Why I support Howard Dean, and why you should, too
Part III: Healing a house divided—Dr. Dean’s domestic prescription

Yesterday I talked about how I found Howard Dean—I was angry. Today, I’m covering Dean’s policies, and why I think his ideas are the right ones for this campaign.

My senior year of college I read a book that I was certain would change my life. (In college, every book will change your life.) It was Todd Gitlin’s Twilight of Common Dreams, about how identity politics had so fractured the ideological left that there was no cohesive structure to balance or fight the less popular forces of the ideological right. There had been a real time of radicalism, when “the personal is political” transformed the social and political landscape. Now, Gitlin argues, it is too much “only the personal is political.” In other words, gay rights activists are not supporting civil rights groups are not supporting labor unions are not supporting feminists ad infinitum. And we all suffer because of it. Was it Franklin or Twain who wrote, “We all hang together, or surely we’ll all hang separately”?

Howard Dean understands that the left is divided. Howard Dean also understands that the right is using this division, exploiting it, making it worse. “I don't want to be divided anymore by race; I don't want to be divided anymore by gender; and I don't want to be divided anymore by sexual orientation,” he says. And he recognizes that the Whopper is making it worse by supporting class warfare in the form of his budget-busting tax cuts and supporting the case against the University of Michigan law school. The Whopper is dividing us by supporting senator Santorum, and by supporting those who want to have confederate symbols on their state flags. We can do better.

Dean is not the liberal pinko commie that some opponents, like the DLC, make him out to be. In fact, reading through his record in Vermont and his policy statements, I find that he very nicely positions himself as being strong on the issues that rock the liberals’ boats (abortion, gay rights) but more centrist on those issues which conservatives get all het up about (gun control). And I think that’s a far better foundation to run on than someone who automatically irks the left (Lieberman) or the right (Gephardt).

The governor’s biggest issue is now and always will be health care (and I don’t care what you say; I’m an English teacher and health care is now and will always be two words). Dean has credibility on this issue for two reasons: The obvious one is that he is a doctor, and his wife still practices. Call me crazy, but I’d rather have a doctor making health care policy any day than legislators or, worse, insurance companies.

The second thing that gives Dean credibility on the health care issue is his record in Vermont. Now, there are disputes about the actual figures and about how much credit the governor should be allowed to take. But I look at one very important but little-discussed part of his record, for which he is absolutely responsible, and that is the status of children in Vermont.

For starters, every child has health care. Every single one. But that’s nothing—any policy nob can write a few lines into the code to fiddle with CHIPs income limits and Medicaid rules. But what I really love—and what I never, ever see talked about in the media or on the blogs—is Dean’s post-natal care measures.

Every new mother gets a visit in the hospital and home visits two weeks after they leave the hospital. Well over 90% if all Vermont mothers accept these visits and learn, as a consequence, about nutrition and health, reading to their children, and even about housekeeping! As a result, child abuse has fallen by 43% in the 0-6 age group, while sexual abuse in particular is down a whopping 70%. Teen pregnancy rates have dropped more than in almost any other state in the nation, too, all under Howard Dean’s watch.

What does this have to do with health care? Any good doctor will tell you that preventive care is the best care. And by stopping child abuse, instilling good parenting skills in new mothers, and setting a pattern of healthy and healthful behaviors (not to mention universal health care coverage of children), Vermont is securing a healthy and safe future. The rest of us should be so lucky. But if we can make the national debate over health care focus on such important issues as preventive care, then we are making real progress.

I should also note that I like Dean’s “work to get everyone in the system and then fix the system” approach to health care as opposed to, say, Gephardt’s or Kucinich’s plan, as Dean’s plan can be implemented now, not after years of work building a new system.

But health care is just the tip of Dean’s iceberg. I’m trying to limit myself to less than a thousand words for each section of this series, so my next three items will all be brief, but they bear further research if you’re still not convinced.

First of all, Dean is right on the money—literally—when he says that “[t]he President's tax cuts are part of a radical agenda to dismantle Social Security, Medicare, and our public schools through financial starvation.” Right now Dean is the only candidate willing to say what we in Blogland have known for years. Dean balanced a budget for five terms in the Vermont statehouse, putting money aside, even, for when another Bush came along to cause another recession. He knows that a balanced budget is what guarantees social justice: You can’t fund justice with no funds at all.

On Civil Unions, much has been made about the fact the Dean did not make this for himself but had it thrust upon him. It’s true: Vermont’s supreme court pretty much told the elected officials in Burlington they had to do something. But Dean, as he does with most things, approached the situation with thought and research, and, despite widespread (60%+) opposition, took CU’s on. He has since become an eloquent defender of the concept—no zealot like the convert, they say—and wonders why Vermont should be the only state where all Americans are guaranteed the same rights as others.

Finally, a subject that cuts close to home for me but which, for the sake of brevity (I’m long past 1000 words), I can only do a paragraph on: Education. The schools are run at the state and local level, and no one knows better how to fund education than people who have been doing it all along—those who have occupied the state legislatures and statehouses. Now, the Whopper’s No Child Left Untested bill may not have been the worst bill ever if the Whopper had ponied up the money to pay for everything he wants schools to do. I can speak from experience that Milwaukee is losing more than 600 employees next year, about half teachers, in part because of new federal mandates about where and how we spend money. The district’s summer school program has been gutted, leaving thousands of kids who otherwise would have been learning on the streets with nothing to do. And what’s worse, is that the program is designed to designate, eventually, every single public school as a failure! In fact, next year, depending on where you live, you could find up to 75% of the schools in your area labeled as failures, maybe more. Who benefits from calling otherwise perfectly good public schools failures? If you said the religious right and their unconstitutional voucher schemes, go to the head of the class.

Tomorrow: Foreign policy, national security, and I wrap it up with a pretty blue bow.

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