Howard Dean Still Has Something to Say

Published Jan 19, 2021, 5:00 AM

Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean offers a long-view take on what’s needed in this pivotal moment as Joe Biden takes office. Dean talks about vaccines, prioritizing the important while attending to the urgent, and what unity might look like for our deeply divided country. Dean has studied democracies around the world, yet much of his adult life has been rooted in Vermont where he practiced family medicine before becoming the state's longest-serving Governor from 1991 - 2003. Dean ran for the Democratic nomination in the 2004 Presidential race, pioneering grassroots fundraising. Then, as chair of the Democratic National Committee from 2005 and 2009, his 50 state strategy played a key role in Barack Obama’s 2008 win. At 72, Dean teaches foreign policy at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and is as opinionated and clear thinking as ever.

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This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from My Heart Radio. My guest today is Howard Dean. Dean has an impressive list of former titles, former governor of Vermont, former chair of the Democratic National Committee, and former candidate for the Democratic presidential primary in two thousand four, and currently he is still opinionated about what the Democrats need to do at this pivotal time. Dean's faith in people's fundamental decency is shaped in part by his years in Vermont politics. Though originally a New Yorker, Dean has lived in Vermont most of his adult life, and he was a family physician before becoming governor. When you look at a map of the states where COVID rates have been soaring, Vermont seems to be faring better than other places like New York City and l A. I wanted to know if it's simply because Vermont is rural. Yeah, I mean from a density point of do it makes a difference. We also happen to have a Republican governor who has a brain and who that cares what the facts are, which is nice. He actually confessed to having voted for Biden after the election was over. I like him. Well, there's there's Larry Hogan and Charlie Baker. I mean, there are some reasonable Republicans still, but Vermont has been very successful. Now, look, we're having a surge too, and we're having problems and we gotta, you know, buckle down. But we're a community that cares about each other. We actually sit down and have discussions about debate issues. I never hated the Republicans when I was governor. We used to sit down and work stuff out as much friction with an our crass as I did with the Republicans. This is a reasonable place where people actually care about their neighbors and believe you're supposed to respect your neighbors. Now, we were just joking before you come and we're like, could Howard Dean be the president now in the interim just till the COVID's over, then Biden could take over. Could we have a medical doctor who's president for an interim period of time? But we know what from us as a physician, where did we primarily get it wrong here in terms of the way we handle the COVID. Well, Trump has been a disaster because Trump cares about Trump and his press, and not any functional thing. I mean, he's basically gutted all the health agencies by putting lackeys in there who are afraid of him. So he ruined the good name of the CDC and and and the f d A, and you know, calling up the f d A president, head of the f d A and threatening if you don't get this thing out in the next twenty four hours, you should resign. I mean, that's not medicine, that's just nonsense. Uh. And that's why the way it's always been, the big problem is and Trump is more or less created the I'm not wearing a mask because that's my political affiliation, which is just stupidity. So yeah, we'd be better off the Trump The problem is, I mean, if you look at other countries, they are better off, a lot better off then we are. Almost all of them, not all of them. Brazil is in bad shape, Russia is in bad shape. But but most of the countries in this world are much doing a much better job than we are. And that that's right at the feet of Trump and the Republican Party, which never dared to confront of them, and locking down was the answer. Locking down, unfortunately, is some of the answer, and I think it was handled actually fairly well. We got behind in New York, and that's understandable because we didn't know what was coming. We didn't understand what was happening. They pulled themselves together. The stuff that's going on in the Midwest is ridiculous. That was a whole bunch of Republican governors that basically said, oh, we don't need to wear a mask. Well, now people are dying, dropping down like flies, and there's I c u s are all full. The danger of the i c u s being fillers twofold one is a terrible indicator of how sick everybody is. But the other is that if you have a heart attack, guests who doesn't get an i CU bed or even medical attention. So the Midwestern states, because of their mostly their own stupidity of their governors, are in bad shape. And I think we're going to get our arms around this again. I think the vaccine is going to be enormously helpful. But we've got six months of really tough stuff in front of us where there. I mean, I'm seventy two years old. I'm gonna have to be really careful for the next six months when the vaccine comes. People get a vaccine, then they have to have a second one like a month later. Yeah, right, and you think that how soon if I get the vaccine. This is something I wanted to clarify for people listening to the show. Let's say I got a vaccine the first week of January, and then a month la I have to get another vaccine, but I still have to distance from people and wear masks. Yes, you really should. The truth is you'll probably have some minimal amount of partial immunity, which will vary greatly from individual to individual, which is why the numbers of the on the second vaccine really matter. This is a peculiar virus which we have very little experience with heretofore. I mean, there have been some you know, the Stars epidemic which was very small compared to this, which we did not have a lot of success with a vaccine, but it wasn't nearly as contagious as this, and I might add the fatality rate was much higher than this one is, so thank god I didn't know the contagion right. This is very very contagious, and it's an odd virus which human beings have very little experience with So that's most likely, and I'm not a researcher, but that's most likely the reason for the two vaccines. My guess is that there's some immunity after the first shot. You really got to get the second one. This is not something you want to fool with. And then after the second shot, you still have to distance in mask and keep or you free to just move about in your safe I would distance in mask. I wouldn't think I was free until we get to hurt immunity. And that's about se vaccinated or having had the disease. We know that most people are immune after they get the disease. The problem is we don't know how for how long. It could be only three months. We don't know how long this vaccine is gonna ask. You know, the flu vaccine you have to take every year, and you have to take it every year for two reasons. One, we don't know how immune you are. And to the flu virus, which is a different, holy different family of viruses, mutates like crazy very quickly, so you may get an entirely different flu riders coming the next year. That's why you get flu shots every year. Uh, this we don't know that much about we do know there's been one mutation. Interestingly enough, despite Trump's chatter about China and all this, the virus that most Americans have is actually a European mutation. And most of the virus in New York actually came from Europe, not from China, because it was we could trace it to a European set of European travelers that actually came back from Westchester County from a conference, and that was the first case in New York. So most of the virus in this country it's the European variant. Now, your father was a Wall Street guy. My father was a Wall Street guy. The thing about my parents is that it makes them different is yes, we have a house in East Hampton. We actually grew up here. I didn't go to junior activities that the Maidstone Club. I went to the East Hampton Boys Club and met everybody. My father, Yes, he played golf all summer with the summer people, and then he shot Coote and duck all winner with the local guys. We went to a church that had a lot of local people in the vestry. It wasn't you know, the hoity toity whatever. So we really although I went to school in New York City. Uh, this is the only places I've ever voted at East Hampton, New York and Vermont. And when the time came for you to go to school and your father was a business guy and you just had to go to medical school, what prompted you to do that? Why? How do I? How? I say this nicely? I worked on Wall Street for a year and a half and I hated it. I did it wasn't for you. Well, I was in college during Vietnam, where presidents of both parties lives through their teeth about the war, and fifty five thousand Americans were killed, not to mention millions of Southeast Asians, and I had given up and everything. I went to ski bummed and Askeden and poured concrete and wash dishes for a year. Decided that was not something I was going to be happy with, and then I went to work on Wall Street. Was the path of least resistance. I learned a great deal, but I learned I didn't want to live in New York and I didn't want to work on you know, make my living pushing other people's money around. And so I decided to go to medical school because a friend of mine had gone and to do a post back. I didn't you know. This was the sixties. There were no requirements in college, so I hadn't taken a single math or or science course while I was in college. But I was good at it in high school, so I went. I loved it, and I went to Albert Einstein College of Medicine. I was at Token gem at the at the Jewish medical school. It was great. I learned a lot and met my wife. So what could what work? Would go wrong? Right? And was Vermont something that was a place you visited summer at ski to something if you're going to do the East Coast skiing at least? How did Vermont come into your life? Uh? There was a family that uh sort of became my second family when I was in college, and I used to spend a lot of time in Bondville, Vermont, which is a tiny little town near Stratton. I did ski a lot, but I came to Vermont by chance. When you leave medical school, you list your top ten choices as internships. Vermont was my fourth, and I had three high powered academic medical centers that I had applied to. Ironically, tour in New York and one was in Washington, d C. And I didn't get any of them, so I got my fourth choice. The computer matches that it's called the match, and it's a big deal when you get out of medical school. So I the match as signed me to Vermont. And if it hadn't done that, then you never would have heard of me. When did you start to become more hyper aware of what was going on? And you knew you had a passion for public affairs when you were how old? Well, I thought I had a public passion for public affairs when I was in high school and I was elected to the student council sort of by accident. And then I got disgusted with all the stuff in Vietnam and the civil rights movement, by the reaction of my own government. It didn't matter which party was, there were pots on both of them. Uh. Then Watergate happened, and the Democrats took a turn left and for better government and try to get the corruption out of the government, which they did to a large extent. Now it's behole returned thanks to the right wing Supreme Court. But I got interested in re interested in politics because I always thought that the way that Democrats could rehab themselves was to get a Southern run. And when Jimmy Carter ran for president, I signed on And that's what got me into politics. To campaign. Yeah, I signed up just as an envelope liquor and a phone call maker. And then I was mentored by two women who were twenty five years older than I, who are sisters, and one of whom was They both actually played a very active role in reconstituting the Democratic Party in Vermont. Vermont did not have a Democratic governor for a hundred and nine consecutive years between eighteen fifty three and nineteen sixty eight. So these two women had put the thing together and they mentored me. And because I worked my butt off for Carter, and I went to the convention and that was this and then I became the chair of the county and that's worked my way out. What office did you hold prior to being governor? I was lieutenant governor for five years, and then before that I was in the State House for two terms. When you have a political passion from when you're you know, during the sixties and Watergate and Vietnam and so Furth, and then you decide to run, what is it that makes you decide to give up practicing medicine to run for politics. Well, I didn't. Everything is part time up there, lieutenant governor. So I was practicing medicine until August fourteenth, and I was seeing a patient and the nurse knocks on the door and says, excuse me, I have to interrupt you for the governor's offices. On the line, I took a call in this quavering voice, and the other end of the phone says, I regret to inform you that the governor has died of a heart attack, and you're the governor. That was the end of my medical practice. Oh my god. So that's how I decided. I actually decided not to leave medicine because it was sort of my turn to run for governor. There were two other people that wanted it, and I thought to myself, you know, I'm gonna get into a primary, I'm gonna have to close my practice for five months, and I'm not gonna have a practice to come back to if I don't win. So I decided to run for a third term, which is again, lieutenant governor in Vermont's a part time job. And then the the governorship. It's a four year term two years, the governor's two years in the months two years, and I love it that way. People keep wanting to change it. That is laziness on the part of the public who doesn't want to hear all those stupid ads. I don't blame him, And it's laziness in the part of the politicians who don't want to face the public. Donald Trump is a good reason not to have four year terms. You can get rid of me anytime you want in two years, and it's happened lots of time. So I'm a big fan of two year terms. Now. It may be impractical in a place like New York, which is so big, but in the smaller states, I believe you actually get more done faster with two year terms because you're accountable every minute. How far into his term was the government when he died, Well, he'd been a governor for four terms before that, and then he'd gone and then come back, and he was eight months into his term. He was eight months And when you in that state, do they have to have a special election to have another about the term? Yeah, but that's another advantage of if you don't get you know, people who weren't really elected to serve for the majority. So I faced the voters, you know, sixteen months later or whatever. And then I was elected to five terms on my own. So you finished his term, and then what happened By the time you finished his first term, You decide you like it and you want to stay. Yeah. Well, I was really interested in healthcare. It was interesting, Alec after a week of you know, drinking water out of a fire hose and being brief because you know, I knew nothing about nothing, and now I gotta worry about the banks. And it was during the one of the recessions, and I've got a zillion things. Everybody's got to come and tell me what they're doing and how the government works. And so I'm going through all this and I don't of a moment to myself and the states and shocked because this giant political figure has suddenly dropped dead at the age of sixty three and about two weeks and I had a couple of hours to myself in my office by myself, and I thought, Wow, you never expected this. What do you really want to do? So I wrote down five things that I thought were really important. The top was universal health care and Jim Hunt, who was governor of North Carolina for sixteen years. He took me aside one time and he said, he looked me in the eye and he said, uh, you know what we do is urgent. Uh. And I looked at him, nodded, and he said, and ten percent is important. And I never forgot that. So every day be while I was in the office, I never left when on the days I was in the office without pulling out my drawer and looking at the five things I put down in that day, two weeks into my unexpected term, to make sure I've done at least one thing that further one of those causes, because every day in your life, no matter what job you have, the urgent, oh ways overcomes the important and you get to the end of your life and you haven't done the things that are important because you focused on the urgent things all the time. I teach a lot now and I advocate to my students write that list down, because even at your age, there's stuff you think is important and stuff do you think is urgent, and you've got to be able to tell the difference, and and the important stuff is going to change as you grow older. But if you don't do that you're gonna spend all your time in the urgin and none of the stuff that's important. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. If you like conversations about politics, check out our archives for more in depth conversations with interesting people, like Good Morning America's George Stephanopoulos. When I left the White House in early I was I guess I was what thirt thirty six? Then I felt much older and I you know why? Oh yeah, I mean White House hears are dog years multiplied. Here more of my conversation with George Stephanopolis a Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, I talked to Howard Dean about what he thinks Biden needs to tackle. First. I'm Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's the Thing. I wanted to hear what Howard Dean makes of Joe Biden's plans so far. I'm very pleased with what Biden's doing. He's not my style. I think I wanted somebody who was about forty because I think I'm desperate to turn all this over to a new generation. I think my generations hung around too long. But I think Biden was a great candidate for for what we needed. I actually thought Bernie was gonna win. I think what happened was first we had Trump, who was just chaos every day's reality television, and then we had COVID, which is scared of the living daylights out of people, and I think people just thought, jeez, I really like Bernie, and I think we really need change, but we're just gonna get four more years of confrontation. Although Bernie is a bit very different than Trump, because Bernie's honest and Trump isn't. But I think that that's when they decided they wanted Biden, and I think he was probably the best nominee we could have had. I think Biden's no nonsense, which is great. I like his cabinet appointments. He has got to focus on both the urgent and the important. The urgent is, let's try to heal the country. Let's put confidence back in government because there is almost none now. But the important is, we really do have to have a universal healthcare program that works for every American. Is ludicrous for the United States of America to be the only democracy in the in the world that doesn't have a universal healthcare program. This is absurd, and he talked a little bit about some of the things. I personally believe that the way to do it is allow everybody to sign up for Medicare. What we did this in my state in Vermont, because at the top of the list, even in the state of Vermont, was universal health care for me. So my second year we put in get rid of all these pre existing conditions. You can't charge anybody more than above what you charge your least expensive patient. And we had a huge Medicaid expand thanks to Bill Clinton, so that every child in my state for two generations has grown up with health insurance. Everybody under eighteen is eligible for Medicaid essentially, or unless they're over poverty. You can do that as a state. What you can't do is say, here, what's going to do a single payer? Maybe single payer is the right thing to do, but the change is too fast. If Jolly Verman hadn't changed his vote under Obamacare and gotten rid of the ability to sign up for Medicare, the so called public option, I think three quoters of the people in this country would be on Medicare right now, because Medicare is a much better program than the health insurance companies are the people that are opposed to universal health care. Is through any argument that they make that make sense to you. No, none, I'm not. Look, you can be opposed to government run healthcare, that's a reasonable argument. I don't happen to think. I mean, I think Medicare does a better job the insurance companies do. But to say that you shouldn't have universal healthcare, that's the argument of people who have what they need and don't give a damn about anybody else. And I have no patience for that. I'm always curious if the COVID has proven anything. It's is how linked we are, you know, biologically. Why don't they recognize that it's in their interests as well for other people to be covered. You know something, most people are not opposed to universal healthcare, including most Trump voters. The problem is what the Republicans do is basically when on the worst instincts of people, they catered racism, homophobia. What they sell is hate and that overcomes a lot of things. Uh, if you pull most Americans, they would really like a universal healthcare program, and that includes most of the Trump voters. You know, there's a guy from Georgia who is married to one of my favorite students, And we were talking one day and he says, you know, do you like Trump voters? And I had to think about it, and I said yes, because most of them used to vote for me. These are working people. These are not I mean, yes, you get the lunatics that are in the paper all the time. These are not horrible people. These are people who are working people and they and Trump brings out the worst in them, but they're most of them are hard working people that don't have a lot of money. They understand that universal healthcare program would be helpful. So what do the Republicans do. They crank up homophobia, they crank up racism, They invent all these these issues that are tangential, and they get them so emotionally invested. Fear is what's driving them. Look, if you're a white guy in rural America and you lose your job when you're fifty years old, there's a pretty good chance you're never going to get another one. Now, black and brown people know that feeling very well. White folks have never felt that before. So they're scared to death. And that's what the Republicans sell, is fear and hate. And I'm done with the Republicans. I think they're done as a party too. I don't think you can survive. Either they're not going to survive or the country is not going to survive. You can't self fear and hate and have that be a leadership trait in a great country. When you ran for president, you had your fifty state strategy. Correct, Yes, I did, but at the fifty it wasn't called that until I became chairman of the Democratic Party. And what do you think what worked for Obama? Because Obama basically employed that, correct? Yeah, what worked for Obama is he took a lot of stuff. Look, I don't take credit for all the great stuff we did in my campaign. The truth is we had no money. We had a ton of we had a very powerful message, and we had all the twenty three year olds in the country were for us, and they invented all this stuff. I had no idea what we were doing or what I was doing. As it turned out, well, it was the small donations, and it was it was the organization, it was meet up, it was all these things on the net. I mean, they were the kids that worked in my campaign was their first campaign and They were incredible. They revolutionized campaigning. When I took over the Democratic Party after I didn't win the nomination, I hired them. They had started as company called Blue State Digital, and because we had to bring the whole party up to snuff in terms of social media and all that stuff. And then Obama hired them away from me in two thousand six. So Obama had two things. Besides being an incredibly charismatic candidate, which he was, he had two other things going. For one, this had been tried for a campaign cycle and it was successful, and the stuff that wasn't successful and went fell by the wayside. And too, he had David Pluff. Obama himself is incredibly personally disciplined, and so is Pluff. So all of a sudden you have all these kids who had no discipline at all, because I didn't was not terribly discipline, and trip he certainly wasn't um. And all of a sudden, these kids now have to report to somebody who's maybe a little old school, but who has sees the big picture, which is Pluff. I truly believe that pluf knew where every single Obama voter in the country wasn't fantasy figured out with these kids, how to get them all out And this is of course a happy ending to this after the Obama campaign that these kids sold Blue State Digital for a hundred million dollars. Convenient good for them. When you decide to run, I mean, I'm always curious about people who run for these state wide offices. You know, something big like governor or senator or the presidency office? Is the is the big brass ring when you run for that? Um, does someone tell you you're ready or did you tell yourself you were ready? Or both? I'll tell you exactly how I knew. I had been in the governorship longer than anybody else in the state, and I'd serve a long time. And We've done some pretty extraordinary things. Universal healthcare, we did the equivalent of pre K with something called success by six or zero to three kids, and dropped child abused down dramatically. And the most controversial thing I did was signed the first marriage equality build in the country. We had to call it civil unions. In no way I could have gotten a marriage a bill that said marriage out of the House, but we did it, and it essentially was marriage. And I had to wear a bulletproof vest for my last campaign, and I had to run in that campaign because if I hadn't uh and quit after we passed it, then that was essentially became a referendum on civil unions, which you know, I didn't want to lose that and I didn't I wanted by D twenty three votes. So I was done. There was no way I was getting reelected to anything. And I just thought what next? And we had two senators that have been there for a long time and I wasn't. I didn't really want to be in the Senate anyway, So what else is there? Politics? And that's what I did. And when you decided to run and you didn't win the nomination, whose idea was it? You to run the d n C. That was my idea and everybody else hated it. I didn't get a single vote from inside the Beltway. My vote, my listener was a classic grassrooms. I was elected by the states, And why do you think that is? Why did they vote for you? And the insiders wouldn't because they were fed up with the inside the Beltway people. Because the inside the Beltway people don't know anything about campaigns. Look at them. They all end up running campaigns after that they were successful fifteen years before, and they're selling all this crap that was good fifteen years ago and elected somebody and it's no good anymore. And they're always getting making a ton of money. When I got to the d n C, there was no data platform, not because Terry McCulloch was an idiot, because he actually left me with the surplus, which is unheard of after a presidential campaign, just because the Washington consultants sold him something was totally inadequate. So I basically ran against the establishment, which I had been doing in my presidential campaign, and it was very successful. I didn't get any votes from inside the Beltway, and three quarters of the members are from the States, and that's where I got my votes. And then the last campaign, I ran a for profit corporation called the Democratic Data Exchange. And the reason I was asked I don't know anything about data. The reason I was asked to run it is because I could get along with both the insiders and the outsiders. After after the fifties, States Strategy gave us back the presidency, the Senate in the House, which none of which we possessed. When I took over as chairman, and we had nothing, and by two thousand six we'd had the House in the Senate, and by two thousand eight we had Obama's president and had to trifecta. Was this something you thought was going to happen when Obama want did you expect you we get invited to commit to that administration? I was hoping I would. What job would you want? Probably h h s. I'd had a few words with a person who turned out to be the chief and staff, and I had a few words with Obama too, you know, like, I don't not famous for hiding my opinions, and I'm not to go along to get along guy. I'm a guy who says what they think, and I think, you know, we ought to do what we can. It's not that I'm not a team player. I am, but I'm not a team player to the extent that you have to lie to be a team player. And I don't play Washington games. And this is the same true with Biden. Do you think if you were invited to come and enjoined Biden's administration anyway, would you consider that? Well? I don't. I won't be invited, and I don't feel bad about it. Um, I really truly think that it's time for a lot of other new people to come in, and Biden hasn't done all of that, but he's done some of it. Uh. He has a very diverse cabinet, which I think is absolutely critical. I mean, I am so pleased to see Janet Yellen as the head of the Treasury Department. I'm thrilled to see Gena McCarthy, who's been overlooked for a long time, going to be his chief climate change person. She really knows what she's doing. Tina Flanois is going to be Kamala Harris's chief of staff. She is a real find. So, I mean, he's got some really good people who are about to take over for him, and I think that's great. Look again, sure it would be fun job to have. I really think somebody's who's forty two should have that job, not somebody who's seventy two. So when two thousand sixteen comes, Trump wins, here you are. You ran for president, you ran the d n C. You've had a successful political career. What happened to Hillary Clinton in two thousand sixteen, Hillary actually was incredibly helpful, So you have to know a little bit. What about what I've been doing relatively quietly. So there was a woman named Judith McHale who used to run the Discovery Channel for fourteen years, and another woman who's a big organizer in Silicon Valley named Amy Raw and Judith is very close to Hillary. She worked for her at the State Department. And we came up with this notion that instead of funding the traditional d n C, we ought to look at what this young generation is doing. And what the young generation is doing will not come as a surprise to you. They all have groups that does certain things. Some of them train people, some of them recruit members of minority communities to run for office, some of them only recruit local officials. All these things need to be done by the d n C. But this is a generation that doesn't trust institutions, so they start their own. Now there's some problems with this generation. One of them is I call it cooperation without commitment. So if they if they have a startup and they disagree, instead of working it out, they go each start their own start up and say nice to work with you, etcetera, etcetera. But what we did was to vet them. Judith would vet them from a business point of view, I'd vote to vet them from a political point of view, because there's zillions of these institutions and try to pick best in class, who could do tech best, who could do local officials best, who did Congress best? So we picked eleven institutions. One collective pack taught African Americans how to raise money essentially from white people, which were was very hard for them to do. Another one was Run for Something, recruited young people to run, especially for local offices, often members of minority and communities and women, not exclusively. Uh. There was a training organization based in Chicago, Vote Latino. So there were eleven organizations that we picked that circumscribed the functions of the Democratic Committee, and Hillary helped us raise the money and of course raised most of it from her funders, who had no understanding what we were doing, but they loved Hillary, and we raised a hell of a lot of money. She raised a hell of a lot of money, and it went to Indivisible and Swing Left and all these really good organizations. And that's what Hillary did for two years, and then the second two years I spent doing Democratic Data Exchange, and she spent raising money for both these organizations and some other ones. So it's this is not meant to supplant the d n C. This is meant to do things for the d n C that they can no longer do because the a new generation has come forth and does everything differently in politics. Basically, it took the stuff that started my campaign, started in Hillary's campaign in two thousand sixteen, some of it, and is bringing it into the twenty one century and then trying to get the d n C used to working with all these groups, which they have to a pretty good extent as allowed by what's left of campaign finance reform. Do you think she ran a good campaign in two thousand and sixteen. No, I don't think she ran a particularly good campaign, but she did a hell of a lot for people since that time to help Biden win and and to reconstitute the Democratic Party. Do you think that the electoral college should be eliminated? Yes, playing and simple yes. And I also think we ought to have ranked choice voting do Yeah. We had in Burlington for a while until one of the Republican candidates claimed that his rival got in because of that, and the rival turned out to be crooked. It was a progressive at the time, and so we got took it off the ballot, We're probably gonna put it on now. But I'll tell you why. It does two things. First of all, you don't have to have a runoff. You get people again. You give people choices. I felt good about the mayor's race that I voted in in Burlington because my fourth choice one, but I had voted for that person. The other thing, if it's ranked choice voting, let's just say you and I are running. I need your second place choices. So I'm not gonna spend a lot of money running around telling everybody what a jerk you are, because if I do all, your second place people are gonna put me last, or your joy people are gonna last. It's not perfect, but you run much more civilized campaign and decent campaigns. If you have ranked choice voting, then you do in this winner take all minority, you know you can win with thirty six per cent or of the vote. So those are the two big reforms I think we need is ranked choice voting and getting rid of the electoral college. What do you think, Well, depends how you do it. There's a bill called National Popular Vote, which has passed in states controlling about nine votes. If they get to to seventy, the electoral college is essentially gone unless the Court Supreme Court, which of course is a function essentially offshoot of the Republican Party these days. What it does Vermont's passed it, New York's past It is say, if somebody wins the popular vote in the country, that's where your electoral votes go. And it takes place when enough states to add to to seventy have passed this ballot. Former chair of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Deem. If you're enjoying this conversation, be sure to subscribe to Here's the Thing on the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, I talked to Howard Dean about one of the most urgent issues for the future of our democracy, campaign finance reform. After the break, I'm Alec Baldwin and this is here is the Thing. My guest today is Howard Dean. Given the deep political divisions in this country, I wanted to know what Dean thinks about the struggle Republicans will face regarding the future of their party after Donald Trump. There's a lot of parently decent people who have been voting Republican for a long time who couldn't bring themselves to vote for Trump. I mean, there are still a lot of decent Republicans. The problem is none of them are in the Senate, with the possible exception of Mitt Romney. There are people I like in the Republican Party the Senate um, but I don't respect them because I don't think they have a spine between them. I'd like Bob Corker a lot and Trump deep six Tim and that's why they're so terrified the Republican Party. This happens to all politicians, and the Democrats are not exempt from this. They care more about their job than they do about the country, and that's a big problem. You shouldn't be in. You know. I'm actually for going back to the way the original Congress was, which is the way the legislature is in Vermontest. This is not a full time job. You better have another employment. And I'm for term limits in Congress. Not because I like term limits, but because when you have the degree of corruption that is going on in the Republican Party, although I'm sure it's going on in the in the Democratic Party in the past, you know, we're not immune from this kind of stuff, then it's time to try to fix that corruption. The corruption is unbelievable, partly because of Citizens United, which is the most dangerous decision that was made since dread Scott. The Supreme Court has totally corrupted billions of dollars of dark money going to the Federalist Society, who then serves up the highest scentage of people rated unqualified by the American Bar Association ever to be seated in the courts. This country is in a lot more trouble than just Donald Trump. And we've created this mess ourselves. Yes, I believe the Republicans are more responsible for the than the Democrats are. But the Democrats need to get their act together. And we need desperately needed generational change. Uh. And we need less politics. And the way I think you get less politics is don't make this a full time job. You know, pay people decently, but you know you've gotta have another job. I mean, campaign finance reform has been my number one issue. And it's what's if you're a proponent of campaign finance reform, if you're sworn to that cause, it's a it's a lonely task because it's the least sexy issue you could possibly be working on, right, but it's the most critical one for the country. It's the lynch pin of all the problems of this country. Yep. It sure is. When you reference term limits and someone said to me, well, I mean always that conversation, people would say, well, elections themselves are termaments. I said, no, no, no no, no, fair elections are like term limits. I said, right now, incumbency is such a daunting power. We need term limits because campaigns are not fair, because we don't have And I was working with people on the nine Sunday's program and Marvin Calb or his brother Bernard Calb at the Shorenstein School at Harvard and then talking about having not ceilings of spending, but floors. So if you're in a statewide race and media saturation for that state for senate governor, we exempt lieutenant governor because that's more ceremonial. In a lot of states, we exempt controller and a g. But you see the two senate races. In the gubernatorial race, what is media saturation in that state? If it's thirty million dollars for you to penetrate the entire media platform, and you you gotta make sure, each candidate, there's thirty million dollars. Now you could oppose me and you could spend eighty. You could spend what Bloomberg, you could spend a hundred. But as long as I have thirty, I have a base of what equal saturation were good to go. I completely believe in public financing of campaigns completely. Well, you know what, solar are A lot of voters this is are seing in Arizona. They actually passed this by Arizona was a pretty conservative state. This is the first time it went to going to Democratic for quite a while. I think since Bill Clinton and two so Arizona they had they passed public finance and campaigns by referendum. They had two governors, both of whom I think served two terms. I'm not sure, Janet Apolitano and the Republican governor I forgot which one it was who won under that system. And the Chamber of Commerce and the labor unions got together and tried to overthrow it because these are two big influence groups, one from each side, and they spent a lot of money on a referendum to get rid of it, and they lost. Because the public likes public financing, because it gets the corruption out of politics. And there was a complicated system because of the free speech component as you described, So you can actually spend more, but everybody has a minimum amount that they can get. And it worked fine until John Roberts came along and then Citizens United passed and then that was thrown out. Well, like they said, the problem is if if someone can spend an unlimited amount of money to run for office of actions speech, the line was then the person with the most cash speaks the loudest. And that's the problem of this country is that the things that Citizen United are protecting are you know, rich mail oriented, Christian oriented, Wall Street oriented. Everything that happens in this country. Now, to me, that significant is about stimulating the Tao. It doesn't get past and washing unless it stimulates the Tao. And that's that's the problem. Well, yeah, I mean that's true. The idea that corporations are people and have the same free speech rights, this is graceful, and this is put on by supposedly serious jurists. And there who do you think gives money to the federalist society? Rich people who who are really conservative and big corporations and they don't have to declare where the money is coming from. That is the classic Jane Mayer definition of dark money. So, you know capitalism, which I happen to believe in because I think it fits our sort of species well, that it helps to be greedy, which we are as a species, and it helps us to be altruistic. But capitalism is in trouble, not because it's a terrible system, is because it's at the extreme end of where it should be. We need better regulations so that everybody can benefit. It doesn't matter what system you have, whether socialism or communism or capitalism. Every system fails if you don't have a moderate, reasonable place in the middle where it can work. And capitalism is not there now. John Roberts bears much of the responsibility for that. Well, we need capitalism with regulations. We need capitalism with some teeth from regulatory teeth. You're right, people need to pay more tax as, corporations need to pay more taxes. But we want people to be competitive. It's the political aspect of the fact that money is speech that kills this. Because as long as my vote was just as important as the chairman of General Motors, that was great. But the truth is the chairman of General Motors can write a million dollar check to some dark money organization and my vote doesn't make any difference if you do that. And that's where we are today, and we can't be there if we want to survive as a country. We may not. There's no guarantee that America survives or any other country survives. It's to us, and we're gonna have to be much more serious about how seriously we take government. That that, to me is the most important lesson of the Trump administration was how close we came to this country actually perishing, which now we're not done yet. Look, Trump is the you know, the worst of the worst and all this stuff, but the hard work has not been done, and it wasn't done by the Democrats either, and we had a chance to do it and we didn't do it. So, yes, Trump is a despicable person. I think he's the symptom, not the cause. It's assumed that you know, Biden is up there, he's older, and he's about to begin a four year term in one of the most grueling jobs known to man, and whether he is willing, whether he's able to seek a second term after that, is to be revealed. But at the same time, he has a young woman who is the vice president elect, and I'm wondering, when you're in that position and there's as much of a chance with him as anyone, that he won't seek a second term. He might not be willing to do that when he's eighty two years old four years from now. Do you think that everybody is assiduously grooming her to run for that job. I'm here. I'm sure she's insiduously grooming herself. But that doesn't look I mean, that's not a guarantee of anything. I guarantee you that if Joe doesn't run for a second term, there'll be a primary, and Kamala Harris will have the advantage in that primary. Everybody will know who she is, but people are gonna come after her. But look, the second term of a president is a referendum on the president. That's why Biden was such a great candidate this time, because it was pretty non controversial and this was all about Trump, and if it was gonna be all about Trump, we were gonna win. So the second term for Joe Biden will be all about Joe. If he chooses not to win, then win, then Kamala will bear the burden and the credit for whatever they do. Well. I'm sure there'll be a primary if Biden chooses not to run, and I think if Biden is healthy, he'll run. Your intelligence and the breadth of your career and all the many different areas you know about. I'm sorry that you're not an American political life right now, but you're probably having a great time right Um, and myself. If you have to quarantine, Vermont is a good place to do it. The people are great, and we're great to each other, and it's a real community. Howard Dean and I talked in mid December, but given the unrest before the inauguration, I wanted to call him to get an update. So, of course, what happened recently in the Capitol. What was your first reaction when you saw all that going on? It was pretty much discussed and horror. Um, And actually my reaction is stronger today than it was when I saw it because of the loss of life. I mean, these people committed murder. These are enemies of the United States. I think the talk of unity from the Republicans is just an attempt to avoid responsibility. I'm all for unifying the country. But condition is the first act of unity, and so I'd like to see a little less posturing and bs and a little more seriousness about what's good for the country. Otherwise, Um, you know, I am convinced that we can put down this insurrection if we need to, and I'm hoping it will come to that. But if it does, that's what we have to do. Do you think that this is just a preluded more of this to come in state houses and so forth. Here's the only way to get rid of this. People have said, well, you have to improve the conditions in rural America. That's true, but you can improve what with the New York Times ridiculously called racial conservatism. I mean, in other words, racism, which for some reason the New York Times didn't want to put in the paper. This is gonna go away with cognitive dissonance. That is, the people who do these things are gonna lose their jobs if they continue to behave like this. Some of them are gonna lose their lives because we're not having this again, and this next time it will be The National Guard is a much better trained than the Capitol Police, and eventually this is gonna go away. This, this embracement of conspiracy theorist is not because people are stupid or un educated. It's because they have to rearrange the facts of life because they feel like they're not doing well. Okay, we can help them do better, but first they have to rearrange the facts of life, because you can't do well if you have an alternative universe that doesn't match the facts of life. We have more and more people who were saying I need the government to help me, and now we are trillions of dollars more in debt from writing checks to people to help them survive the COVID. Do you think we get to a point where we can't afford it anymore, We're really going to be in serious economic and financial trouble. Well, we would be in serious or economic financial trouble if we weren't putting out all that money. I mean, you know, the unemployment rate among women is going up seventy that's shocking, just shocking. Um. So this is a true economic danger. The problem is we had the most incompetent, corrupt president in the history of the United States at the helm when all has happened. Um, So, we can dig our way out of this. From an economic point of view, it's going to take some time. I think we can do that. Our economic system is still stronger than anybody else's in the world. Uh. The concern that I have is how do you tamp down this very small minority of crackpots who are willing to do whatever it takes. What's the situation in that regard in Vermont? Um, it was so far. You know, Vermont is not this kind of a place. This is a real community where we actually care about each other and respect each other. The Republican governor here called for Trump to leave office after this happened. So, I mean, we were Vermonter's first and Republicans and Democrats second. But the situation is and but there've always been people like this. I remember when I did civil unions for the first time in the history of the country, gay people could essentially get married. And I had some some of that. I mean, I had fifty year old ladies using the F bomb on me when I was campaigning and stuff. Um, but uh, that's a minority of people, and they're kept in check because the state doesn't put up with it. We're polite, we don't shame them. We're not confrontational, but they are confining themselves to the edges of society. By the entire class, including the Republican Party in Vermont, there are very few people in the Publican Party in Vermont that are actually elected that behave like the majority of elected representatives to do at the federal level. Well, in my mind, the COVID and the political upheaval in the country mirror one another. Their problems we've never faced before in this country. We've never I shouldn't say we've never faced this kind of political upheaval before, but but I think specifically to where we are now, We've never seen a bunch of hoodlums crash the gates of the and the doors of the of the Capitol building and vandalized the Capitol Building. That's something I never thought i'd see in my lifetime. But if you're Biden and you're the president, now, what's the line you have to walk between demanding law enforcement, demanding people don't do those kinds of things again, but not be perceived of someone who you're ganging up and you're piling up on the extreme right. Okay, so what Biden has to do is speak to the whole country minus the extreme right. You can't reason with these people. Their treason is they're really not Americans. So that's not our problem. Our problem is that is the seventy million people that voted for Trump that aren't crazy. There's plenty of them. I don't think most Trump supporters think this is okay, and so I mean the ones in Congress appear to, and that's mostly because they completely lack any intestinal fortitude whatsoever. But I think what Biden needs to do is speak to all of us at the same time, not carry on about law and order, but be really clear that when this kind of stuff happens, the consequences are going to be enormous. Enormous. These people are gonna get this is already happening. These people are gonna lose their jobs, and if they are willing to put other people's lives at risk, they're likely to lose their own lives. As long as we're speaking to the majority of Americans who are I think fundamentally decent people, we can suppress the crazy people who are armed and mean other people harm. And the last thing I want to say is we cannot what we must not do under any circumstances is concede other people's rights in order to bring order. We are not going backwards on civil rights. We have made huge gains over the summer. Uh's who the demonstrations, the Black Lives Matter, and I think the consciousness in the white community about what the problems are. That's where a lot of this is is a lot of the white community doesn't want to face what we really need to face in order to try to get rid of some of this injustice. But most people will want to do that. I think most people in their hearts are good people. We have to have a president that's willing to talk to those people and be really tough on the people that want don't want to play ball. Many many thanks to you, sir, and thanks for taking my call. My great pleasure. Talk soon. Former Vermont governor and former d n C chair Howard Dean. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by my Heart Radio. We're produced by Kathleen Russo and Carrie Donohue. Our editor is Zach McNeese and our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our theme song is by Miles Davis. Didn't pay Me in US to

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