Howard Dean is the former governor of Vermont, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and 2004 democratic presidential nominee runner-up for the Democratic Party.
Brown Political Review: What was the hardest thing about running for president?
Howard Dean: There were two things. One was the schedule. I was routinely getting about four and a half hours of sleep a night, and that gets really tough. The other was the press corp, which really values stories above facts. They’re basically incompetent.
BPR: Previously you’ve spoken about activist culture at universities and your time as a student, and today’s culture of what you call student idealism. And you pointed out that this is especially true in the Ivy League. What keeps you optimistic about our generation?
Dean: I’m particularly optimistic because you have an empowerment tool that far outstrips anything that multinational corporations and the government have, which is the Internet, so individuals can accomplish things without having to go through government or institutions. For example, Congress trying to pass SOPA/PIPA, which was judged by young people who use the Internet to be an attack on the net. The result was that SOPA/PIPA was, after a bipartisan vote, put aside. The power of the net and the people on the net is extraordinary and it makes me very optimistic.
BPR: What is our generation’s greatest shortcoming?
Dean: I think that remains to be seen. Right now, you’re doing things much smarter than we did. You’re much more patient, much more thoughtful. A frequent shortcoming I see is lack of persistence, but I have a very high opinion of your generation; I think it has been very effective and very committed to change. I also think change has become a moral value for your generation, and I think that’s terribly important.
BPR: In a recent interview with the Yale Politic, you said that “I think the most innovative Ivy League universities right now are Brown and Princeton, and I don’t happen to think it’s a coincidence that they are headed by women.” What exactly did you mean by that?
Dean: When I was at Yale, it was the most innovative institution at the time. They were the leader in the Ivy League when it came to having more of a meritocracy. They weren’t taking as many kids from prep schools. They were taking many more kids who were state valedictorians at their high schools. They were going out and recruiting kids who were from very disadvantaged, segregated schools in the South, bringing them up for a year, and giving them the kind of remedial education they needed. These were highly motivated kids who just happened to go to dreadful segregated schools. Yale was a really activist school with an activist administration. The strongest Ivy League president at the time was Kingman Brewster, but Ruth Simmons and Shirley Tighlman really did a tremendous amount. Brown has evolved as the most progressive school in the Ivy League, the one where there’s the most freedom for students. Tighlman introduced a lot of the tuition policies that are essential for keeping the Ivy League competitive — for instance, nobody has to pay for school if their parents make less than 60,000 dollars a year. Again, these are two leadership institutions in the top corps of leadership colleges, and it’s interesting that they’re both headed by women. I see women as playing a much greater leadership role in the world in the next century. I believe that if you did gender-blind admissions in the Ivy League, about 70% of undergraduates would be women.
BPR: Shifting gears to economic policy, now, what would you say is the relationship between the Democratic Party and Wall Street?
Dean: I think Wall Street has created a very bad situation. It’s a failed institution at this point, in terms of taking the needs of the country into account. David Brooks had a very good column [recently], saying that the existing Wall Street leadership doesn’t feel any obligation to the country, they just feel an obligation to themselves. That’s a terribly disappointing and expensive example for the country. These institutions are not doing good things for America. They’re investing in things like credit default swaps, which are basically gambling instruments. About 15% are legitimate hedges and the other 85% turn Wall Street into a casino. That’s not the purpose of Wall Street — the purpose of Wall Street is market capital allocations. They put us at tremendous risk. Just the other day, we heard about the banks fixing the LIBOR rates. It’s outrageous. There’s not a single major American bank that hasn’t participated in illegal activity, as far as I know — some of them probably haven’t gotten caught yet. This is an institution which has cost America dearly, and I wouldn’t expect the Democrats to be supportive of that. In this system, that costs you money. I think it’s worth it.
BPR: Does it concern you that Wall Street donors are moving away from the Democratic Party?
Dean: No, it does not. Somebody has to call out Wall Street, and if you allow them to buy you off, then you’re not doing the country a good service. Both parties have taken a lot of money from Wall Street, and both parties have served Wall Street’s interests and put them higher than the interests of the country. Getting rid of Glass-Steagall turns out to have been a dreadful mistake, and had we not gotten rid of Glass-Steagall — which was done by the Clinton administration — I don’t think we would have had the 2008 meltdown, because we wouldn’t have had institutions that were too big to fail. Friedrich von Hayek, the great conservative guru, once said that failure has to be the penalty for mistakes in capitalism, and I agree with that. The problem is that these institutions are so big, they bring down the entire economic system if they fail. You either have to regulate, or you have to make the institutions smaller so that if they do fail, they don’t bring down the entire world financial system.
BPR: Do you think that Obama has been aggressive enough in regulating Wall Street?
Dean: No. I think Dodd-Frank barely touches the surface of what needs to be done. We need to go back to Glass-Steagall and we need to break up banks so there’s no such thing as “too big to fail”. Ron Paul’s view that we never should have bailed out the banks is ridiculous — we’d all be living in caves if we hadn’t. But the fact is, we shouldn’t have been put in that position, and we got put in that position because these banks are too big to fail.
BPR: Do you think that President Obama’s attack ads about Bain Capital, which groups like Politifact have rated “mostly false,” have been fair?
Dean: I used to be a fan of all those groups, but they’ve been compromised. There’s this notion — which has been bought into by another failed institution, the media — that you have to be equally tough on both sides. You don’t. The fact is that the right wing hardly ever tells the truth; it mostly instigates propaganda. The left wing isn’t perfect, but they’re more likely to tell the truth. The problem with organizations like Politifact is that they try to be even-handed, and in doing so, they unintentionally lean over backwards to please the right. I don’t pay attention to them. What Bain did was buy companies, take as many fees as they possibly could, and run up debt.
BPR: The US has a big fiscal cliff coming up at the end of the year. Should constituents be bracing for another debt ceiling fiasco like the one that took place last summer?
Dean: I think we’re going to go over the fiscal cliff, and I think that’s a very good thing. The truth is, we have to deal with the deficit — it’s a very very serious problem that nobody in Washington is serious about. Everybody’s posturing about taxes and cuts — the truth is, you have to have both. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t go back to the same tax rates we had when Bill Clinton was president, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t try to rein in entitlement spending. But you can’t rein in entitlement spending for old people and poor people while you’re giving millionaires tax breaks, which is what Republicans are trying to do, and you do have to rein in entitlements, which is the opposite of what the Democrats are trying to do.
I’m in favor of going over the fiscal cliff for three reasons. Firstly, because the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that it will throw us into recession for only two quarters — it will have a positive growth rate at the end. That’s a tough price for the people who are going to lose their jobs, but it’s a price the country is going to have to pay because it’s going to cut the deficit in half. Secondly, it’s going to end this tax debate and take us back to the Clinton tax rates, which were much more reasonable, and the economy was much better under Clinton as well. Thirdly, it’s going to cut the defense department, which people have been trying to do for years but haven’t been able. It will also make some entitlement cuts, so there will be some sacrifice. Both parties are trying to pretend that there doesn’t have to be a sacrifice to fix the deficit. There does, and I think everybody has to sacrifice, not just poor people and old people. That’s what the Republicans seem to want to do.
BPR: Do you trust the President to do the right thing on Medicare in future debt negotiations?
Dean: The only thing he suggested that I rigorously oppose is raising the age of eligibility for medicare. Medicare is the only universal health care program that we have in this country and it should be expanded, not contracted. Other than that? What we should do is end fee-for-service reimbursement in medicare. That would make things work much better. Then we’d we’d pay doctors to keep people healthy instead of paying them when they get sick.
BPR: You’re on record as saying that the individual mandate part of the Affordable Care Act was foolish, and that you actually hoped the Supreme Court would strike it down. Why strike down the signature achievement of your party’s president?
Dean: The individual mandate has very little to do with the signature achievement. If anything, it’s totally unnecessary. I know this because we did what’s in this bill twenty years ago. The argument of the insurance companies is, if you’re going to insure everybody, everybody has to be forced to be in the pool. Well, we insure every child, and we force insurance companies to cover everybody, and we don’t let them charge 20% above their base rate to anybody, and we don’t have an individual mandate. Our insurance market’s no worse than anybody else’s and it’s better than some. I have twenty years of experience doing this, and I can promise you, the academics in the insurance companies like the individual mandate. The truth is, in practice, it’s not necessary. All it did was piss off a whole lot of Americans that would otherwise be supportive of the health care bill. It was a political blunder. Does it do any harm? Not really. But I don’t think it was worth the political price the president paid.
BPR: Do you believe that a public option would be a much better way to go on health care? Would it help contain costs over time?
Dean: There’s nothing in this bill, including the public option, which would have contained costs. The only way to contain costs is to stop fee-for-service payments. Right now, everything in the health care industry incentivizes them to pay me as much as I ask, for as many things as they can do for me, whether they work or not. If we paid them on a per-patient basis instead of a per-procedure business, we wouldn’t have so many procedures and they’d be much more careful about how they spent our money because it would be a fixed budget. The public option would have been a much better way to go, because you would have had people with more choice about what they got in healthcare. They could have gone into Medicare. They would have been allowed to choose an option that was not an insurance company, but that wasn’t to be. None of that, though, has anything to do with healthcare costs.
BPR: Nothing to contain costs? Do you believe then that health care was enacted in a fiscally reckless way?
Dean: No. We had to do something; this something is better than nothing. It will evolve. First of all, we’ve made the commitment to keeping health care in the private sector. Whether that’s good or bad, we can debate, but that’s the commitment that was made by the courts and the legislature. We might as well take advantage of the private sector’s ability to use ingenuity to affect the cost curve, and I think the private sector will do that.
BPR: Switching gears again to the election: If you were on Mitt Romney’s advisory team, what long-term advice would you give to him and the GOP?
Dean: Get your tax returns out there right away, because you’re going to lose if you don’t. People are going to ask, “Have you paid any taxes between 2000 and 2010?” They’re going to keep asking until you can prove you did, and they’re not going to vote for you if they think you didn’t. Secondly, stop beating up on gays, Muslims, and immigrants, and people like that, because you need some under-35 votes, and you can’t get any as long as you’re doing that.
BPR: Would you recommend he advocate a particular set of views?
Dean: It would be nice if he advocated some views — right now, all he’s doing is attacking the President, and that’s not a winning strategy. Nobody has any idea what his economic program is, and nobody [will] as long as they can talk about his Cayman Islands and Swiss bank accounts, and about his taxes.
I’ll give you my advice [that] I gave to a Democrat one time: “What have you got your investments in?” And he told me what he had, and some of them were drug companies and things like that. I said, “You’re going to sell them right now.” He said, “I can’t do that.” I said, “Fine, then. Don’t do it, and if you’d like to be talking about that during the campaign in October, right before the election, be my guest. But if you’d like to talk about what you want to do when you’re governor, then you’ll sell them right now.” That’s the advice I’ve got for Romney. Want to be talking about your taxes and whether you’ve paid them in October? Be my guest. Not a winning strategy. My advice for everyone is, get the stuff out there now. Take your lumps. It would have been a lot smarter if he’d done it last January, but he didn’t. I’ve never seen a campaign that’s as witless as this one in terms of things like that.
BPR: In 2006, you warned that the Iraqi interim government might turn virulently against Israel, and that’s now a common concern in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Do you think that the Arab Spring was a net gain for the United States?
Dean: Absolutely, yes. I don’t consider Iraq to be part of the Arab Spring, though. The Iraqi government is becoming more and more authoritarian, and the Iranians are essentially calling the shots. Maliki was essentially elected by the Iranians — he needed the votes of Muqtada al-Sadr in the Parliament, and Muqtada al-Sadr was basically told by the Iranian government to vote for Maliki. We’ve already lost Iraq. It was a terrible mistake to go in there in the first place — I said so nine years ago, and unfortunately, I turned out to be right. However, I think the Arab Spring in Tunisia, and Egypt, and Libya, — and even Syria, where the outcome is unknown — have been very big positives. Any time you can get people to democratically express their views, you allow a debate. You have to worry about populism, but the way people outgrow populism is to understand the consequences of their own choices.
BPR: Do you think that an Israeli strike against a nuclear Iran might hinder the chance of a democratic regime change in Iran?
Dean: That’s a very complicated question, and I don’t think anybody knows the answer to that. I think that if the Israelis choose to strike Iran, that’s not going to be part of the calculus. It’s all speculation and nobody knows the truth.
BPR: Can you envision a situation in which it would be wise for the United States to intervene in Iran?
Dean: Well, we may get dragged in. If the Israelis attacks Iran and Iran strikes back and Israel is going to get the worst of it, we will get dragged in. I don’t think an American government is going to sit by while Israel gets destroyed.
BPR: When you ran for president, your campaign revolutionized online participation and activism. What do you think the future of campaigning looks like?
Under Citizens United, it’s very bleak. I think that the Roberts court essentially sold America to the highest bidder when they made that decision. It was extra-Constitutional — there’s no basis in law or the Constitution for the idea that a corporation is a person, so it’s incredibly unfortunate. A lot of young people are going to be turned off of politics. Fortunately, I think it’s going to be possible to make changes without going through the political system. I think the political system is going to increasingly be seen as one that’s bought by people with lots of money. That’s going to delegitimize the executive, the judicial, and the legislative branch. I think that ultimately, there will be a Constitutional amendment that says that a corporation is not a person, and that free speech is not equated to money. Otherwise, I think that democracy may not survive.
I do a lot of work in southeastern Europe, in places like the Ukraine, to try to build democracies. Now I find myself in the position of lecturing them about why oligarchs shouldn’t fund the government, while it’s perfectly legal now over here in the United States. It’s a huge setback, both for democracy around the world, and for the United States. That decision was one of the very worst decisions ever made by the Supreme Court, and I don’t say that on a partisan basis. I think that as time goes on, we’ll see — as Sandra Day O’Connor did when she supported Bush v. Gore — that it’s a terrible body-blow to democracy and to the country.
BPR: There’s a new film, Ides of March, written by your former aide. How does it feel to be to be played in the movie by George Clooney?
Dean: It’s delightful, but the movie had absolutely nothing to do with the campaign, and not much to do with the play that Beau wrote — the play was fantastic. But it had very little to do with my campaign. The movie is great. And I am a huge fan of George Clooney.
Love the Hayek quote.