"Rolling Stones" interview with Dean. You have never read anything quite like it.
This interview was conducted in two sessions. We first met up with the candidate in New Hampshire, where he was speaking at an AFL-CIO rally near Manchester, the day after he received the endorsement of former Vice President Al Gore. A week later, we met up again, in Los Angeles, the day it was announced that Saddam Hussein had been caught.
You've really been getting attacked by your opponents out there on the campaign trail -- how does it make you feel?
Interestingly enough, I personalize things less now than I did when I was governor, in terms of attacks from other opponents and so forth. A lot of these attacks come across as personal, but they are mostly theater. But when they first started going after me, I couldn't believe it, because I knew a lot of those guys.
In Iowa, an unnamed Democratic group was running ads against you that somehow implied that your policies would help Osama bin Laden.
I'm disturbed by the Democratic attack ads. When we find out who's running them, they're going to be unelectable, and they'll have no future in politics.
Why's that?
Because they're being funded by enormous special-interest groups -- we don't know who they are yet. That is the old Democratic Party, the Democratic Party that can't possibly win. If you're a politician who relies on special interests, trying to run against the president, who relies on special interests, you really don't have much of a case to be president.
Are you surprised at how far you've come?
I think that the reason that we've done as well as we have is because people really are sick of politics as usual. The Democrats caved in after George Bush became president. And he had 500,000 fewer votes than Al Gore, and yet they supported the war. When the first Bush tax cuts came along, Bush said he wanted to cut $1.2 trillion. And they said, "Oh, no, you can't do that. How about $900 billion?" They have not been an effective opposition party. It's not [Senate Minority Leader] Tom Daschle's fault; he's doing the best he can.
The Medicare bill's a perfect example. Enough Democrats voted for this ridiculous bill so that it passed. And the insurance companies get $85 billion of our money; the drug companies get $120 billion of our money. There's not much left over for seniors. We've got to stop that kind of stuff, and that's what people are upset about around the country.
Why do you think the Democrats just rolled over for Bush?
I don't know, but there's something funny in the water in Washington, because they all rolled over when Newt Gingrich got elected Speaker of the House in 1994. And I was the first one who took a whack at him then, too. Everybody was just bowled over by Gingrich. I thought he was a house of cards.
I'm assuming, once Bush came in, that you told your fellow Democrats to stand up to him. What was the reaction?
They didn't pay any attention. I was this governor from Vermont. What did they care? The currency in Washington is "Can you get reelected?" It's not my currency -- I want to change the country. And so if your currency in Washington is "Can I get re-elected?" you measure everything by what you say, and how that relates to whether you can get re-elected or not. I think that's the worst kind of politics there is. You end up standing for nothing -- except getting re-elected.
What makes you think you won't just get steamrolled once you are in Washington?
The Democrats just need a president who's going to support them. That's what I did on the civil-unions bill in Vermont. I came out in favor of civil unions about an hour after the [Vermont Supreme Court] decision came out. I knew it would give cover to a lot of legislators who would want to do the right thing but just didn't have the nerve.
Didn't you also say at the time that the whole idea of legally sanctioned gay relationships made you feel uncomfortable?
Sure. Look, I didn't know anything about the gay community when I signed the civil-unions bill. I grew up in the same homophobic milieu that everybody else did. I was told the same thing about gay people that all heterosexuals were. And most gay people were told the same thing themselves -- by parents, ministers and everybody else. I was uncomfortable, and I said so. And I got a lot of flak for it. But I still thought it was the right thing to do.
You don't allocate civil rights by who makes you comfortable and who doesn't. I believe that civil unions was a masterful way of making sure that every gay and lesbian Vermonter was entitled to the same rights as everybody else -- without getting into the business about telling churches who they could marry and who they couldn't marry. I think what we did was the right thing. Others may do it differently.
Equal rights under the law is a fundamental part of everybody's thinking in America -- which is why I don't think civil unions is going to be a big issue in the election for me.
Is this an important enough issue to have it be one of the main issues of a presidential campaign?
Well, civil rights is an important issue. Gay marriage is not. Karl Rove will make it that way. Because he'll claim that everything is gay marriage, and this and that and the other thing.
So you are just going to change the subject?
Yeah. If we allow the Republicans to run the campaign based on divisive issues -- like prayer in school, gay marriage and gun control -- then we lose. The right wing will try to make a big issue of it, and they'll get some votes from some people who would have voted for them anyway.
Most people do not want to traffic in hate. And this election is going to be about whether we cater to the worst in us or cater to the best in us, and I intend to do the latter.
What do you think of today's Republican Party?
I think the Republicans are much meaner than the Democrats are. I don't want to absolve the Democrats, but Republicans are just brutal. They do not care what happens to the country as long as they stay in power, and they're willing to do anything they can to stay in power. It's the most unforgivable thing about this administration and the congressional leadership.
I admire George Bush's father. There were some things I strongly disagreed with him on -- but he tried to be a good president. This president is not interested in being a good president. He's interested in some complicated psychological situation that he has with his father. He is obsessed with being re-elected, and his obsession with re-election is hurting the country.
What do you think is George Bush's philosophy? What motivates him?
George Bush's philosophy is, "If you're rich, you deserve it, and if you're poor, you deserve it." That's not my philosophy.
The Republican Party has become the official party of the religious right.
There's nothing wrong with being religious, and there's nothing wrong with having religious people lobbying the government. What's wrong is to have anyone in this country be able to inflict their religious views on somebody else who doesn't share their religion.
How do you feel about the president's policy of limiting stem-cell research? Do you think he did that to mollify his supporters on the religious right?
I don't know what drove the president to his restrictions on stem-cell research. But I can tell you: This president should never get the vote of any family with a diabetic in it, under any circumstances, because of what he's done to dash the hopes of small children of recovering. And not just diabetes but all manner of potentially curable diseases. I think his slavish adherence to anti-scientific thinking is costing people their lives and their hopes all over the country.
How about John Ashcroft?
He doesn't represent the mainstream. He doesn't care, and he believes he literally has the God-given right to enforce his views on every other American.
Irrespective of what the Constitution says?
That's what I believe. You'd never get them to admit that, but that's what they're up to. This administration intends to remake America by appointing judges who will rewrite the Constitution by their court decisions.
These guys are not driven by real-world considerations. They're driven by an ideological view of the country, which they believe, literally, it's their God-given right to inflict on everybody else. And this election's going to show, I hope, that it's not their God-given right, and that we don't want it.
Last month, your campaign got a huge boost when Al Gore endorsed you. Do you share his alarm over the environment?
Ultimately, the planet's going to be uninhabitable if we don't do something about issues like global warming. We are going to have a remarkable change in environmental policy if I win. It's essential to the future of the globe.
In Vermont, wasn't the environmental community often sore at you?
Yeah, some of them. There were one or two groups that were really far out there and that carried on about me a lot. But the truth is, we did some really great stuff, particularly in conservation. You know, we closed seventy-six local landfills -- that was pretty tough -- over a lot of local opposition. I mean, it's all in context.
I was a centrist governor. I think they would have liked me to be more aggressive in terms of some environmental protections. By national standards, I have a pretty strong environmental ethic. The environmental community in Vermont would probably benefit by moving to one of the other states for a while, to see how tough things really are.
You criticized the president for not standing up to Saudi Arabia. What would you do to confront the Saudis?
First of all, I'd get off foreign oil. All it means is enormous investment in renewables. Wind -- the Danes get twenty percent of all their electricity from wind. We can do something very close to that. Solar -- you've got to change the tax laws and have a massive effort to do that. Oil conservation -- if you had the same mileage requirements for SUVs and trucks as you did for the rest of the fleet, every year you'd save the entire amount of oil that's supposed to be in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
In the short term, you've got the Saudis financing fundamentalist schools; you've got this web of connections they have with terrorists and the terrorists of tomorrow. How do you deal with that?
You use economic pressure.
Like how?
We're not going to go into like how. As a potential president of the United States, I prefer to make my threats privately.
A lot of people say that maybe we don't have much economic pressure against the Saudis. They hold billions in U.S. Treasury notes. What if they responded by threatening to liquidate their investment in our government? Wouldn't we be screwed?
Balancing the budget would help that. I mean, this president has made us much weaker than we were when we got here: $500 billion deficits as far as the eye can see is a terribly weakening thing to the economy. Both the Chinese and the Saudis, and others, hold enormous amounts of T-bills. That's a huge problem for us in an era with a declining dollar and a huge deficit. If most Americans understood what you just said, George Bush would be gone.
In the meantime, don't they hold a kind of veto power?
You cannot permit that to happen to the United States. You just have to be very tough about it and be prepared to endure the consequences.
When Bush made his one comment about corporate scandals, he said there was no problem with our business culture as a whole.
Our business culture is a disaster in this country. And this president's largely responsible for it, because he hasn't set the kind of example that needs to be set. When the energy industry writes your energy bill, and the pharmaceutical companies write your Medicare prescription benefit, you've got a big corporate-culture problem in this country. And it doesn't surprise me that the president thinks there's no problem with business, because the president is part of the problem. Let's be very blunt about this.
The majority of business leaders in this country are honest, decent people who'd like to do a good job. The reason we have these corporate scandals is because there is no statement from the president of the United States, other than lip service, that immoral, unethical behavior in business is not going to be tolerated. He just winks and nods.
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