Dean as Attack Dog? Or Old Style Centrist? Or Effective Leader?

MSNBC: Attack-Dog Dean -- This week, Dean pounded Rep. Dick Gephardt, deriding his health insurance proposal as “a pie-in-the sky radical revamping of our health care system that has no chance of ever being passed.”

“What I want to know is what in the world so many Democrats are doing supporting the president’s unilateral intervention in Iraq!”

“What has Congressman Gephardt in his 25 years in office — along with the other candidates running for President — ever successfully accomplished in all their time in Washington toward solving this (health insurance) problem?”

“I’m the only physician in this campaign, and I’m the only candidate who has actually provided nearly universal health care to the people of my state.”

“I’m here to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party."

Common Dreams -- Howard Dean: An Old-Style Centrist

"I think the country is going in the wrong direction both economically and in terms of foreign policy and I don't think the Democrats are going to be able to beat the President with the equivalent of Bush Lite."

"It's a pathetic thing that I'm the most progressive candidate."

"I want each state to be able to make their own gun laws--as much as they want or as little as they want. We don't have much gun control in Vermont, and we also have the lowest homicide rate in America. So why have a big gun control law? Why not let California and New York make as many gun laws as they want but not have them in Vermont and Wyoming and Montana?"

"I don't think you should run for President unless you're willing to use the military might of the United States to defend ourselves. But I don't think that the President ever made a case that Iraq was a particular danger to the United States. And I think that North Korea is a particular danger. Bush is refusing to negotiate with them. The policy is a policy of bullying and intimidation of both our allies and our enemies."

""My attitude, having tried to do it for twenty years in one way or another, is we ought to try to get everyone in the system and then talk about reform. We've done the opposite the first three times we've tried it under Truman, Carter, and Clinton. The result was that we couldn't get anything done. . . . Every time we have that fight about how to reform first, the losers are the forty-two million people who go on for another ten years with no health insurance."

"Few people would have accused him of being a progressive governor in Vermont," says Paul Burns, executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group (one of the network of consumer and environmental advocacy groups founded by Ralph Nader). "It was not by accident that a strong progressive party was formed while he was governor here as an alternative to some of the positions he was taking."

Vermont now provides coverage to more people than almost any other state, thanks largely to Dean's efforts. Only 1.9 percent of the state's poor children were uninsured in the years 1996-1998, according to a report by the Vermont Agency of Human Services. This was the lowest rate in the country.

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