Excerpts From Iowa

Governor Dean spoke at a "Hear it from the Heartland" forum hosted by Sen. Tom Harkin this weekend. The video is great -- and it closed the deal with a libertarian friend of mine whose previous position was that Howard Dean was the only Democratic candidate for president who "doesn't make me want to gouge my own eyes out and light myself on fire when he talks" but who is now fully on board. With any luck a donation will be forthcoming.

I haven't seen any transcript yet, but here are two good excerpts (via me, actually; here and here) from the first part of the his remarks:

A lot of people say, "Well how's this guy from Vermont gonna win? He wants to get rid of the president's tax cuts! How's he gonna win in the South?" Here's what you do: we're not gonna say, "Oh, let's get rid of the president's tax cut -- all the money went to the wealthy." I don't think class warfare works.

What we're gonna say is: You have a choice, Americans. You can have the president's tax cut or you can have health care that can never be taken away. You can have the president's tax cut or you can fully fund special education so class size can go down and your property taxes can go down. You can have the president's tax cut or you can have the 20% of the federal highway grants that the president cut to every state this year because he couldn't manage the money.

Now, if you put it that way, most people are gonna say, "Well, I want to have the roads, the education, and the health care," -- because they didn't get the president's tax cut.

And a short while later:

When I go to the South -- you know how I plan to win in the South? It's a hard place for Democrats to win. I'm going to say to our African-American base, "We support you, we need you, and we're going to talk to your issues."

But then I'm going to say to Souther whites, "You've been voting Republican for 30 years. What do you have to show for it? There are 103,000 uninsured kids in South Carolina; most of those kids are white. Has your job gone to Indonesia? Have you had a raise in the last five years? Are you satisfied with the quality of your public schools? Because if you don't like the answer to that question, you ought to think about voting Democratic again. Because when white people and black people vote together in this country, this country moves forward."

Mathew (not Matthew) Gross over at that other Dean blog has two wire stories with some other bits that emerged in Reuters and AP reports on the event. Be sure and watch the whole event -- it's vintage Dean.