First Door on the Left

Washington — Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean is widely regarded as a champion of gay rights after signing a pioneering civil union measure that he called “the beginning of the end for discrimination against any American.”

Yet Dean, who speaks emphatically on the right of same-sex couples to receive the same legal privileges as anyone else, is hesitant to extend his demand for equality to the institution of marriage.

“I think that’s up to the people of each state,” Dean said Monday in an interview with The Chronicle. “We did not do gay marriage in Vermont. When I had the chance, we chose not to do it. But I’m not going to make a value judgment about the rights of other states to do what they want.”

Dean, who has surged ahead of his Democratic rivals in his quest for the party’s presidential nomination, defended his posture in favor of gay civil unions but not marriage, saying: “It’s not what it’s called. It’s the equal rights we need to focus on.”

The question of gay marriage, thrust into the forefront by a Massachusetts court’s ruling last month that same-sex couples cannot be excluded from the institution of marriage, is likely to become a contentious issue in the 2004 campaign. Religious conservatives are pushing President Bush to support a constitutional amendment to bar same-sex marriages, something the White House has indicated Bush is considering, but has not yet decided. Democrats are divided over whether to support gay marriage or a civil union measure such as the one Dean signed as governor of Vermont.

Dean, in his most extensive comments since the Massachusetts’ court ruling, outlined a position on gay marriage that is complicated by jurisdiction, constitutional rights and nuance. He opposes a constitutional ban on gay marriage. He supports full equality on matters including filing joint tax returns, Social Security benefits, immigration and hospital visits. But he does not give a simple answer on whether he supports, or opposes, gay marriage.

“Marriage started out as a religious institution, and most people still think of it that way,” Dean said, explaining why Vermont — which, like Massachusetts, was under a court order to provide rights to same-sex couples - - rejected marriage in favor of civil unions. “We focused on the notion of equal rights under the law for every American. And civil unions grants that.”

(snip)

Bush has spoken out against gay marriage but has given mixed messages about whether he supports a state’s right to offer civil unions. His aides say White House lawyers are studying a constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage.

If elected president, Dean said, he would not promote gay marriage because it is a state issue, not a federal one.

“We will not be pushing gay marriage because that is not the province of the federal government,” Dean said. However, he would extend federal rights now provided to married couples — including joint income taxes, Social Security and inheritance benefits and hospital visitation rights.

So why embrace civil unions rather than simply marriage, which Canada legalized earlier this year?

“Because it’s easier,” Dean said. “And the religious connotation of marriage makes gay marriage a very difficult issue. It is a religious issue. You can’t get away from it. You can say, well, some marriage is civil and some is religious, but people in this country think of marriage as a religious institution.”

As I’ve written here before, this is the one area in which Governor Dean and I part paths. You cannot leave a matter such as this up to the states. Had the civil rights issue in the 1960s been left up to the states, we’d still have “Whites Only” restaurants and rest rooms in the southern states. This is, and must be, an issue for the federal government to deal with. History has proven that equal rights cannot be a matter for individual states to legislate.

Well, it seems that Exterminator Tom has backed away from his plan to provide a luxury cruise ship for his cronies at the Republican national convention.

Under intense pressure and mounting criticism, Representative Tom DeLay said today that he will not go forward with his plan to use a luxury cruise ship as a floating entertainment center for members of Congress and their guests during the Republican National Convention next summer.

Mr. DeLay, the House majority leader, had insisted that he was moving forward with the plan to dock the 2,224-passenger Norwegian Dawn in the Hudson but ultimately backed off saying it was not worth fighting for.

“Tom DeLay fights for what he believes in,” said Stuart Roy, communications director for Mr. DeLay. “But where we have an event at the convention is not something that he particularly cares about. He will stand and fight on principal for things he believes in, things that matter. Whether you have an event on a boat is irrelevant.”

The decision marks an abrupt reversal for Mr. DeLay, who first proposed the idea to Republican members of Congress in November, saying it would allow Republican members of Congress and their guests to stay in one place. He stuck by his plan to use the ship even as criticism mounted, with Democrats pouncing on the plan as evidence of Republicans’ disdain for New York.

Dang. I was rather looking forward to the contention this was going to add to what is already shaping up to be an explosive summer in the Big Apple for the Greedy Old Party. Plus, I am 100% in favor of anything that further shows DeLay to be the hypocrite he really is.

Howard Dean has said repeatedly that he would, against the odds, help elect a Democratic Congress to move his agenda if he were elected president next year.

Within the next 24 hours, the former Vermont governor will take the first step to live up to his word. An official said the campaign will send a mass e-mail to Dean’s 513,220 registered campaign supporters, asking them to donate immediately to Representative Leonard L. Boswell, an Iowa Democrat who has been targeted for ouster by the Republicans.

The appeal is part of a broader effort by Dean to use his unexpectedly potent fund-raising network to support the campaigns of 19 or 20 congressional candidates. Collectively, their victories would break the Republican grip on both the House and Senate.

One political analyst said Dean’s effort to simultaneously direct his supporters not only to his campaign but to those of congressional candidates as well is both unusual and also the latest indication of Dean’s unconventional thinking.

“Most politicians would view money as a zero-sum game — that if they get it somebody else doesn’t, or if somebody else gets it then they don’t,” said Stuart Rothenberg, author of a nonpartisan Washington political newsletter. Supporting Boswell and other congressional candidates “would add a very interesting twist, and make it much more of a case of Howard Dean trying to transform the broader political system than just winning the White House.”

(snip)

Last week, at the end of a discussion of early-childhood issues in Ankeny, Iowa, Dean disclosed that his campaign had specific plans for supporting congressional candidates next year, with one aim in the House being the dethroning of Republican Leader Tom DeLay of Texas.

“We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that Mr. DeLay is the minority leader in the next House of Representatives, and there are going to be 19 or 20 key seats,” Dean said. “We, frankly, plan to raise money for congressional candidates who are going to be in tight races.”

Joe Trippi, Dean’s campaign manager, said the campaign has aimed all year not only to win the Democratic nomination for Dean and carry him to victory in the general election next year, but also to eventually see a shift in the control of Congress. Trippi points to the campaign’s number of volunteers, as well as Dean’s success in outraising the Democratic field in the last two fund-raising quarters, as evidence it will be able to deliver votes. Trippi said that the effort to change the congressional makeup would proceed if Dean did not win the party’s nomination but that it would have a better chance of succeeding if Dean were the nominee.

“We can actually mobilize people to volunteer and work in the precincts, to work on behalf of strong challengers on the House and Senate level,” Trippi said yesterday. “We believe this is more than about changing the president; it’s about changing the country.”

This is just one of the many reasons that I so strongly support Dr. Dean. He understands that just taking back the White House is not enough. We must regain control of the Senate and the House of Representatives also. This is the only way we can guarantee the survival of our democracy and our country.

Sign up for the campaign right now!

Contribute to Boswell for Congress.

President Bush’s Thanksgiving trip to Iraq was a generous and bold-hearted gesture of support to American troops. What made it such a success, however, was that it managed to severely limit an otherwise unavoidable aspect of travel: contact with foreigners. When Bush has had to go beyond U.S. Army bases in recent weeks, the tours have not gone so well.

Traveling through East Asia last week, I noted how poorly most observers rated Bush’s recent trip there. Even more striking, however, was the comparison repeatedly made between Bush’s visit and that of Chinese President Hu Jintao — with a thumping majority believing Hu had done better.

In Thailand at the meeting for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, “there was no question that Hu was the better appreciated one,” a Thai official said to me. “He outshone Bush in most of the attendees’ eyes.” The trips ended with the two making back-to-back visits to Australia. Bush was greeted with demonstrations, his address to Parliament interrupted by hecklers. Hu, on the other hand, got a 20-minute standing ovation from Parliament. “It is Hu’s visit rather than George W. Bush’s that will provide a lingering sense of satisfaction and security about Australia’s place in the region,” wrote the Australian, a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch and not given to knee-jerk anti-Americanism.

What is going on here? How does the chief representative of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy lose a popularity contest to the leader of a Leninist party?

Let’s start with the atmospherics. Everywhere Bush travels, his security is handled with the usual American overkill: huge numbers of guards and aides, walled-off compounds, tightly scripted movements from one bubble to another. Hu, by contrast, had a modest security detail, traveled freely and mingled with other leaders and even the general public. (Tony Blair sometimes manages to travel abroad with a total of six people.) Bush’s trip to London two weeks ago is now being heralded as a great success. But here is how one of the president’s most ardent supporters, his former speechwriter David Frum, saw it while in London himself. “Bush was sealed away from London for the entire visit. There was no drive down the Mall, no address to Parliament, no public events at all,” Frum wrote in his Weblog on National Review Online. “The trip’s planners reduced the risk of confrontations — but only by broadcasting to the British public their tacit acknowledgement that the visit was unpopular and unwelcome. By eliminating from the president’s schedule events with any touch of spontaneity or public contact, the trip planners made the president look as if he could not or would not engage with ordinary British people.” In Great Britain, Frum concluded, “the United States has a problem, a big one — and it was made worse, not better, by this recent visit.”

But the deeper problem is not one of style but of substance. Bush’s trips to Southeast Asia and Australia focused single-mindedly on the war on terror. Karim Raslan, a Malaysian writer, explained the local reaction: “Bush came to an economic group [APEC] and talked obsessively about terror. He sees all of us through that one prism. Yes, we worry about terror, but frankly that’s not the sum of our lives. We have many other problems. We’re retooling our economies, we’re wondering how to deal with the rise of China, we’re trying to address health, social and environmental problems. Hu talked about all this; he talked about our agenda, not just his agenda.”

There is a lack of empathy emanating from Washington. After the Bali bombings, which were Australia’s Sept. 11, the administration did not bother to send a high-level envoy to a steadfast ally for condolences. Australians had to make do with a videotape of George Bush. Even last week, Bush could surely have arranged to meet in Baghdad with a few troops from allied countries who are also fighting and dying in Iraq.

What is most dismaying about this state of affairs is that for the past 50 years the United States has skillfully merged its own agenda with the agendas of others, creating a sense of shared interests and values. When Presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy waged the Cold War, they also presented the world with a constructive agenda dealing with trade, poverty and health. They fought communism with one hand and offered hope with the other. We have fallen far from that model if the head of the Chinese Communist Party is seen as presenting the world with a more progressive agenda than the president of the world’s leading democracy.

This is what happens you have a bumbling imbecile as leader of world’s greatest democray. George W. Bush has no social skills. He does not get along well with people — unless they happen to be handing him bundles of $2,000 checks.

The United States must regain its standing in the world community. The only way that is going to happen to put somebody besides George W. Bush in the White House. I’ll repeat my usual mantra — it’s time to put the adults in charge again.

by Paul Krugman

Inviting Bush supporters to a fund-raiser, the host wrote, “I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” No surprise there. But Walden O’Dell — who says that he wasn’t talking about his business operations — happens to be the chief executive of Diebold Inc., whose touch-screen voting machines are in increasingly widespread use across the United States.

For example, Georgia — where Republicans scored spectacular upset victories in the 2002 midterm elections — relies exclusively on Diebold machines. To be clear, though there were many anomalies in that 2002 vote, there is no evidence that the machines miscounted. But there is also no evidence that the machines counted correctly. You see, Diebold machines leave no paper trail.

Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, who has introduced a bill requiring that digital voting machines leave a paper trail and that their software be available for public inspection, is occasionally told that systems lacking these safeguards haven’t caused problems. “How do you know?” he asks.

What we do know about Diebold does not inspire confidence. The details are technical, but they add up to a picture of a company that was, at the very least, extremely sloppy about security, and may have been trying to cover up product defects.

Early this year Bev Harris, who is writing a book on voting machines, found Diebold software — which the company refuses to make available for public inspection, on the grounds that it’s proprietary — on an unprotected server, where anyone could download it. (The software was in a folder titled “rob-Georgia.zip.”) The server was used by employees of Diebold Election Systems to update software on its machines. This in itself was an incredible breach of security, offering someone who wanted to hack into the machines both the information and the opportunity to do so.

The Republican leadership in the House of Representatives has refused to allow Representative Holt’s bill to come onto the floor for discussion, let alone a vote. Please write or call your representative in Congress today and tell them that you want them to support The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003 (H.R. 2239). Tell them that this is, for now at least, still a democracy. Tell them that you want to be sure that your votes in 2004 are recorded and counted in the way you intended. After you have done that, please encourage your friends and family to do the same. This is too important to let it slide.

President Bush likes to talk about the need for “fiscal sanity in Washington.” His decision to run up the national debt is entirely sane — as long as you understand his real purpose. Bush doesn’t care a whit about deficits. That’s because he is not a fiscal conservative. He is a political conservative out to buy himself a majority in 2004 and spending the next generation’s money to do it.

Some act mystified, as if conservatives are always more responsible with the people’s money than liberals. But it’s possible to be generous toward social needs and pay as you go. That’s what liberals have usually done. Paul Gigot, the Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page editor, once called this approach “balanced-budget liberalism.” It’s conservatives, not liberals, who twice over the past quarter-century have created extravagant deficits.

It’s also forgotten that redistribution to the poor is not the only way to shift money around. The government’s coffers can also be run down by redistribution to the wealthy and to favored interest groups. And when it comes to the politics of payoff, the president and his allies are nothing short of brilliant. Disgorging public money to your friends makes political sense. By recycling a small fraction of the cash back to Bush and his party in the form of campaign contributions, those friends are financing the construction of a mighty political machine. It’s a weird form of public financing of campaigns — confined to one party.

Bush’s first tax cut distributed just enough to middle-class families to give cover for a plan that largely helped the best-off Americans. Next came the dividends tax cut, an even more naked transfer of cash to the wealthy. At least a fifth of the benefits of this year’s tax package went to a mere four-tenths of 1 percent of taxpayers, those making more than $500,000 a year. One-third of Americans got nothing, and half got less than $100 a year.

(snip)

Building transit, roads and schools, and helping the young and the poor buy health insurance and get a better education — these might justify deficits to finance investments for the next generation. Sending us into a hole to buy an election and to help well-connected interest groups just doesn’t seem worth it.

The New Big Spenders are very different from the old ones. How long will it take us to understand that?

Richard Nixon made himself famous by insisting “I am not a crook.” This bunch we now have in Washington can never make that claim. They are crooks through and through.

It is imperative that we drive them out of Washington in 2004. If we do not, we are not going to have a country left. Can you just imagine what they would do with four more years?

But it’s not just our money that this administration is stealing. They are stealing our safety and security as well. Please take a few moments and read this BuzzFlash editorial: “It’s the Incompetence, Stupid!”

The Bush cartel continues to be successful at maintaining Bush’s credibility with half the population by defining the issue as you’re either for the terrorists or you’re for us.

Unfortunately for all of us, it is the very Bush administration that is fostering the conditions for more terrorism. It is the very Bush administration that blithely stumbles along as we set a record for military deaths in Iraq. It is the very Bush administration that outs a CIA operative who specializes in tracking weapons of mass destruction, thereby weakening our national security. It is the very Bush administration who then has its own slobberingly loyal Attorney General ensure that no administration staff members will be held responsible for this treason.

This is not about whether or not we will fight a war on terrorism. This is about tolerating incompetence and deception.

America should not be run like Enron.

So, the next time a Dittohead or GOP bully tells you that you are unpatriotic for not supporting Bush, you tell him or her this: “Listen, buddy, this is my life at stake — the lives of my family and friends. You can support an incompetent blunderer if you want, but I’m going to put my family and friends before my political party.”

Bush, the rich kid who couldn’t succeed at anything on his own, has been bailed out his whole life by enablers.

Let the next election be fought on the question of competence.

Our lives depend upon it.

As governor of Vermont for nearly 12 years, Howard Dean grappled with a number of issues he would probably have to face as president: health care reform, welfare policy, educational performance, environmental concerns, taxation and budget management.

But as the chief executive of a state with 616,000 residents and annual public expenditures of just $3.4 billion, there were plenty of issues he never had to confront — immigration, defense, foreign affairs, monetary policy.

To close the experience gap, Dean has begun consulting with a short list of policy experts, primarily from academia and Washington think tanks. The effort is coordinated by the campaign’s policy director, Jeremy Ben-Ami, who served as an aide in the Clinton White House.

In foreign policy and defense, Dean has “talked with” several Democratic Party stalwarts — such as former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, former defense secretary William Perry and former national security adviser Anthony Lake — over the past six months, according to his campaign. All three, however, have consulted with other Democratic candidates as well, and none has endorsed Dean. Indeed, Perry, an engineering professor at Stanford University, has endorsed Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.).

Dean’s most committed foreign policy wonk is a volunteer, Danny Sebright, a former Pentagon official who is vice president at a Washington consulting firm headed by William Cohen, who was President Bill Clinton’s defense secretary. Sebright — who headed a Pentagon panel on global terrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — compiled Dean’s foreign policy briefing book and wrote the campaign’s position papers on such topics as Israel, North Korea and nuclear proliferation.

In economics, the campaign has sought advice from such luminaries as Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz, Princeton University’s Alan S. Blinder and Jeffrey D. Sachs of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. Sachs said he has spoken with Dean “about a half-dozen times” on trade, environmental policy and macroeconomic issues. Although he has not endorsed Dean and consults with other candidates, he said he thinks Dean “has the right instincts” on fiscal and foreign policy. “I’ve been very impressed with him as a listener,” Sachs said. “He wants the background. He asks the right questions. I like the process with him.”

Dean’s chief domestic policy advisers are a husband-and-wife team, Harvard law professor Christopher Edley and Maria Echeveste, who was deputy chief of staff under Clinton and the highest-ranking Hispanic in Clinton’s administration. Echeveste and Edley, who headed Clinton’s task force on affirmative action, are volunteers.

He’ll be ready to take the reigns on Inauguration Day!