Alternet Interview with Dean

Alternet takes some time to grill the good doctor on the environment. Chief among the revelations contained is that Dean (gasp!) drives an SUV! The interview is great, with Dean exhibiting both his righteous and goofy sides, and putting out some truly substantive policy proposals, among them

- Making CAFE standards the same for the SUV fleet as for the regular fleet,

- Labeling genetically modified foods,

- Buying a hybrid SUV for his next car

And this charming story:

personally I'm a recycling madman. I always go through the office and if I see something like a piece of white paper that should have been in the recycling I make a big scene in front of the hapless staff member. On April Fools' Day, one of my longtime aides had a bottle in the wastebasket – and those bottles are 5-cent returnable bottles in our state – and I said "What is this?" and yanked it out of the can. But it had a long string attached to it and I kept pulling the string and it had about 12 recyclable items attached to this string (laughter) and they knew it was enough to do me in.

It should also be noted that Dean's embrace of sites like Alternet.org and Commondreams.org is an attempt to get the more liberal aspects of our party back into the fold, the Nader-ites and the people who would otherwise be Kucinich supporters. Follow that up with work to reach the moderates (shame that the DLC and Dean have such bad relations) with sane fiscal policy and balanced budget proposals and we'll have ourselves a "Big Tent" campaign.