Badger Herald: You had sent out an e-mail and there were some statements in the press that you were going to forgo the reminder of your campaign if you lost here in Wisconsin. Since then, other statements have come out that that will not happen. We were wondering what your intentions are in Wisconsin.

Howard Dean: Well, we are working really hard in Wisconsin; we want to win here. And if we do, we’re in great shape. If we don’t, we are going to keep going because what we really started was an attempt to change the political culture in Washington, which has been pretty unresponsive to what ordinary people in this country have wanted for a long time. And there are a lot of people who don’t want us to quit, and so we won’t.

BH: You mentioned that there are a lot of people who don’t want you to quit, but to date, you have not won a primary. What makes you think you can win here in Wisconsin?

HD: Because Wisconsin has a history of electing people like Bob LaFollette, Russ Feingold and Bill Proxmire, who are independent-minded people who stand up for what’s right, not just what’s popular. The disease in Washington right now is people will stand up for something if they have the polls to approve of it, and that’s not very good for the country. I have more delegates than anyone else other than John Kerry, so I think I have a reasonable shot.

BH: Have you heard that Clark intends to endorse Kerry? What’s your reaction to that?

HD: That’s fine. Endorsements are very nice and I like to have them, but Al Gore and Bill Bradley endorsements didn’t make a big difference in Iowa, and I don’t think Wes Clark is going to make a big difference in Wisconsin.

BH: What is the No. 1 reason Joe Student at UW-Madison should vote for you?

HD: There are actually three reasons, not just one. Three things I have heard students all over the country talk to me about are balancing the budget, environmental concerns and how to pay for college. I am the only person who has ever balanced a budget. My environmental record is very good. The truth is, as a governor I have a huge advantage — I have actually done things. The Senate is a wonderful place and there are some great people down there, but it is mostly that they talk.

We have done extraordinary things in the environment. We started something called the Energy Efficiency Utility — the first of its kind in the country, where we save electricity by sending teams around to factories, farms, houses and businesses and show them how to save electricity. We reduced our total electric load by 2 percent. The goal is to do it by 10 percent in 10 years, and that’s huge, like having an electric plant, but you do it by efficiency. Eight percent of the entire state was put aside never to be developed while I was governor. There is a huge crush to develop everything and that’s not really compatible to the kind of character my state has. Renewable energy has to be a basic tenet of what we are going to do. We already have wind farms going up in Vermont right now as a result of that.

The reason balancing the budget is so important to students is because students know they get the bill. Conservative Republicans supposedly were concerned about money, but they’re not. This is really the credit-card presidency. Whatever the president wants — $540 billion for a prescription program, $87 billion for Iraq, free student loans — put it all on the credit card. You (students) are going to pay for that all, not us (older Americans). We will be dead by the time the bill comes along, but you won’t be, and it’s going to be a huge problem. You think you have trouble paying your college tuition now; wait until you see what happens when the bill for Social Security and Medicare comes along. It’s totally irresponsible. I am the only person running for president who has balanced a budget, and it’s tough, but I know you have to make tough decisions. Legislators don’t make tough decisions, governors do.

Finally, the college-tuition issue. We’ve got a plan; it costs $7 billion to be paid for by getting rid of the president’s tax cut, which I want to get rid of so we can balance the budget so we can spend it to fund special education, have health care for everyone and deal with college. The deal is everybody in the eighth grade gets $10,000 a year for four years of college or post-high school technical education. They get told in the eighth grade because we want them to work through high school. A lot of poor kids sign out in high school because they just figure their parents can never send them to college and they have no aspirations. They don’t believe, so if you tell them, at least the finances will be there…

Ten thousand dollars won’t get you tuition at UW-Madison if you are from out of state, but it will get you to a community college, wherever you are at. Any college education is important. Ten thousand dollars will be in grants and loans, depending; if you have no money, it will be in grants. If you have some, some of it will be in loans. When you go to pay it back, you will pay no more than 10 percent of your income in any year. After 10 years, your loans will be deemed paid back whether you did it or not. If you go into public service — teaching, social work, nursing, police, fire, something like that ,which doesn’t pay very well — 7 percent is the maximum you will ever pay to repay those loans, and at the end of 10 years, they will be fully paid up whether you have actually paid the full amount or not. I think that is a pretty good investment. Seven billion dollars sounds like a lot of money, but consider we are spending $87 billion in Iraq and the total budget of the United States is $2.4 trillion. It’s a very small amount of money to guarantee that higher education is not going to have financial barriers to it.

BH: It’s a big jump to go from the college campus to the world, but certainly during the pre-war era you made it certain that you are believer in the United Nations, which suggests to us that you are a member of the cosmopolitan community. Saddam Hussein killed nearly a million of his own people, used chemical weapons on his own people; Olympic athletes were tortured with acid. Can you really tell us, as a member of the cosmopolitan world that we live in, that we are not better with him gone?

HD: Let me just back up here for a second. You talked about a number of genocidal things that were done during the first Bush administration. My criteria for the use of force includes (number) one, [if] we are attacked, like we were at the World Trade Center — which was why I supported the world’s war in Afghanistan. Number two, when our allies were attacked, which was why I supported the first Gulf War against Saddam because Kuwait was overrun. Incidentally … John Kerry voted against (the war) for some inexplicable reason. Three, to stop genocide. Now, I supported Clinton’s intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo because the international bodies that were responsible for stopping it wouldn’t do it — the European Union and NATO. Sadaam, however, committed genocide when George Bush the first was at the helm.

BH: But didn’t the violations extend until the day we went back over?

HD: So we should also invade Zimbabwe and Ukraine as well?

BH: Well, as president, how would you stop these human-rights violations in Zimbabwe and Ukraine?

HD: You do the best you can with sanctions, which we were doing. We had a no-fly zone; Saddam had no air force of any kind, and he was not a threat to the United States. I don’t believe you send troops in and lie to the American people when you do it. If he’d told the American people that the only reason we were going in was because Saddam was a bad person, then we wouldn’t have had the invasion. Instead, the president told the American people there were weapons of mass destruction, that Iraq was buying uranium from Africa and that Iraq was about to get nuclear weapons. All of those were lies.

BH: Martin Luther King Jr. said that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Obviously there is injustice in Iraq. How is that not a threat to justice in the United States?

HD: Do you believe it is the right position of the United States to say that we will send troops anywhere in the world to preserve human rights and stop genocide?

BH: Can you tell us how, other than sending troops, we can stop genocide and end human-rights violations?

HD: Sometimes you can’t.

BH: We’d like to change the subject off war for a moment to gay marriage. As you know, the ruling of the Massachusetts court just came out. We would like to know what your views are on that, given legislation in your state.

HD: Our choice was not to do gay marriages. We did civil unions, the first (legislation) of its kind in the country. What it creates is a petition that gives all the legal rights that are available to anybody else in America to gay and lesbian couples. So in my state, the only state in the country, there is no legal discrimination against gay and lesbian people. Now, how other states choose to do that is their business. Marriage is none of the federal government’s business.

BH: So you are against the proposed federal amendment (banning gay marriage)?

HD: Yes, I am against a federal amendment. I think every state has the right to choose how they give equal rights to every single American, and that’s not the federal government’s business. What is the federal government’s business is to ensure there are equal rights. So my job as president is not to pass judgment on what we did. I think we did the right things — we did not do gay marriage, but I think if other states want to do it or do domestic partnerships, like New Jersey and California have done, our job is to recognize the partnership and make sure they get Social Security benefits, and that immigration laws are the same as it would be for a heterosexual couple.

BH: Wouldn’t that create [constitutional] problems?

HD: Yes, and I wouldn’t support [the Defense of Marriage Act]. I don’t think that the states have to recognize marriage, but that they have to recognize the contracts. We have a law that says marriage is between a man and women, and I would oppose a constitutional amendment to do that because I don’t think you should put bigotry in the constitution. It doesn’t recognize the marriage, but the equal rights. Should everyone have equal rights? Yes. Should the federal government interfere with what has traditionally been the state’s right? No, because I don’t like the idea of extending the federal power over the states. Although I recognize there are certain times they should, and civil rights is one of those times. My approach is kind of threading the needle. When you have two conflicting principles, both of which are important, I think you end up with a compromise that is not totally satisfactory to both sides. Mine is that the rights have to be recognized, not the marriage.

BH: What is the leading reason you are better than John Kerry or John Edwards?

HD: There are three of them. One, I will stand up for what I believe in, whether it is popular or not. Two, I have a record. I balance budgets, everybody under the age of 18 in my state has health insurance, (and) a third of our seniors, low-income people and disabled people have prescription benefits. This is a real record that people in my state can say, “I had health insurance because Howard Dean was my governor.” I don’t know of any senators that can say that. Three, I don’t owe anybody anything. All of those other folks are fine people, but they are getting all their money from the same special interests that everybody else gets their money from in Washington. That’s why we don’t have health insurance for everybody in this country after 56 years — because special interests are profitable. Eighty-nine percent of my money comes from small donations from ordinary people, including a quarter of it from people your age.

BH: That said, in the event that you lose Wisconsin and you were to lose on Super Tuesday, would you to get out of the race, or would you take it all the way to the convention?

HD: What I am not going to do is to undermine the prospects of the Democratic Party to win the presidency. I think all of us are better than George Bush. So whatever happens, I am not going to go down swinging and tear the party down. Better to vote for someone who takes money from special interests than George Bush, who takes more money from special interests. It’s not what I want, but I have been voting for people I didn’t thoroughly approve of for a long time. I am not going to stop now.

BH: What do you think of the argument that John Kerry is the most electable candidate?

HD: That is absolutely untrue. Imagine John Kerry, a Democratic candidate on the same stage as George Bush. George Bush turns to the Democratic nominee and says, “You supported me on the war, you supported No Child Left Behind, you supported some of my tax policy, and you have no experience balancing the budget. Why don’t you just support me?”

BH: You speak of your record in the state of Vermont. Can you use the state of Vermont as a model to the rest of the country? It is smaller than the city of Memphis, Tenn.

HD: Would you rather use Arkansas or Vermont? I mean, seriously, think of what we’ve got. Now here’s my argument: the health programs we did we built on federal programs that exist everywhere. The early-intervention program we did for kids under three, which dropped our child-abuse rate by 43 percent, we copied from (what) was going on out in Los Angeles. You can do these programs anywhere; it doesn’t matter what race or what ethnicity. It just matters if you have strong leadership in the community — and that can be anywhere — and it matters if you are really committed to receiving.

I look at centralization versus decentralization. If you centralize, you will have mediocrity everywhere; if you decentralize, you will have a few programs that are disasters, but a lot of programs that are really successful when innovated at the local level …. The Republicans always like to talk about running the country like a business. I want to run the country like a really successful business. The Republicans around the country run the country like Enron. The businesses that are incredibly successful have been the businesses that allow local people at the entrepreneurial level to make decisions for themselves (and) understand that some of them are going to make mistakes. No terrorizing them to think if they make one mistake, then they are fired. That is exactly the worst way to get the best out of people. The way to get the best out of people is to support the 95 percent of the people that really want to do a good job of getting the resources they need to succeed. If you terrorize people, everybody will be so afraid to make mistakes, they will never do the constructive and creative things they could do to create really good programs. That’s basically what we did in Vermont (support the people), and I think that is a great model for the rest of the country.

BH: The U.S. Census Bureau has reported that the most segregated cities for African Americans are in the north, with Milwaukee sitting at the top of the list. Has affirmative action been successful if such widespread segregation is still taking place?

HD: Affirmative action has been successful.

BH: Well, what would you do as president to end what we think are still serious racial problems in this country?

HD: First of all, talk about it. I have a whole way that I talk about race to predominantly white audiences, which most white politicians don’t do — they just say we have to have civil rights. My chief of staff was always a woman when I was governor, and my office became a matriarchy because my chief of staff was in charge of hiring. I talk about that and tell how she jokes that she would like to have more men, but it’s hard to find a qualified man. Every black person in America has heard the phrase, “It’s really hard to find a qualified African American.” The reason I tell the story is because we can always laugh about gender stuff, but it’s true, and the reason you need affirmative action is because everybody tends to hire people like themselves. If you are sitting across the table with two people with the same resume, you hire the one like you and aren’t aware of what you are doing because you are more comfortable with them.

BH: Al Sharpton has accused you of doing precisely the same thing in not having African Americans in your cabinet.

HD: Let me just say one thing about Al Sharpton. First of all, a right-winger is running his campaign and he did the research for that, and whatever his motivations, they weren’t helpful. And secondly, I was unprepared for that question because I was shocked that he would raise it. The truth is that I had done more to hire minority folks in my state that is 96 percent white than any previous governor. Of the six people in my cabinet, all of them had ranking longevity and we didn’t have any people from a minority group — but we did on my staff, which is 11 people, have African Americans and Latinos.

BH: Can you speak about your views on Pell Grants?

HD: The president has cut 84,000 Pell Grants because of his tax cuts. The truth is, I think the program I have described is better than Pell Grants. I am not going to get rid of them; I am going to restore them to their former amount once we get rid of the tax cut because we have to pay for all of this stuff. Politicians cannot tell people that they can have a middle-class tax cut, health insurance, (and) Pell Grants. People have to understand they have to make a choice. They can have the $304 check, or they can have the Pell Grants restored. But the truth is I am more interested in expanding AmeriCorps because AmeriCorps gives people an opportunity to raise money for college. But it also gives people an opportunity to get mixed up with people of all different backgrounds from all over the country and serve somebody else for two years. Then they go to college when they are 20 instead of 18.

My argument is people get much more out of college when they are 20 than when they are 18. The reason I have that bias is from my own experience. When I went to college I got a lot out of it, but a lot of it was at the end of a beer bottle. When I went to medical school, I had worked for three years. I knew exactly why I was there — I knew why I was spending the money. I also knew what was and wasn’t important in the classes …. I went to work in something I hated — I went to work on Wall Street. I think the work experience which AmeriCorps gives you is incredibly valuable because it can point you in the right direction but can also point you away from the direction you don’t like. I love AmeriCorps, and I think it is a great way to finance education.

BH: What is your reaction to the large number of 18- to 24-year-olds who have come out to support your campaign? Why do you think that is?

HD: They are helping a lot — their energy is helping enormously, and they give money. They don’t give much money, but their stories are inspirational. We had a woman at Penn State that sold her bike for $100 and said she sold it for democracy. It’s amazing.

BH: How are you going to get those same people to the polls?

HD: Well, they do come to the polls, but the question is, do they come to the polls enough? First of all, here’s why I think we are attractive to 18- to 24-year-olds: I don’t talk down to people. I mean, I am very aggressive in what I think and I am clear about laying out my views, but I respect other people’s opinions right back. I listen to what people are saying and I process it. Most politicians don’t do that-they talk down to people. Adults put up with that, but people your age don’t because they are coming right from a time when everyone talks down to you and you are sick of it.

Secondly, I will say things that other people won’t say that I know are true. All that crap that all the other candidates use to say that Howard Dean created a gaffe a day. That was just manufactured nonsense. I would say things like “We are not any safer since Saddam has been captured,” and that’s absolutely true. The next week, we lost 23 more people over in Iraq and American airliners are being escorted in by F-16s. That doesn’t mean Saddam isn’t a terrible person — I’m glad he’s captured — but the fact is that we aren’t any safer. I will say things that people your age, who have a very low tolerance for hypocrisy, recognize as true, that other adults won’t say, and I think that is very appealing.

The third thing is I think long-term, and people your age think long-term. I expected people your age to be very interested in the environment, to be very interested in college loans. What I was shocked at was how many people your age brought up the budget deficit. Adults don’t do that stuff because they figure, “What the hell, I’ll be dead in 15 years.” You guys are going to be the ones to pick up the bill, and I think that is very perceptive …. My idea of leadership is different than everybody else’s in politics. My idea of leadership is that 80 percent of us do the same thing as everybody does well: we listen to the voters, we do what they want, we look at the polls, blah, blah, blah. The 20 percent that they don’t get is that leadership is also saying what you think, even if they don’t agree, and bringing people to you. Americans, especially older Americans, would rather hear the nice things. What they don’t want to hear is the tough things. I am not warm and fuzzy — people have accused me of that — but goddamnit, this country is in trouble because we keep electing warm and fuzzy people who won’t address the issues. I think people your age see that.

BH: Could you clear up the perceived hypocrisy surrounding that fact that you couldn’t go to war because of a medical reason, but then you spent the time after skiing in Colorado?

HD: I had a low draft number. I went for my draft physical. I failed the physical, and then I did other things because I wasn’t allowed in the army. I knew I had a back injury because it began to bother me during track, and I still played football and still wrestled because I am the kind of person who pushes myself to the absolute limits of everything. There was no way I was not going to do something. I went and had my physical, and they said, “We don’t want you.” End of story.

Editor’s note: Invitations for interviews with The Badger Herald have been extended to Sen. John Kerry, Sen. John Edwards, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, and the Rev. Al Sharpton. The Herald is still waiting for confirmation from Sens. Kerry and Edwards. An interview has already taken place with Rep. Dennis Kucinich. The Sharpton for President campaign has not returned our calls.