some sort of energetic response that rises to that level of urgency?
Dean: What level of urgency?
Orton: The Bush White House. They're worried that are they … they are actually going to invade another country. I understand that the specific policies are there, but are you worried that Democrats don't feel like their leaders are actually going to stop any further invasion?
Dean: Let me be very clear about this. We can't stop anything. We don't control the House, the Senate, or the White House. I thought it was so funny the other day when Bush tried to blame Reid for the immigration bill that didn't get passed. Our guys voted for it; it was their guys who didn't vote for it. I mean enough of this stuff already. I guess I don't fully understand your question. Are the Democrats worried that the President might send us into war again? You mean the Democratic rank-and-file?
Orton: Yes.
Dean: Well, certainly some people are because I read about it on the Net.
Orton: I mean, presuming the Democrats…foreign policy is very dry and boring, but the Bush administration is kind of making this into a black-and-white issue, a “God-is-on-our-side” kind of thing. How do you counter that? How do you communicate some sense of urgency in the policy.
Dean: I don't know what to make of the reports about whether the President is going to bomb Iran and all that stuff. He denied it, which of course, given his credibility among the American people, may not be worth much. I think that if the Democrats thought that he was really going to expand the war into Iran, there'd be some pretty vigorous discussion about whether that was a good idea given this President's track record and the incredible blunders that he's made on the military side and on the foreign policy side. I think there'd be a lot of consternation, not just among Democrats, if they seriously thought that the President was going to send us into war and use nuclear weapons. But again, the Democrats can say a lot of things and vote on things, and I assume that the vote would be very different than the vote that was taken before the Iraq War. I think most of those senators felt that … you know, there was a speech that George Bush gave in Cincinnati a week before the vote, which basically said this is the last option to avoid war, so in retrospect a lot of the discussion, you know -- “the Democrats voted for this war” -- well, a lot of them really didn't. A lot of them were figuring out how to avoid it. Some of them who voted for the resolution took the President at his word, as people used to do in those days. The bottom line is I think we're going to take a pretty careful look at the foreign policy, but I think the idea of a pre-emptive strike in Iran would be something that not only would Democrats be deeply concerned about and likely to say something about, but I think that the American people would be deeply concerned about since the President's mismanaged this one so badly I can't imagine what confidence we could possibly have in the Republican Party to manage yet another war. Our troops are stretched to the maximum. The President clearly had no idea what he was doing when he got into this one nor did his people, and if they did, they were shut out of the decision. I don't think there's any appetite among the American people, let alone the Democrats, to start another war.
