August 20, 2003

A conservative Vermpnter's View of Howard Dean

TURN LEFT AT VERMONT
By JOSEPH STERNBERG
http://online.wsj.com/public/us

People say the darnedest things on 'Larry King Live.' Remember Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos telling Larry, 'The president has kept the promises he meant to keep'? Well, last week it was Howard Dean's turn. Seems the liberal firebrand and presidential wannabe isn't a liberal after all; he's really a misunderstood moderate. 'Larry,' he said between commercial breaks, 'I am in the center. There's nothing that's not centrist about me.' Somebody better get Barbra Streisand some smelling salts. Apparently we had Dr. Dean all wrong. We
thought he was gaining momentum on the Democratic campaign trail by rallying the party's liberal base. Now he says he's a moderate? What explains the yawning gap between America's view of the man and the man's view of himself?

In a word, Vermont. The state Dr. Dean governed for more than 11 years is a quirky little patch, with politics to match. Vermont, after all, has given us the House's only self-described socialist, a Republican senator who eventually admitted he was about as comfortable in today's GOP as Ted Kennedy would be, and, of course, Ben &Jerry, the creators of the world's first PC ice cream. The state also boasts a small but potent Progressive Party (whose candidate for
lieutenant governor took 25% of the vote in 2002). No wonder Vermont produces a far-left candidate who says he's really a centrist. Back in the Green Mountains, he is one.

While governor, Dr. Dean had Progressives to his left and an eclectic bunch of conservatives to his right. His conservative constituents, already incensed by Vermont's insane environmental laws, were livid when Gov. Dean and the legislature (under orders from the state supreme court) enacted a radically redistributive property tax to finance education. But they were positively furious when Vermont became the testing ground for civil unions, and launched a massive "Take Back Vermont [from the hippies]" campaign. This was decried as homophobic by the left, which promptly printed bumper stickers proclaiming "Take Vermont Forward."

Throughout this skirmish, Gov. Dean remained aloof from the debate. The good doctor never did say what he thought about gay marriage. (In fact, he still hasn't -- he told Larry that he had "never thought about that very much," which would make him the only adult in Vermont not to have wrestled with the issue.) In any event, he eventually signed the civil-unions-which-is-still-not-gay-marriage law in a private non-ceremony in spring 2000.

That election cycle, liberals took to describing Ruth Dwyer, the socially conservative GOP candidate for governor, in terms which would have been reserved for a witch in an earlier age: She was an anti-abortion, anti-gay crusader who would destroy all that was good about Vermont; such is what passes for political discourse there. Gov. Dean's campaign rhetoric seemed tame by comparison: He merely reminded constituents that civil union wasn't marriage, and called for citizens to put divisive politics behind them. Which is how he turned favoring civil unions into a "moderate" stance.

So, too, with Dr. Dean's views on the war in Iraq. His statements on
President Bush's foreign policy are among the most liberal positions he has taken. Yet back home, they're truisms. In a state teeming with anti-Vietnam vets of the '60s, decrying any military intervention anywhere wins at least as much praise as protest. A multilateral approach involving the U.N. seems downright middle-of-the-road.

Not that the state's politics were always so. The past presidents who were born in Vermont, Chester Arthur and Calvin Coolidge, were Republicans. (Dr. Dean is a "flatlander," born in New York.) His predecessor as governor was a Republican, as was the incumbent that the state's Congressman, Bernie Sanders, unseated in 1990.

Vermonters once lived by an almost libertarian ethic; many old-timers still do. Mr. Sanders first won with support from the pro-gun crowd after Peter Smith, the sitting congressman, was too supportive of gun control. But as disaffected leftists have poured into Vermont in the last 30 years, the state's political "train" has chugged ever leftward. Dr. Dean just happens to have jumped off somewhere between far-left-of-center and even-farther-left. Moderate, in Vermont, is a state of mind.

-- Mr. Sternberg, an editorial page intern at the Journal, lives in Vermont.

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