To respond to your question, Alice, you might ask Dean himself. In the May issue of the Progressive, he said he considered himself a moderate.


"But while Wellstone spent his life fighting his party's creeping centrism, Dean only recently took up his position as a left fielder. He considers himself a moderate, and he has often crossed swords with Vermont progressives--including a challenger from the state's Progressive Party who won 10 percent of the vote in the last gubernatorial election.

"It's a pathetic thing that I'm the most progressive candidate" among those considered to have a serious shot at the nomination, Dean says.

Progressives in Vermont don't disagree. "Few people would have accused him of being a progressive governor in Vermont," says Paul Burns, executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group (one of the network of consumer and environmental advocacy groups founded by Ralph Nader). "It was not by accident that a strong progressive party was formed while he was governor here as an alternative to some of the positions he was taking."

July 9, 2003, he told Roger Simon in an interview, "We need to move this country back to the center... We're not talking about the left; we're talking about the center."

In Vermont, his rhetoric on supporting small farms is at odds with his record of supporting policies that favor factory farming. On almost every issue, including gun control, he takes a strong state's rights position. (The NRA has been a strong Dean supporter and gives him an "A" rating.) He supported using Yucca Mounting as a nuclear waste dump. He is extremely (rabidly) fiscally conservative. He's against medicinal marijuana. He's not against mandatory school prayer -- as long as there isn't a federal law requiring it. Conservation lands in Vermont are open to hunters, and he supported IBM's corporate desires to build a road despite a critical environmental impact report.

Dean describes himself "to the right of Bush" on issues of budget and homeland security. As governor of Vermont, he supported concealed weapons, and at the time told everyone he was legalizing gay civil unions because the Vermont Supreme Court forced him to do it. He supports the death penalty. He doesn't completely support the Kyoto Treaty.

I'm not saying I disagree with all these things. Dean strikes me as the Democrat version of McCain who doesn't toe the line either way. That in itself would be a plus for me, but this sudden "born again liberalism" is a bit nauseating given his record. To be fair, a lot of it is coming from his supporters, not the official campaign. If you are looking for a die-hard leftie to vote for, Dean is probably not your man.

All of which makes the DLC's attempts to portray Dean as a raging liberal and forward Lieberman as a "moderate" all the more ironic.

The fact that he's driving about Iowa in a Ford E-350 doesn't say much about his environmental credentials, either.