Excerpt: Gov. Howard Dean, Winning Back America

[wyldwolf]

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/excerpts/2004-01-12-winning-back_x.htm

[buckeye1]

1. We have leaders.

They have crooks.

[question everything]

2. Dean's (in)experience as governor of Vermont

Dean's (in)experience as governor of Vermont

By Michael O'Hanlon

January 18, 2004

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/uniontrib/sun/opinion/news_mz1ed18ohanlo.html

(snip)

But there is another reason to worry about Gov. Dean – his limited government and political experience, all in the tiny if wonderful state of Vermont. Simply put, one must ask if running that state provides the necessary experience to become the chief executive of the United States of America.


Dean has effectively criticized his opponents for being part of the DC establishment, and indeed most of them are.

(snip)

But is Washington experience really such a bad thing? And is Dean's preparation for the presidency really so strong? If he becomes the Democratic nominee, he will do so with less big-league political experience than any major party candidate in more than half a century.

Dean's political career has been spent entirely in Vermont.

(snip)

Its population of just over 600,000 ranks 49th among all states (and well under many counties in the country's major metropolitan areas). Vermont's largest city, Burlington, has just 40,000 citizens, and the capital of Montpelier where Dean has done his work as governor has 8,000.

Demographically, Vermont is full of great people – but almost all are white. Specifically, the state is about 97 percent white, 1 percent Hispanic, 1 percent Asian, 0.5 percent black, and the remainder native American and other groups. As such, Dean has extremely little experience dealing with the broad racial diversity that so characterizes the modern United States.

...by the standards of the United States, governing Vermont is not very hard – no rampant poverty, little urban blight, few racial tensions.


George Bush and Ronald Reagan, though criticized for their inexperience when seeking the nation's highest office, were both two-term governors of two of the largest states in the country. Michael Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts, with a population ten times that of Vermont. Ditto for former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter. Bush the father and Al Gore were vice presidents and members of Congress before running for the top office in the land.

Even Bill Clinton, pilloried as the chief executive of little old Arkansas, ran a state with a population of more than 2 million, substantial amounts of industry, four headquarters of Fortune 500 companies (to Vermont's zero), and a demographic mix comparably complex to that of the country as a whole. Moreover, candidate Bill Clinton went out of his way to demonstrate a mastery of national and international economics and governance that Dean, in his obsession with Iraq, has not begun to match.

(snip)

O'Hanlon is a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution.