Mostly centers on John McCain, but he indicates he believes superdelegates will follow the wishes of the voters. He says this about them:
Dean: They are going to follow the wishes of the voters in their states, and I'll tell you why. They are elected by the voters in their states. Superdelegates are not cigar-smoking people who take corporate jet rides from lobbyists. Superdelegates are elected by the same people who went and elected the other delegates. For example, there are two classes, and one is elected officials -- senators, governors, congressmen. Those people are responsive to their own electorate. If you go and vote for a governor and you work in their campaign and you do all the things that activist Democrats do, you're going to have the ability to call the governor's people and say, look, I really want the governor to vote this way in the primary. That is part of the democratic process.
The other class of people are DNC members. Anderson Cooper of CNN did a great interview last week with a 21-year-old college student from Wisconsin. He is a superdelegate. How did he get to be one? He went to the Wisconsin Democratic convention with his friends, ran a campaign, handed out stuff and won at a convention of 6,000 delegates and became a DNC member. The DNC looks like the Democratic Party. It is ethnically diverse, racially diverse; 50 percent of them are women. So the idea that the superdelegates are somehow going to fix this process -- that's not so. They are just like everybody else and they will vote according to what they believe is the right thing to do for the Democratic Party and for the country.
Most of the interview is about John McCain. He is devastatingly blunt, not so much about the affair business, but about his past history.
Interview with Howard Dean by National JournalInterviewer: So there is big news about John McCain -- the story that is in the New York Times, raising questions about his relationship with a lobbyist. This is a story the McCain people are saying is unfair and untrue. What do you think?
Dean: I have no idea whether the affair story is true or not, and I don't care. What I do care about is John McCain -- and this has been well-documented -- is talking all the time about being a reformer and a maverick, and in fact, he has taken thousands of dollars from corporations, ridden on their corporate jets, and then turned around and tried to do favors for them and get projects approved. He has tons of lobbyists on his staff. This is a guy who is very close to the lobbyist community, a guy who has been documented again and again by taking contributions and then doing favors for it. This is not a guy who is a reformer. This is a guy who has been in Washington for 25 years and wants to give us four more years of the same, and I don't think we need that.
There is more, you need to read the whole interview.
Interviewer: So are you saying that McCain, by virtue of what is spelled out in this story, has somehow suffered a hit in terms of his own legitimacy on the campaign finance and ethics issue?
Dean: Yes, he certainly has. This goes all the way back to the Keating Five Scandal and the S & L scandals, where he took a hundred thousand donations, rode on corporate jets and then intervened on Charles Keating's behalf -- and again and again we see this. We even saw -- it's so hypocritical -- we even saw that he is trying to harass Barack Obama about whether he's going to take public financing in the campaign, and he forewent his own public financing in the primaries after getting a loan, based on the idea that he might take public financing.
Good to hear him speak on both subjects. I agree the superdelegates over all will do what they should do.
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