The View from Vermont...
Here's a great special to the Washington Post by Vermont journalist Darren Allen. Vermont can be a quirky place, and this perspective piece is a good primer on understanding why Dean and his record so confound those 'flatlander' reporters who come up here looking for the 'real' Howard Dean. There's also some info on how Dean got to where he is and his predecessor, Republican Richard Snelling.
An excerpt:
"I can't claim to be an insider yet -- my grandchildren, if they're born here, probably won't be able to shed the "flatlander" label -- but I have watched with some amusement as members of the national media have come scouring the Green Mountains in search of the "real" Howard Dean. I think many have left with a distorted picture of the state and its politics.
As most close observers of Vermont politics note, Dean the Democrat continued to pursue much of the agenda established by Snelling the Republican. Dean worked at balancing a deficit-plagued budget, resisting urgings from the left to abandon Snelling's tightfisted ways. As he told Vermont Public Radio in an interview two years ago, "I think there was an expectation among some of those on the farther liberal ends of my own party that I was going to come in and now things were going to be different, and the facts were that we had a big serious financial crisis and somebody had to deal with it and that somebody happened to be me by chance." "
An excerpt:
"I can't claim to be an insider yet -- my grandchildren, if they're born here, probably won't be able to shed the "flatlander" label -- but I have watched with some amusement as members of the national media have come scouring the Green Mountains in search of the "real" Howard Dean. I think many have left with a distorted picture of the state and its politics.
As most close observers of Vermont politics note, Dean the Democrat continued to pursue much of the agenda established by Snelling the Republican. Dean worked at balancing a deficit-plagued budget, resisting urgings from the left to abandon Snelling's tightfisted ways. As he told Vermont Public Radio in an interview two years ago, "I think there was an expectation among some of those on the farther liberal ends of my own party that I was going to come in and now things were going to be different, and the facts were that we had a big serious financial crisis and somebody had to deal with it and that somebody happened to be me by chance." "
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