IMPORTANT.... From Howard Dean

[DFW]

97. I have an easy time taking him seriously

I've known him for over 15 years, since before anyone outside of Vermont knew his name. His ideals haven't changed. Times have. We didn't heap disdain upon him in 2003 because no one outside of Dennis Kucinich was making noise to Howard's left on a national level. He was never a purist. He might have come off that way because so few were to his left back then. But there was a reason Rove feared running against him. The bad blood between Howard and Bernie Sanders (which went back almost 20 years before that) was not on the public radar, either, but Howard was long over that by then.

I asked Howard in February, 2009, what his future plans were. Tom Daschle had just been scratched as Obama's new HHS secretary, a post Howard would have been selected for had it not been for the fact that Rahm Emmanuel still harbored a grudge for Howard's having been right about the 50 State Strategy in 2006. Howard said if he was not picked to be part of the Obama administration, he would lend his name to some firm for income, and spend the rest of his time "raising hell for causes I believe in."

I have been lucky to get together with him in person once a year since then (if that), because he has a LOT of causes he believes in. He travels all over the world, in demand by liberal political parties requesting help in organization. He also helped organize a march from Bangkok to the Burmese border to draw attention to human trafficking (basically slavery by another name). I don't remember anyone here giving him credit for that. He was invited to the Davos forum--not as a business rep or politician but as an environmentalist, a cause of his that most people ignore.

Just because he has gotten past tooting his own horn since losing the primary of 2004--something not universal to all New Yorkers now living in Vermont, it seems--doesn't mean Howard has abandoned his ideals by any means.

And by the way, didn't you mean 180? "A full 360" would bring him right back to where he started, which would have been accurate except for the fact that he never went anywhere to begin with.