wo outstanding people spent time with me this morning and this coming week the resulting interviews should be aired. The questions were challenging and their answers true to form; erudite, sensible, effective and the kind of challenge that I would wish they had the opportunity to pose, face to face, to President Bush. It won't happen.
Ralph Nader and Dr. Howard Dean were my guests and they will likely anger many Republicans and inspire Democrats. Tomorrow I'll write about a revitalized Ralph Nader.
Let's start with the man who sought to be the Democrat's presidential candidate. For a brief while he held the lead. He was painted by the Bush team as an extremist liberal. He isn't, wasn't and never has been. The former Governor of Vermont managed to balance budgets, despite the fact that his is the only state that doesn't mandate a balanced budget. By the way, he confirmed to me that on several occasions he was endorsed by the National Rifle Association.
Dean is now the chairman of the Democratic National Committee and for those who claim that he has taken the post as a way of retaining a high profile to seek the presidency again, wrong! Being the DNC chair takes him out of the running, precluding until 2009 his seeking the presidency. But then, he's young enough to work on issues in preparation for 2012 and 2016.
I mentioned to him that the former Republican speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, just last week said that he thought Senator Hillary Clinton would be a "very formidable" candidate in 2008. He added, "Senator Clinton is very competent, very professional, very intelligently moving toward the center." He shared the Gingrich opinion but did not feel she needed to move in either direction.
She certainly has the smartest American politician advising her ...Bill Clinton.
Howard Dean was a critic of the war in Iraq very early on and was painted, sadly successfully, by the Presidential re-election team as being not just opposing the Iraqi conflict but, ergo, being against the men and women in uniform and anti-American. He thought that was certainly inaccurate and thought the the President's actions were  "anti-American" and certainly not doing right by our troops.
We are approaching 1,600 dead men and women and something like 15,000 physically wounded. Who can tell the countless number of emotionally suffering veterans. The Secretary of Defense, recently returned from another few hours in Iraq has said, in answer to a soldiers question that they don't have an exit strategy but they do have a "strategy for victory." I asked Dr.Dean what that might be. He didn't know, but did agree that we can't simply, precipitously remove all our forces yet.
Many issues concern him and he is most clear in his rebuttal to the administration's views. For example, I mentioned that conservatives have an almost absolute lock on the courts of this country. Republican appointees now constitute a majority of judges on ten of the nation's federal appeals courts. There might well be three or four lifetime appointments on key courts.They will rule all save the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court appears headed for a long, very conservative future.  He agreed with my statement but did not appear to be overly concerned about that.  
We covered other areas. I asked the Doctor whether, if the Bush tax cuts are made permanent, then by the year 2010, billionaires will be paying a smaller percentage of their federal income taxes than those in the upper middle class. It disturbed him and he took issue with the President having identified tax reform as a top goal.
Available time was the only restriction on the issues we were able to discuss. I asked "Governor, I don't think there are too many ho would take issue with the statement that Social Security is the cornerstone of our social safety net. Two questions, is President Bush off-base in his assertion that the system is in dire straights..or soon will be ...and what do you think of his partial privatization proposal?" He was very much in opposition.
If there could have been more time there are many issues I'd have brought up, but one would have been extremely personal. He lost his older brother, Charlie, when he was traveling in South East Asia. He was captured and killed by Laotian guerillas ...How, sir, did that tragedy impact on your life?"
That loud roar he produced while watching primary election returns hurt his campaign out of all proportion. He described it as "a crazy, red-faced rant." His career is far from over.