P.S. - you'll soon be in for a shocking experience!
Posted on 06/25/2003 6:31:20 AM PDT by bedolido
It wasn't exactly the deer-in-the-headlights look some candidates get when they realize that running for president is unlike any other political endeavor. But it was close -- as it should have been. Watching Howard Dean, the Democratic contender and former governor of Vermont, worm his way through his evolving support for the death penalty is not pretty.
Even if he's sincere (big gulp, please), he's still wrong.
This bit of political sausage-making came into public view on Sunday, a day on which Dean would have profited from not getting out of bed.
Dean appeared on Meet the Press. It was a disaster, in a league with Teddy Kennedy's inability during a 1980 television interview to quite say why he wanted to be president. On Sunday, Meet host Tim Russert was at his prosecutorial best, gnawing and snarling at Dean's inconsistencies, incongruities and flip-flops. You could hear transcripts of the NBC show pouring out of the printers at the headquarters of gleeful Democratic rivals before Russert even signed off. The White House has probably had its copy bronzed.
Let's see. Dean spoke of "absolutely" favoring a limit on increases in Medicare spending. Try that in Florida, Dr. Dean. He would "entertain" an increase in the Social Security retirement age. Try that anywhere, Howie.
But the squirming was most delectable -- and deservedly so -- when it came to the death penalty, as Dean becomes yet another Democrat to accommodate (but only in very special high-minded circumstances, you understand) this mad national blood lust. It was gagging.
Throughout most of his political career, Dean has opposed capital punishment. But he seems, in almost Damascene moments, to have grown more fond of the barbaric penalty (which the nation and 38 states share, you'll recall, with North Korea, China, Saudi Arabia and other forward-looking regimes) in curious conjunction with increased interest in running for president.
As late as 1992, Dean told Vermonters that he opposed the death penalty for two reasons: "You might have the wrong guy," and "a state shouldn't be in the business of taking people's lives." That year, according to the Houston Chronicle, Dean, as governor of Vermont, appealed to Gov. Ann Richards of Texas to intervene on behalf of Death Row inmate Robert Drew, a Vermont native convicted in the 1983 Houston murder of an 18-year-old runaway.
In his interview Sunday, Dean said he began "rethinking" the death penalty in 1994.
"Maybe that's what was in his head," but he did not publicly discuss any change in position until 1997, said Tracy Schmaler, a capitol reporter for the Rutland (Vt.) Herald. Dean on Sunday cited "a series of articles" in the Herald from 1994 on the point. Neither Schmaler, Herald editor Robert Gibson nor Internet search engines remembered such a series. A call to Dean's campaign press office seeking clarification was not returned.
By 1997, Dean was considering a run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000. As Schmaler recalled it in a phone interview this week, Dean's move to support for the death penalty came to light in a session with Washington reporters, but word got back to Vermont and he confirmed to reporters there that he saw some crimes as "so incredibly depraved" as deserving the death penalty. He supported the death penalty for killers of children and cops. Dean has since added mass-murderers, such as terrorists, to his list.
As Schmaler noted in a story earlier this month, Dean did not act on his shifting view and did not seek to institute the death penalty in Vermont, where the death penalty was abolished in 1965. So much for conviction.
A Providence (R.I.) Journal columnist noted in early 1998 that Dean, who had just dropped his prospective presidential campaign, was no hero to Green Mountain State liberals. "Latest example cited by these folks was Dean's decision as he flirted with the presidency to shift his position on the death penalty, which he had long opposed," the column said.
Dean has trouble keeping strands of his argument straight. He said his "rethinking" began because of the killing of Polly Klaas, the Oregon girl who was abducted and murdered by an ex-con. Moments later, Dean said he "began to rethink" his position after "a very similar horrible case in Vermont a few years earlier." But even after citing the Vermont case, Dean said Sunday that in his state, "we don't need a death penalty."
Dean, dropping his smirk for a moment, said Sunday that the death penalty is "a deeply, deeply troubling issue." Yes, indeed.
"He hates this issue," said an experienced Vermont political observer. Well he should.
Hines is a Houston Chronicle columnist based in Washington, D.C.
Pray that this will come to pass. Dean appears to be an incompetent failed physician who is now an incompetent failed politician.
I completely agree: the victims' next-of-kin should be given the honor.
Or somewhere there abouts. Democrats are starting to avoid all mention of Californistan, the state of the art in Democrat government. Polly Klaas lost her life because of Democrats letting fellow Democrats out of jail.
P.S. - you'll soon be in for a shocking experience!
Sounds like a tag line from DU or DTR.
Are you saying that you feel that the election in 2000 was not decided in accordance with state and federal Constitutional Law?
Anyone who makes that claim is either an ardent Liberal, a Democrat or an idiot. But then, I repeat myself.
Correction: She was a Petaluma, California girl.
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