Howard Dean’s campaign has produced a very compelling “Bill of Rights for a New Generation of Americans,” with a number of key government priorities, including the “right to a quality education,” the “right to patriotic dissent,” and the “right to leadership which seeks to form a more perfect union — and does not divide its people by race, by gender, by income or by sexual orientation.”
The campaign may want to give a second look, however, at number seven: The right to leadership which does not operate in secrecy.
The fact that Vice President Dick Cheney oversaw a secretive energy task force that refused to share even the most trivial details with Congress or anyone else is well known. We are just now learning, however, that Dean had his own energy task force that met in secret, information that is coming to public light thanks to a well-researched AP story that hit the wires yesterday.
Dean’s group held one public hearing and after-the-fact volunteered the names of industry executives and liberal advocates it consulted in private, but the Vermont governor refused to open the task force’s closed-door deliberations.
In 1999, Dean offered the same argument the Bush administration uses today for keeping deliberations of a policy task force secret.
“The governor needs to receive advice from time to time in closed session. As every person in government knows, sometimes you get more open discussion when it’s not public,” Dean was quoted as saying.
Sounds like another example of Dean being Bush-lite.
To be fair, the substance of Cheney’s secret task force and Dean’s secret task force were miles apart. Yesterday, in response to the AP article, Dean said that “any comparison between my successful bipartisan efforts to solve an energy crisis in Vermont and Dick Cheney’s donor rewards program disguised as a national energy policy is laughable.”
In terms of the work product completed by the respective secret task forces, that’s true. Cheney met almost exclusively with industry lobbyists and executives to shape a national energy policy that gutted the environment, ignored conservation, and gave big business everything it could ask for. Dean, meanwhile, organized his secret panel in a more even-handed way, meeting with energy executives and environmentalists to produce a more balanced policy.
That said, the AP report is a terrible embarrassment to Dean for two reasons.
First is hypocrisy. For months, Dean has hammered Cheney about the secret deliberations of his energy task force, yet Cheney’s defense is the same one used by Dean. Indeed, Dean agreed with Dem lawmakers in Congress about the need for an open process with Cheney, but Dean failed to mention that he was criticized by Dems in the Vermont legislature for keeping his energy panel’s progress a secret as well. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, said, “In general, what is good for the vice president should be good for the governor. A candidate who attacks on grounds he is vulnerable is foolish.”
Second is secrecy. Let’s face it; Dean has a penchant for concealment, much as the Bush White House does. The same governor who claims to champion leadership that doesn’t operate in secrecy ran a secret energy task force and sealed gubernatorial records he wants to keep secret so political rivals and/or opponents can’t dig up anything that may be embarrassing.
What’s more, in a story that isn’t well known outside of New England, Dean was actually sued by a number of Vermont reporters while governor because he insisted on keeping his daily gubernatorial schedule secret.
The journalists argued that the governor’s daily schedule was a public document and that the public had a right to know where their governor is. Dean refused to comply because he didn’t want his constituents seeing how frequently he was leaving Vermont to campaign for president.
Dean lost his case and had to start releasing his schedule to reporters.
At the time, it seemed like a petty fight between a stubborn governor and an inquisitive media not used to Vermonters running for national office. But in context, one begins to see that Dean is a highly secretive person, not unlike the man he hopes to replace.