Great article on Howard Dean in the Times. Can anyone read this and still say he's too liberal to be elected? http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/30/politics/campaigns/30DEAN.html?pagewanted=1 Defying Labels Left or Right, Dean's '04 Run Makes Gains By JODI WILGOREN with DAVID ROSENBAUM TTUMWA, Iowa, July 25 — During a special live broadcast of the Vermont Public Radio program "Switchboard" before an audience of Iowa Democrats here, the host played two audio clips of his guest, Howard Dean. The first, from Dr. Dean's 1999 State of the State address, delivered when he was governor of Vermont, was a staid, nonpartisan call to view all Vermont as one community. In the second, which came from the official kickoff of Dr. Dean's presidential campaign last month, you could practically hear fists flying as he shouted over and over, "You have the power!" and "We're going to take our country back!" Back home, said the radio host, folks have been wondering, "What has gotten into Howard Dean?" Vermonters are not the only ones pondering that question. After more than a year of nonstop visits to Iowa and New Hampshire on a threadbare budget, supported mainly by volunteers who had connected over the Internet, Dr. Dean, who began as an antiwar gadfly, has in the past month burst from his obscurity to rank among the top contenders in a crowded field of Democrats for the party's presidential nomination. Thanks to his stunning surge as the top fund-raiser among the potential Democratic candidates in the second quarter, Dr. Dean now has a campaign budget to match those of more-established candidates like Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri. The $7.6 million Dr. Dean raised in the quarter — mostly in small contributions from 59,000 people — has led to increased attention, greater scrutiny and dogged determination from his rivals to halt his momentum. With his early and intense opposition to the American-led attack on Iraq, his call for universal health insurance and his signing a bill that created civil unions for gay couples in Vermont, Dr. Dean, 54, is seen as the most liberal of the major Democratic candidates. Many of the people donning his "Give 'em hell, Howard" buttons hail from the left wing of the party and beyond. But in Vermont, whose political center of gravity lands left of the nation's, one of the secrets to Dr. Dean's success was keeping the most liberal politicians in check. Over 11 years, he restrained spending growth to turn a large budget deficit into a surplus, cut taxes, forced many on welfare to go to work, abandoned a sweeping approach to health-care reform in favor of more incremental measures, antagonized environmentalists, won the top rating from the National Rifle Association and consistently embraced business interests. After winning the first of his five elections for governor by more than 50 points, he barely got a majority in 2000, in part because of third-party challenges from the left that, in the 2002 election absent Dr. Dean, helped hand the governor's chair to a Republican. A Pragmatic Politician In the green, hilly quiet of Vermont, Dr. Dean, a stockbroker's son who grew up on Park Avenue in Manhattan and in Sag Harbor, N.Y., is viewed not as an idealistic maverick, but as a shrewd politician who always kept one ambitious eye on the next step. Even the civil unions bill, sure to cost him among conservatives nationally, was considered a cop-out by some gays and liberals at home who say he did only what was demanded by state courts and signed the bill "in the closet," without a public ceremony. "In the Vermont political spectrum, he was a moderate or a centrist," said Eric L. Davis, a professor of political science at Middlebury College in Vermont. "In the spectrum of Vermont, he was not someone who was a strong supporter of left or progressive causes." The difference may be as much a matter of style as substance. In fact, much of Dr. Dean's presidential platform, particularly his plan for universal health insurance, is a outgrowth of his accomplishments in Vermont. He remains a fiscal conservative, he believes gun control should be left to the states and he favors the death penalty for some crimes. But in building an insurgent campaign as a Washington outsider, Dr. Dean has gained fluency in the populist language of political revolution, constantly repeating the fact that half his contributors have never before donated to a candidate. "The way to beat George Bush is not to be like him," he told a rally of 600 people overlooking the harbor in Portsmouth, N.H., on July 22. "The way to beat George Bush is to give the 50 percent of Americans who don't vote a reason to vote again." Many of Dr. Dean's issue papers do run counter to the centrist positions of the Democratic Leadership Council that have dominated the national party since Bill Clinton's emergence in 1992. [On Monday, in fact, in a critique clearly aimed at Dr. Dean, the group warned that the party was in danger of embracing "far left" policies that would ensure its defeat next year.] Dr. Dean vows to repeal Mr. Bush's tax cuts to pay for health care and other social programs; he insists that all abortion decisions be left to women and their doctors, and advocates alternative energy sources like wind ("I can see Karl Rove chortling about that Birkenstock governor," he says at every stop, referring to Mr. Bush's senior adviser). And while he sees marriage as a religious issue, Dr. Dean said during the radio show here at the Hotel Ottumwa that all states should find a way to ensure that gay couples have the same rights as straight ones, something that sent several people away shaking their heads. "I don't think it's their prerogative not to treat Americans equally," Dr. Dean said of the states, adding later that he remained unsure how, as president, he might force individual states to adopt plans for providing benefits. "This is not a country that was built on discriminating against other people." But over all, Dr. Dean's presidential pitch is more pragmatic than ideological. He is less George McGovern than John McCain, less Eugene McCarthy than Jimmy Carter (his first job in politics was stuffing envelopes for President Carter in the 1980 presidential campaign, and he has adopted President Carter's habit of staying in voters' homes rather than hotels). Many who met him over four days in New Hampshire and Iowa said they were inspired not by a checklist of issues but by his straight talk — a phrase the campaign is reluctant to use, since it was practically trademarked by Senator McCain in 2000. Several voters said they loved Dr. Dean's willingness to say "I don't know," as he did, for instance, when asked whether pictures of Saddam Hussein's dead sons should be released to the news media. "Whether you're right or wrong, if you're honest, it won't matter," said Lee Cassenn, a former chairman of the Keokuk County Democrats who turned up on Thursday to meet Dr. Dean at the Copper Lantern restaurant in Sigourney, Iowa. Between stops at a hospital in Concord, N.H., and an orchard in Canterbury, N.H., last Wednesday, Dr. Dean said that he was selling his character. Voters "give you wide latitude on the issues if they like the way you make decisions," he explained. "I have no right to be where I am if you look at this race on paper," he added the next morning on the plane to Iowa. "The reason I am where I am is because I say what I think." But as Dr. Dean has transformed himself to a valid contender in the race, examinations of what he says and thinks have intensified. Among the most carefully scrutinized are his evolving critiques of the Iraq war. With other Democrats now criticizing the administration for overstating intelligence concerns about Iraq and uranium, Dr. Dean has been claiming that he was the only major Democratic candidate who had been unconvinced by President Bush's evidence on weapons of mass destruction. But earlier this spring, he said repeatedly that he did believe Iraq had such weapons and just did not think an American-led invasion was the right solution. "Governor Dean is simply reinventing his own position and that of others, and that's the rankest kind of politics," said Jim Jordan, campaign manager for Senator Kerry, Dr. Dean's leading rival in New Hampshire. "He was an unemployed doctor with no responsibilities, and it was easy to sit there and take political potshots from the outside." Leaving a Mark in Vermont Like George W. Bush before him, Dr. Dean often points to his experience as a state's chief executive as qualification for the job. When Mary Hartley, 49, an unemployed woman drowning in $91,000 in student loans, expressed skepticism about false promises after Dr. Dean's recent talk at Taso's restaurant in Oskalossa, Iowa, he urged her, "Go see what I did in Vermont." With about 600,000 residents, 97 percent of them white, Vermont is hardly a typical state; its largest city, Burlington, has fewer than 40,000 people. The poverty rate is below the national average, but so are wages and per-capita income. The Democrats who dominate the State Senate sometimes advocate things that have been abandoned as lost causes in Washington, like higher income taxes and government-run health care, while the Republicans who hold a narrow majority in the State House of Representatives rarely espouse the social conservatism that dominates the party elsewhere. Dr. Dean graduated from Yale University in 1971 — five years after Mr. Kerry, three years after Mr. Bush, and one year after Garry Trudeau, whose "Doonesbury" comic strip has featured the Dean campaign for weeks — and attended Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York before moving to Burlington, where he ran an internal-medicine practice with his wife, Dr. Judith Steinberg. He first dipped his toes in political water in a 1978 campaign to build a bike trail around Lake Champlain. He spent four years in the Vermont Legislature and five as lieutenant governor, both part-time jobs, before being elevated to the top job in in 1991, when Gov. Richard Snelling, a Republican, died of a heart attack. He inherited a state budget deficit of about 11 percent, the highest income taxes in the country and the lowest bond rating in New England. To the dismay of liberals in the Legislature who wanted to expand social and environmental programs, Dr. Dean and his chief economic adviser, Harlan Sylvester, a conservative stockbroker and investment banker, stuck with the Snelling budget-cutting plan. Helped by a booming economy, the state's finances improved sharply. Dr. Dean lowered income tax rates by 30 percent and put away millions in a rainy day fund. Vermont's bond rating became the highest in the Northeast. In his last term, Dr. Dean won a change in law so that Vermont taxes were not automatically lowered by Mr. Bush's cut in federal income taxes, and Vermont had a comfortable surplus this spring when most other states faced crippling budget shortfalls. On the stump, he blames the federal deficit for the weak economy and derides Mr. Bush for running "a borrow-and-spend credit-card presidency." Mr. Bush's tax cuts, he say, are a gift to "the president's friends like Ken Lay," referring to the former chief executive of Enron. Standing Up for His Beliefs Other than the state's finances, the area where Dr. Dean most made his mark as governor was health care. When he entered office, Dr. Dean was determined to provide health insurance to everyone in the state in one fell swoop. Despite support from liberal lawmakers, his plan failed, along with a similar initiative by the Clinton administration. So Dr. Dean changed tactics and managed to accomplish much of his goal incrementally. Vermont now offers the nation's most generous health benefits to children, low-income adults and elderly residents of modest means. Almost all children in the state have full medical insurance, and more than a third of Vermont residents on Medicare get state help in paying for prescription drugs. Under the program, teenage girls can often get counseling about sex and contraception without their parents' knowledge. Dr. Dean promised that as president he would spend half of the money he would save by repealing Mr. Bush's recent tax cuts to provide free insurance to people under 25 and those who earn less than 185 percent of the poverty rate, and to let everybody else buy into a national plan for 7.5 percent of their gross income. "My plan is not reform — if you want to totally change the health-care system, I'm not your guy," Dr. Dean told supporters in Lebanon, N.H. "I'm not interested in having a big argument about what the best system is. I'm interested in getting everybody covered." Dr. Dean earned the National Rifle Association's highest rating in its ranking of governors by signing two bills that protected gun ranges from commercial development and shifted responsibility for background checks to the federal government from county sheriffs. He says he would enforce federal laws banning assault weapons and requiring background checks, but would leave the rest to the states. But the two most controversial bills Dr. Dean signed were forced on him by State Supreme Court decisions declaring the state's school financing system unconstitutional and demanding the same legal benefits for gay couples as for married heterosexuals. In both instances, Dr. Dean mostly stayed in the background and left the heavy lifting to the Legislature. He insisted only that income taxes not be raised; the Legislature then turned to property taxes in wealthier communities to subsidize schools in poorer areas. And he pressed the state not to sanction gay marriages, although he allowed civil unions. Although Dr. Dean flirted briefly with the idea of running for president in 2000, he says it was the civil union battle that finally convinced him to do so. "I realized you could win by standing up for what you believe in," he said. A Real National Contender? The question now is whether Dr. Dean can capitalize on the current momentum to convert what began as a long-shot bid to raise concerns about President Bush into a serious national campaign. The fund-raising windfall has prompted the campaign to speed plans to hire workers in eight states, including the union strongholds of Michigan and Wisconsin. But Dr. Dean's lack of national experience has already tripped him up, most notably when he flubbed a series of detailed questions about military deployment on "Meet the Press" in June. Aides say they will prepare better next time. His surge also creates the risk that he could peak too soon. "He's got the hot hand, no doubt about it," said Charlie Cook, the legendary handicapper who edits the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. "At the same time, to be the hot candidate and to have momentum in July, six months before the first people vote, I'm sure they would much rather be in this position four months from now." Just as critically, his prominence could raise expectations for his performance in the neighboring state of New Hampshire. At his current pace, some analysts say, even a second-place showing in New Hampshire would be damaging. On the other hand, while many insurgent campaigns like Dr. Dean's rely on results in Iowa and New Hampshire to attract money and attention, Dr. Dean's campaign manager, Joe Trippi, said the early fund-raising success gave him a safety net. Regardless of the results in those first two states, Dr. Dean will probably still have money in the bank and staff on the ground to compete elsewhere. But his prominence also makes him a tempting target for the rivals he threatens, particularly Mr. Kerry, whose campaign also expects to do well in New Hampshire. "These campaigns are in some respects like musical chairs — when the music stops, there's only going to be two candidates sitting," said Chris Lehane, Mr. Kerry's campaign spokesman. "We know we occupy one of those chairs. More and more, it looks like Dean is going to occupy the other." The only major Democratic contender who doesn't have another job, Dr. Dean has been on the road since February 2002. He has logged 34 days in Iowa and 27 in New Hampshire so far this year. Dr. Dean typically speaks without notes except for the names of people he wants to thank. Instead of a formal speech, he juggles about 20 distinct paragraphs, each with their signature phrases — the most effective is the disgusted, sardonic "we can do better than that" that often punctuates his indictment of the president's performance. This keeps him fresher, but despite all that time on the road, it sometimes leads to inelegant stumbling. "He needs to do more polishing — he's not as brilliant as Clinton — but at least he's real," Sheilah Rechtschafter, a painter and teacher who lives in Garrison, N.Y., said to a friend after hearing Dr. Dean in Portsmouth, where she was visiting. Dr. Dean travels with just one longtime aide, and his wife has no plans to join him on the campaign trail. His staff recently convinced him to wear newer suits and lose the colorful "Save the Children" ties, but he is hanging on to his odd belt, with its large buckle and silver-rimmed holes, that once belonged to his brother, Charlie, who was killed in Laos in 1974 while traveling with a friend. Lately, a campaign that was built almost organically by disenfranchised voters who connected online has turned to more mainstream sources. Dr. Dean now spends much of his down time dialing Democratic governors and New Hampshire state legislators. He also has had conventional fundraisers in Provincetown, Mass., and on Cape Cod. On the West Coast, his supporters include Rob Reiner, Martin Sheen, Mel Brooks, Norman Lear, Nora Ephron and Larry David. But with that kind of backing, it is not surprising to hear the question that a man posed to Dr. Dean at a house party for 200 on the muggy sea coast of New Hampshire: Isn't he too liberal to get elected? "If being a liberal means a balanced budget, I'm a liberal," Dr. Dean said, delighted at the opening. "If being a liberal means adding jobs instead of subtracting them, then, please, call me a liberal." "I don't care what label you put on me," he finished, "as long as you call me Mr. President!"
Here's a response to that article (also from Salon) from a couple days ago: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/07/25/dean/index.html
Dean......not a liberal? Here goes his issue positions from his own website......http://www.deanforamerica.com/site/PageServer Sure....right. Federal health insurance....that's not liberal. And Dean old boy, it will cost far more than 88.3 billion. When something is free......people use it. It will be a hypochondriac's wet dream. Tax cuts for those EVIL rich. Wow.....that's some really conservative rhetoric there. Guess he wants to keep all that money in the Imperial Federal govt. in Washington, where only the U.S. Congress knows what to do with it best. How are you going to defeat the threat, Gov. Dean if we "strengthen our alliances" when most of our allies opposed us taking out Saddam because of their extensive economic ties? Also, this "enlarge the circle of beneficiaries" comment is scary. Not only are your tax dollars to be redistributed here....but all across the globe. We're just too wealthy here. We don't need that money at all. None of this is very conservative either. And the sad thing about it is he will have to swing even farther left to pick up the Democratic base. It kind of reminds me of that line from MST 3K: The Movie...... "I just want to ram an ovipositor down your throat and lay my eggs in your stomach......but I'm not an alien."
He's liberal on social issues, but right in the middle regarding everything else. Of course, most Americans who call themselves "conservatives" think anything slightly to the left of Barry Goldwater is a "gawl-danged liburul" so naturally they will consider Howard Dean to be a card-carrying member of the communist party. This is what happens when people have the inability to think for themselves, and depend on talk radio to force-feed them their political views.
Some nice excerpts from a piece that I recently read entitled "Base Anger" by Christopher Caldwell: BY EARLY SPRING, journalists and political activists had begun to notice that former Vermont governor Howard Dean had a knack for firing up crowds. He was little known and badly financed, but his issues were unfudged and easy to understand: budget-balancing, civil unions for gays, a middle-of-the-road states-rights position on guns, and implacable opposition to the war in Iraq. Tying them all together was a hostility to George W. Bush that bordered on loathing. Dean has called the Bush administration a collection of "right-wing wackos," and last week, at a meeting on a New Hampshire lawn, he bluntly described the president's promise to unite Americans as "a lie." Dean may have risen by attracting a base of fundraisers who are the same people as those the party claims, increasingly implausibly, to speak for. Nonetheless--or, perhaps, therefore--many Democrats are asking whether he is "electable." Among these doubters are the architects of two consecutive losses in national elections. Their skepticism seems premature. Those Democrats who dismiss Dean as unelectable are making an assessment of what non-Democratic voters think, and this is a subject on which Democrats have been driven into a frenzy of illogic by their dislike of George W. Bush. The current self-serving self-delusion--one reads it in "Doonesbury" and hears it from Nancy Pelosi and a variety of marginal commentators and celebrity know-nothings--is that Republicans have succeeded because their message is stupid and simple and dishonest; and Democrats have failed because they're so subtle and principled. Under this logic, Democrats will do best by nominating a malevolent sleazeball and getting him to shout at the top of his lungs. Suffice it to say that this logic is identical to that upon which Republicans built a string of defeats in the Clinton years. But there is no concrete political reason why Dean should be less electable than any of his rivals. People forget that "electability" used to be a synonym for "large advertising budget." Dean has the latter; therefore he has the former. Those who wonder whether his issue appeal is broad enough forget how far John McCain got attacking on a far narrower front. Another rap on Dean is that his "social libertarianism"--by which is meant his support for gay civil unions--is going to destroy him in the South. But any Democratic candidate will be destroyed in the South. The only one with a chance of appealing to social conservatives is Joe Lieberman. But since the Congressional Black Caucus singled out Lieberman for condemnation on July 9, and since Kweisi Mfume attacked him (along with Gephardt and Dennis Kucinich) for not singing for his supper at a July 14 NAACP roundtable, it is abundantly clear that the black establishment has made it a priority to sabotage his candidacy. Their reasons can only be guessed, but the upshot can be stated plainly: Without black support, Lieberman can't compete in the South, either. A more subtle version of this southern critique is that Dean is so regionally limited that he will let the president "get the South on the cheap," as the political scientist Merle Black puts it, allowing Bush to concentrate resources in the battleground states of the upper Midwest. But at least Dean has a strategy for these de-industrialized Midwestern areas. He seems poised to contest them on a protectionist platform--he has called for a renegotiation of all free-trade treaties--which is only a more forthright version of how the unimpeachably "electable" Gephardt intends to run. The main piece of evidence adduced for Dean's unelectability is his leftism--he's an antiwar McGovernik who will lead his party to a crushing defeat. It's a distinct possibility, but it seems less probable than it did just a few weeks ago. Dean claims to be a centrist, and he may in fact have an easier time moving to the center after the primaries than any of his rivals. The key to this claim would be his budgetary record. Specifically, Dean balanced eleven budgets in Vermont, a state without a balanced-budget amendment. While his Democratic rivals hem and haw about how they didn't really support Bush's tax cuts, Dean has actually promised to undo them, raising taxes across the board to combat the deficit. With the exception of Gephardt, none of the candidates has spoken out as passionately as Dean on this score. Certainly Dean has his weaknesses. His military service record does not, to put it mildly, bear comparison with John Kerry's. (After getting a military deferment for a back ailment, he moved to Aspen, Colorado, where he boasted of spending 80 days on the ski slopes in a single winter.) And Dean often worsens public misgivings about his lack of military experience with his off-the-cuff foreign policy remarks, such as his pooh-poohing of the killing of Uday and Qusay Hussein. There is also something phony about Dean's small-state image. His roots in Vermont stretch back not to its dairy-farming past but to its colonization by Ivy League progressives since the 1960s. He can show an occasional arrogance, which might derive from his having been born into the upper reaches of Manhattan high society, the son of an art appraiser and several generations of stockbrokers. And Dean can practice the very shiftiness he purports to critique, as when he refused to tell Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" how his Vermont civil-unions law differs from gay marriage. ("I can't answer that question because it's a legal question.") But Dean has one overriding strength, and that strength is always in the news. The key to Dean's electoral hopes is George W. Bush. New Republic journalist Jonathan Cohn is one of the few to have stated as much with an appropriate baldness. "If Dean isn't really so liberal," Cohn asked in a recent article, "why do so many liberals love him? A big reason is that he seems as angry as they are." Dean has convinced Democratic voters that he is simply madder at the president than his rivals are--and less capable of doing business with the forces Bush represents. That is the real nature of his extremism. Some Democrats worry--Cohn's New Republic colleague Jonathan Chait, for instance--that Dean will paint himself into a corner by automatically taking the position diametrically opposed to the president's. That may indeed limit Dean's flexibility and cause him trouble in the general election. But the Democratic nominee will be chosen by a base that demands nothing less. As for the general election, Republicans seem unaware of how riled up Democratic activists remain, even three years after the 2000 elections. A substantial segment of the party's base has been radicalized to the point where it does not recognize the legitimacy of the Bush presidency. This is a very different thing than mere dislike of a president. It means that Democrats are prepared to fight this election as if they were struggling to overthrow a tyrant. One fears that 2004 could wind up--in its rhetoric and its electoral ethics--as the dirtiest general election campaign in living memory. It is not a condemnation of Dean to say that his rise provides another piece of evidence that this fear is well founded.
T_J, I agree with one of the last lines of the article you posted. No matter who the Democratic nominee is in 2004, the 2004 Presidential election will definitely be --in its rhetoric and its electoral ethics-- the dirtiest general election campaign in living memory. I personally feel we are beyond the rhetorical and ethical point of no return, and it is not something I am looking forward to, either.
I gotta agree with you on that one....The mud will be flying back and forth. Substantiative issues will get short shrift in favor of "You're no Jack Kennedy" style soundbite rhetoric. I'm going to vote Libertarian anyway....so I guess you could say I'm wasting my vote, but I don't see a vote for either Dean (if he wins the nomination, which I think he will unless Hildabeast enters the race) or Bush really being positive for our country.
Bama, How can you vote Libertarian? As I understand it Libertarian's want as little government control over people's action as possible. That would mean the decriminalization of homosexual sex and drug use. Are you willing to allow those individual choices so that you can carry assault rifles and eliminate public health insurance. I don't think you get to be a selective libertarian.
Health care for everyone may be left of center, but it's not an upopular notion, nor is it off the charts in terms of left or right. By not liking Bush's tax cuts doesn't mean he's against tax cuts. If you look at his record in VT. Dean Cut taxes. That charge doesn't stick. Dean is just smart enough to know that Bush's tax cuts are destructive. Dean, unlike Bush, is for economic responsibility and not running up the debt. There is as much proof to say that we went in to Iraq for economic reasons and oil as there is to say that our allies didn't want us there for economic reasons. I also have no problem with anybody that didn't want us going in to Iraq. That just sounds smart. I understand there are plenty who disagree. But I will say that if we have stronger allies that means less of a strain on our troops. I'm definitely for that.
I'm not for criminalization of sex and.....ask Andymoon, I favor strongly at least decriminalizing drugs and more specifically, legalizing mar1juana. What you do on your own time in your bedroom is sure as hell not the business of govt. I've never been inconsistent in those viewpoints. And to answer FB's post...name the last Democrat to not only promise, but deliver on any sort of a tax cut. JFK is the answer to that question. Clinton promised a middle class tax cut, but all we got was a gigantic tax increase. The SOB even raised the taxable threshold on social security benefits, making it a defacto tax increase on senior citizens. There is nothing destructive about Bush's tax cuts.....at all. The only reason we have a deficit is because of rampant spending and reduced revenues. The tax cuts have largely not even taken effect yet! And I think that deficits are no big deal. Eventually, as we did in the 90's, they will go away with some stewardship of govt. spending and increased revenues during upticks in the economy. They are nothing to get bent out of shape about. Name one way that a deficit hurts your pocketbook.
Deficits did go away in the 90s but the federal debt did not. A close look at the percentage of the federal yearly budget that goes for debt financing (ie interest payments) is shocking. If you look at the forecasted federal spending once the baby boomers start retiring, you will see the increases in the federal commitments to seniors far out strip our project ability to pay for them, even without Bush's tax cuts. I am sure you do not wnat to believe me. It is inconvenient. Go here for the complete, nonpartisan story: The Concord Coalition.
Well, if it so destructive.....why can't we cut spending? Why do we need a prescription drug benefit we can not afford to pay? Why do we need all these farm subsidies and corporate welfare such as money to research electric cars and such? Why do we need WIC and all these other alphabet soup programs if this debt is so destructive? Why is our intel community divided among a gazzilion rival agencies with competing agendas if the debt is going to destroy us? If the problem was as serious as you make it out to be, something would have to be done about it. And that something is cutting wasteful spending.
