 Welcome to Moments with Melinda, my name is Melinda Moulton and my guest tonight needs no introduction because I have as my guest on Moments with Melinda, the indomitable Governor Howard Dean. Thank you so much for being on my show. Oh Melinda, thank you very much. This is so exciting. I have, I have tons of things to ask you and we only have a half an hour so I'm going to try to get right to it. Well, first off, I want to start by sharing with our viewers a little bit about your early life. And who was your inspiration. That's a hard question because I have changed so much. I basically grew up in Eastern Long Island in East Hampton. I went to school in New York but we really lived out there. And it was, it was a great childhood it was outdoors all the time skating on the ice which doesn't freeze anymore because of global warming football softball, you know I was not terribly good at sports but I loved it and without doors all the time. Then I went to boarding school that was great a great experience then I went to England for a year on exchange scholarship and that's when I really, you know, you get hit in the face by a few things. It was very interesting to see how people lived outside of America, and what they thought of what America was doing which was basically being in the Vietnam War which was very unpopular. When I went to Yale had two African American roommates my first year, which was an earth shattering experience, and one that I saw it. But it really taught me a lot about the meaning and nature of race and what that meant from somebody else's eyes. So I had a whole lot of transformational stuff happened to me. You know between the ages of about 15 and 25 that I think really made me who I was. Thank you for that. Um, so what brought you to Vermont. Look, I went to I went to where I bummed around the world I went to South America and stuff after I graduated I skied for a year and wash dishes which my father didn't think was a good use of my Yale diploma. And I realized, and I had to go to work. So I, I thought of teaching which I had done as an undergraduate at Yale for middle school kids and in New Haven and I was terrible at it because I was too impatient. I thought of, of being a doctor which is something I really was interested in and done very well in science but it was the 60s and I hadn't taken a single science and math course at university. So I went to work on Wall Street, and I absolutely hated it I learned an enormous amount but I hated it so I went to night school in at Columbia to get all the science courses I hadn't taken. And then I got in a medical school in New York and then at the end of medical school you have something called the match. And for some odd reason because I knew I wasn't happy in New York I really didn't like living in New York City at all. And for some reason I put, I listed the top three medical schools that I hospitals that I wanted to do my residency at. And the fourth one was the University of Vermont ambulatory care program I didn't didn't get into the top three which were in New York and Washington. And so, because I got my fourth choice I came to Vermont and I've never left. That was over 40 years ago. What a what a what a great story and your wife, your wife is a doctor too did you both meet at UVM. Yeah we know we met at Einstein at the Albert Einstein College, it was interesting I I'm sort of I learned a lot from other people I as I said I had two African American roommates in the in this in 67 when Martin Luther King was killed and Bobby Kennedy was killed in the convention blew up in Chicago and 99 cities were burned and then I went to a Orthodox Jewish medical school for which for a waspy Christian community was another huge piece of education. So we met there and I was a year ahead of her because I went through in three years and went to went came up here and by that time we were pretty serious data so she came up here and we got married. I love it. What a great story. What a great story and you have two children. Yep. Adults. You're now adults today and either of them go into medicine or politics. I'm a lawyer and the other stars charter schools. They're both do gooders though I mean they both work for in populations that have gotten the short end of the stick. Well we we need all the do gooders that we can get in this right. I agree and two grandchildren of five and a three fantastic congratulations. They're really fun. So can you share with us. You were governor. It was an auspicious way that you became governor you were lieutenant governor and then governor Snelling died from a heart attack and you became governor. Can you share with us a few of the more memorable accomplishments that you that you had when you were governor of Vermont. There was a number of them that lasted to this day the first was every child in the state under 18 has health insurance. I was very close to the Clintons because I endorsed them the night the draft letter came out which people may remember was featured Bill Clinton thanking somebody for getting him out of the draft not very politic. But I, you know I thought he was the best candidate and so they and the Clintons never forgot their friends. We got all kinds of waivers, we used Medicaid to take care of people in their own homes and cut down on nursing homes which is to this day. We got a waiver so we could use Medicaid to ensure every kid who didn't it was in a family making less than 300% of poverty which meant everybody had health insurance. We had a long trail through the Green Mountain Club we used to appropriate huge amounts of money I started that when I was in the legislature and then when I got to be governor. The Berlin bike path was actually built. It was built. I had a hand in starting that with Rick sharp but then when you know Dick Mazza and I made a partnership and built the bridge across the Winnowsky River and all that and we had bike paths all over. But the most important part was conservation we gave the land trust a huge amount of money every year in the housing and conservation trust fund. So I would say probably 3035% of all Vermont land is conserved in some way it's a lot of it's in private hands but so we really made some huge differences the other thing we did was insist on transparency and the transportation fund which was a short term change but it mattered. Dr dinosaur so many people have benefited for sure including my grandchildren. People still thank me for that if I go to I went to Seattle one time and the clerk. Thanks me because she grew up in a family with it was you know not so well often she she and her sisters had health insurance their entire time in Vermont they grew up in Vermont. So let's talk a little bit about moving into being the chairman of the DNC and helping to facilitate Barack Obama becoming president and and the work that you did there. That was interesting so my campaign for president which didn't we didn't win but we didn't have any money and we had a lunatic campaign manager so we let the 23 year olds do whatever they wanted. They were the ones that invented the modern political campaign I never made a phone call for money after about three months in because they had so much money coming in over the transom on the internet. And when I left the dropped out of the president presidential race and eventually became chairman of the Democratic National Committee because there was an election that most people don't vote for from Washington they are there most the delegates are outside Washington because the inside Washington crowd and like me very much. But I by that time all the 23 year olds that started a company called blue state digital, and I hired them to remake the DNC's. You know their tech, which was negligible. And so they did. And in 2006 Barack Obama hired blue state digital away from me. And, and his campaign was my campaign except they had a really disciplined campaign manager David Pluff. And my problem was I'm not a very disciplined person, and there was no discipline in our campaign but there was in Barack Obama is a very disciplined person and so was Pluff. And then he had the advantage of all these kids who had invented how to do a modern campaign. And the happy ending of the stories after Obama became president United States, the 23 year olds who were then 28 year olds sold their company for $100 million to WPP. Pretty impressive. Well, you also had the 50, you had you had the full you had all state strategy though you went at you, you, you ran the DNC in a way that nobody else had ever done before. In a sense, I was, I was very lucky Melinda because the DNC essentially run by the president or the president's campaign people political advisors. I had no president George W Bush was president when I was DNC chair so I could do whatever I wanted and since I wasn't elected with any inside the beltway votes, I could politely tell them to f off, which I did. In fact, there's a great story about Rahm Emanuel and Schumer and I and read meeting in my office and Rahm lost it as he often does jumped up and said f u f u 900 times and all this stuff. And then, and we ignored him and then here he is standing up having screamed and yelled the f bomb and and Schumer and read and I are just calmly talking what does he do. He sits down and pretend it never happened so he he ran out the door and slammed it as hard as he could this was June I never saw him again for the rest of the campaign. But we did our recruiting by by not by doing the inside the beltway thing my basic philosophy is that Washington is basically middle school on steroids. I mean they're very smart and they work really hard but they're invented their own culture and it's all about them all the time, even the people I like a lot of them, not all of them. Yeah, go ahead. So, so what we did is instead of recruiting people who could finance their own campaigns or knew somebody who knew somebody or was a venture capitalist with a lot of money. We called up people like severe Kathleen Sebelius who was the governor of a very red state in Kansas and say who do you think can can win us some congressional seats. So they came up with a bunch of candidates that nobody in Washington knew, and they won their primaries and then they won seats and that's how Obama got his majority in the house. So we're going to go back to that hopefully I'll remember to go back to that because I want to talk to you about today's world political world. Talk to us a little bit about your political your presidential run because that was, that was phenomenal. I mean you rose to the top and you were taking small donations and you had all this endorsement from so many people came out of sort of the left side. And of course, then we had Bernie recently to but talk a little bit about that experience and do you regret, do you regret it or in some ways. No, I was one of the great memories of my life the problem is I'm not I'm not terribly disciplined I didn't know what I was doing and unfortunately not too many people in the campaign knew what they were doing I mean we started from nothing. Only previous experiences winning an election and in a five elections which was pretty good but still this we have 600,000 people in this state. I knew nothing about how to run a campaign in New York or Virginia or Nevada or Alabama. So, but we had the kids and the power was in our message. The message was you matter, and the Democrats should stop voting for Bush's tax cuts and stop voting for the war in Iraq. Now people that left fell in love with me but the truth is, as you well remember from my governor's time. I wasn't particularly left. The reason I oppose the war. I'm a Hillary Clinton Democrat when it comes to defense. You know, I think you have to have a powerful presence, even though you shouldn't be doing, but I don't think I grew up during the Vietnam War when presidents of both parties lied their faces off about what was going on. And when Bush and Cheney who were clearly lying about what was going on in Iraq. I've seen that movie before and I don't think you ask people's children to go to war and you at risk of losing your children, if you have to lie about it if you have to lie about it there's something fundamentally wrong about what you're doing. That's why I was anti war it's not because I'm a peacenik. It's because I think you do need power you do need a strong military, but you also need some kind of a conscience about how you conduct yourself we need strength, but we also don't need to have strength and I think one of the reasons we're in the position we're in today is because we had two wars that were basically based on lies one was Vietnam and the other was Iraq and an undermined our image all over the world. So that was a very powerful message. People think oh it was the left blah blah blah it was not the fuel was young people who were inspired by somebody who's going to come out and tell the truth and tell it like it was, and they flock to our campaign, and they had enormous responsibility and that is what produced the flocking to the campaign, the 50 state strategy Melinda came from the fact that when I go across the country even I make the campaign plane stop in Idaho, which doesn't have enough Democratic votes to sneeze at. We get 8000 people coming to the airport to see us, and I realize you know we may never win Idaho, but if you don't show up in Idaho then you're leaving the Democratic message to be given by Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. If you don't show up in these places and connect with people. Somebody once asked me if I like Trump voters, and I had to think about it for a minute I said you know I kind of do because they all used to vote for me in Vermont. A lot of them did, because you what they want is, I know it that white Christian nationalism is a disaster but a lot of people just are tired of getting kicked in the butt and that's, that's the same people that voted for Ruth Dwyer, one of my really far right voted for Bernie Sanders in the Northeast Kingdom. Why, because they liked Bernie because he stood up and said what was on his mind and that stuff matters a lot and that's the kind of campaign we ran we said what was on our mind we didn't give a damn with the people in Washington thought, which they knew and made them very nervous. But unfortunately they're not winning. I mean, you should have. I mean I would have loved to have had you as president I think Bernie. I think I would have loved to have had Bernie running against Donald Trump in 2016 but anyway that's not there you know there. Now listen we're going to move on to Madeline Albright she is a she was a dear friend of yours and she just passed away. And I know that you were working with her in the Middle East can you share with us a little bit about that work amazing person she runs an opera was running an operation called the National Democratic Institute and which I'm on the board of. If I teach a foreign policy course now at at Yale, and the reason I teach it is I have no formal training in foreign policy but I've spent an enormous amount of time in Ukraine and Moldova and Burma and all these places. And it's because of NDI because what I do is for and or was doing for NDI before the pandemic was going to these countries and trying to create democratic institutions in places like Georgia which were newly emancipated from the Russians from the Soviet Union, and I did a lot of work on this subject in in in mold in Ukraine as well. Madeleine ran that she was an amazing person, a lot of people have read about her and it's all true. She had a way of, she had a way of something Kathy white my former chief of staff went said is she had a way of telling you to go to hell and having you look forward to the journey. She's a remarkable human being I was shocked because I had no idea she was so sick. I'm sorry for your loss and the loss to this country. She's a great woman. What what what should the USA be to be doing in Ukraine. We should keep doing what we're doing I think Biden's doing the right thing by not sending American troops but I think the tougher you are Putin only respects one thing and this is not just about Putin this at Potsdam the peace conference after the Germans were defeated Truman met with Churchill and Stalin and and Stalin was very charming and and Truman sort of said oh you know Joe Stalin I think we can do business with him and and one of the generals looked at Truman and said Mr President the only thing that Stalin understands is how many divisions do you have. That's the way the Russians roll you know it's you can only deal with them through strength doesn't mean you have to bomb the hell out of them but it means you have to be strong. You can't trust them at the bargaining table they took over. You know 10s of nations in Eastern Europe by bsing in America that was tired of a war after World War two you have to be tough, but being tough doesn't mean sending troops to every hotspot in the world. Do you think we should be doing more in Ukraine to help. I think we should give them more defensive missiles and the Ukrainian people are incredibly brave and incredibly wonderful, and there's a lot of crap going around on the far left about Ukraine the pro Putin people, but that is just nonsense I was in Ukraine after the People rose up and overthrew Putin's puppet and and and elected democratically, not one but three presidents, and and Zalinsky was elected to get rid of corruption which he was doing a yes they still had plenty of problems or post Soviet state. We need to support these people that are incredibly courageous, they're carrying on the fighting as they should be we need to support them and we need to give them the weapons that they need to defend themselves. I want to I want to just very quickly. Talk to you about your brother Charlie I interviewed. A few shows ago and she shared with me her book. Well in darkness there is light and this is a book that she wrote about your brother Charlie. Could you share with us a little bit about his legacy. He was the guy that would have been president. Yeah he's amazing, a guy, especially for his time he was a year and a half younger than I. I did a bunch of interesting jobs when I was in high school in the summer I, including one on a cattle ranch and in Florida where I was shoveling you know what and all that kind of stuff. I spent all four summers working at a camp for kids from Harlem who did never had a break. He was incredibly idealistic incredibly motivated went to the University of North Carolina and then decided to go around the world for his year off and went on a freighter to Japan and so spent nine months which Luella wrote about in at a farm in Australia and then went to Laos and was kidnapped by the Viet Cong, the, but the pot that loud while he was taking a boat down the Mekong with his pal from Australia. Going down the Mekong is how you got to Thailand this is during the Vietnam War, and he was held in a prison camp for three months. He knew everything the CIA had a tight reign they had all his intelligence on him and then he was, he insisted on going north to talk to the head of the pot that loud to get to let them go and in order to get to northern Laos from southern Laos you have to go through Vietnam and the Vietnamese put him up against the wall and kill them both. I'm so sorry Howard. It was a long time ago. It was a long time ago but I know that he, he lives deeply in your heart so this is the book that Luella Bryant wrote well in darkness there's light about your brother. Idealism and tragedy on the Australian commune. So, thank you for that. Good writer. It's a great writer. So I want to ask you do you think the Democrats can hold the presidency the Senate in the house. They can hold the presidency in 2024. I mean 2022. Do you think they will hold the presidency. I mean, I, I'm 24, it's too early to say. I'm more optimistic than most I think because I think there's the Senate Republican senators are so awful. That I think some of them are going to lose just because they're incompetent boobs. Ron Johnson in Wisconsin I think we can beat I think we can pick up the open seat in South Carolina and North Carolina. The two me seat in Pennsylvania. The guys who are running in Ohio which is a 10 plus 10 Republican are so atrocious that and Tim Ryan is such a good guy very moderate Democrat I think you can win that seat in Ohio so I think we can win four or five seats I think war knock will win again in Georgia. So I do I pretty optimistic about the Senate. The House is going to be much tougher it's always much tougher. There's clearly a lot of bad stuff going on in places like Arizona and Texas and Florida in terms of, and not to mention Jim Crow and Jim Crow regulations being restored in Alabama and Georgia. And a Supreme Court that basically has the support of about 30% of the people of public in the country. So we're going to we're we have a tough moment here in front of us. I continue to be optimistic but if people don't get out and vote. We're going to lose our democracy never mind what the Democrats win or lose. Governor there isn't there isn't an amendment a constitutional amendment that says that if you were treasonous or if you, if you carried on any treasonous acts that you are not allowed to, to sit for Congress. I know that there are people in Congress who were part of the January 6 insertion. Why are they still there. That's a very good question. And they shouldn't be. You know, Cawthorne, Jim Jordan, Boba, Mary, Mary, Marjorie Taylor Green they should not be sitting in Congress, Josh Holly, not a matter of being conservative I used to get along fine with Republicans. If you're an honest person you can have a differences of opinion. If you're racist if you're a liar like Ted Cruz if you're a neo Nazi like Josh Holly, you don't belong in the Congress of the United States of America. So that's something that I think that we need to focus on because they don't deserve to be there and I think back in the Eisenhower days, they would have been marched off. Well, Joe McCarthy lasted a long time and he was the king of disinformation in that era so you know what we've got what we've got unfortunately Melinda, this country also has a lot of oligarchs. Yes, and they have put enormous amount of money into controlling the political process. The, the good news is that the public doesn't agree with them the bad news is sometimes the public doesn't vote. We, we almost lost the governorship of New Jersey and we did lose the governorship in Virginia and a whole lot of people under 30 didn't turn out to vote like they did in the election the previous year for president if that happens again, you know those young people are not going to grow up in a democracy so we have a lot of work to do. That's very true so what do you think is the number one issue right now for the world right now. Right now it's Ukraine. I mean it's climate change in the long term but Putin is capable of losing new using nuclear weapons, and it's puts us in a very difficult spot we mustn't give in to him. Otherwise, he'll just push people around more. But we also obviously a nuclear war is a total disaster. But I think in the long term is no question this climate change that'll be the extinction of our species which sometimes looks pretty good to me given what's going on. I hear you and that would have been my number one as well. Right, I hear you on Ukraine and I just, I feel in my heart that we should be doing more and. And I'm sad that we're not and I get the whole Third World War but I just, I wish that we were able to do more to help these. I could take a page out of the out of what we learned by doing all the wrong things in Iraq and Vietnam and in Afghanistan for that matter. The Ukrainians are willing to fight for themselves. We don't have to send troops, but we do have to send a lot more material than we're sending here here and and that we have and there's that doesn't you know across this money but it doesn't mean, you know, that's that we should we should allow people who want to defend their freedom to defend their freedom. And but but I again, given the disasters of Iraq and Vietnam and Afghanistan, I think I was not against sending troops to Afghanistan I said Bush did the right thing the problems were made in getting out when we basically set up our own corrupt governments of Afghans who were much more interested in their own money than they were in their own country. When you start doing that then it becomes your war. The Ukraine war is not our war, but it is our obligation to stand up for people who want to defend themselves and people are trying to live in a free society and that is the Ukrainian people. It's, it's, it's all so hard and it's, and in some ways it's so male. I just think we need more female leaders in this. I totally agree with you and I can't wait. That happens. We're about to have our first Republican I mean first woman, Democratic Congress woman. I'm not sure who it's going to be but we have three extraordinary candidates and four actually from Essex very impressive. I'm so sorry so for and they're fabulous women so as we end our show here I, I what what words of wisdom and hope do you have for the youth in our nation when their earth is burning. Fascism is rising across the globe, a pandemic threatens human health and they face rising inequality between rich and poor and now the specter of a third world war keeps flashing across their TV screens. What do you have to say to these young people who soon will be the new leaders in America. So I'll go back to my freshman year in college with my two African American roommates. This is the year as I said before 99 cities Americans in America were burned and I don't mean black lives matter protests I mean Washington didn't recover from the burning for 25 years. They were burned down a lot of them. And there were a Martin Luther King was killed. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated the Chicago Convention Democratic Convention nominated somebody who'd been in six primaries in the back room and a machine deal. If you told us in that freshman room that we were going to have a black president in 40 years we'd laughed you right out of the room and 40 years later Barack Obama was president United States. So my father once told me something that I've never forgotten. Although at the time I thought yeah yeah yeah he said you know after I'd gone through all the battles at 20 some odd year old boys go through with their fathers. We're sort of making our peace and he says you know I still have an advantage over you and I said oh yeah what is it. I can look backwards as well as forwards and I thought so at the time I thought oh yeah yeah yeah yeah. Well I now understand what he means. I know that we're going to win this and your role in life as a young person is to be impatient and angry and insist on change your role in life at our age is to tell them if they got it if they keep at it they're going to win. I consider that we have one. I mean we have fundamentally changed America imagine this is this is another change that I made in Vermont. Imagine two people who fall in love who happen to be of the same sex can now marry each other. I mean, you know that's a big step forward in human rights. The civil rights revolution is not over but it's so much better than it was. So yes it looks very bleak when you're 20 years old right now because you haven't experienced what you had to do to get to where you are today but if you keep working the way that people that always work on these issues. Eventually, you win. You just have to keep working every day to get there and you will get there. Bravo. Governor Howard Dean this half hour. I knew it was going to be great. I thank you so much. Thanks for having me on for you beyond words. I'm going to say goodbye to our viewers right now but I'm going to ask you to hang on, because I want to be able to say goodbye to you properly. So to my viewers. Thank you for joining me and Governor Howard Dean for these moments with Melinda. Good night.