Can A Long-Shot Candidate Beat Donald Trump?

Hi, Radio Atlantic listeners.

This is Isaac Dover, staff writer here at The Atlantic.

You've heard me a couple of times as a guest on the show, but with Alex out on attorney leave, I'm stepping in to the host chair this week.

So, my main beat at the Atlantic is covering the 2020 Democratic primary race, which means that I spend a lot of time talking to all the people running, chasing them all over Iowa and New Hampshire, thinking about them when I get back to Washington, and trying to make sense of it all.

It's a lot.

More of my life, I assume, than it is many of yours.

But the one thing that everyone knows about the Democratic race right now is that many people are running.

18 already, and another half dozen or so, it seems like, about to get in.

An obsession of mine is that we don't know who counts as a frontrunner or a long shot at this point, or who's in what tier, the top tier, second tier.

It's really early, and already the polling is very fluid.

And what we have seen from the fundraising numbers is that Pete Budajudge, the South Bend Indiana mayor, who's getting a lot of attention these days, but who most people still in their gut assume can't win, well, he raised more money for more people than Elizabeth Warren, Corey Booker, or anyone else other than Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, or Betto O'Rourke.

And O'Rourke, of course, is a guy who lost a Senate race last year.

Before that, three-term congressman from Texas, wasn't very well known.

And all of a sudden, we think of him as a top-tier candidate.

But seriously, most of these people aren't going to win or come close to winning.

But I'm telling you, for almost all, if not all of them, they really believe that there's a way that it all comes together in a surprise, and they do.

Call them long shots now, they say, but they have plans and dreams and hopes of how it'll all come together.

And maybe, maybe, one of them will be right.

People who've led in polls this far out in presidential elections have all lost.

And Donald Trump is the president, after all.

That changes everything.

Or does it?

Well, our guest today is a man who knows a little bit about being a long shot presidential candidate and what it's like for the candidacy to work, at least for a very long stretch, and what it's like for it to fall apart.

And that's Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont and former chair of the Democratic National Committee, which we should note he's now back working with again on a new voter database initiative.

But back in 2004, he was a Democratic presidential candidate, and for a time, the frontrunner in the last race to try to take down a a Republican president looking for his second term.

I'm not saying that 2004 tracks directly onto 2020, but who better to talk with about what it's like from the inside, going from obscurity to frontrunner and back, and all the ups and downs along the way?

Governor Dean, thanks for being here on Radio Atlantic.

Thank you for having me on.

So what we're talking about today is this democratic field that is getting larger almost by the day.

I was looking at an article from when you got in to the race, the 2004 race, that referred to the crowded primary field.

I think it was eight or nine people at that point.

We're at 18 as of this recording.

I don't know.

It might be twice that by the time that the episode hits.

Take me back a little bit to your decision to get in at that point.

Were already out of office by the time you decided to run?

You were out of office by the time you announced, but were you still governor when you were thinking, hey, maybe I'll, even though I'm the governor of Vermont, not a lot of people know who I am,

I'm going to get into this presidential race.

Yes, I realized that after I we did, we were the first state in the country to do marriage equality.

And after that,

that was pretty much the capstone of six terms as governor.

I looked at Kate O'Connor, who was my chief assistant campaign manager, and everything else in the beginning, and just said, I think we're done here, right?

And she didn't say anything, of course, because she never did.

She looked at me wisely, and I said, Okay, I think we're done.

And then we, about a couple of months later, we opened an office above a chiropractor's office in Montpelier,

just enough for two people.

And we hired our first employee, and then she had to leave the governor's office and became the second employee.

And that's how it all started.

That was in 2002.

But that process, when you say, okay, I'm going to run for president, it's not like you were coming in as

a likely frontrunner.

That way.

I mean, was that,

how do you come to that within yourself?

Because I think one of the things that when people look at this field, there are

many people running right now, and all of them,

with maybe one or two exceptions, believe even if the pundits say there's no chance that they can win, and at least part of them believe, yes, I'm going to be the nominee, I'm going to be the president.

Otherwise, this is a pretty tough process to go through and put yourself through for two years.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: You know, my mind doesn't work like that at all.

And it never has in politics.

I didn't have a conference with my family.

Judy has been my wonderful partner for 38 years, but she is not the least bit interested in politics.

When I was governor, the deal was she only had to show up twice a term, one for the election night and the other for the inauguration or the, you know, the State of the Union.

So that was it.

No campaigning, no nothing.

And that was the deal.

She wasn't interested and she was doing plenty of great work, especially with the kids when I was gone as much as I was.

So I made all my political decisions internally and I, you know, just the way I do things.

I actually work on stuff subconsciously before I know I'm working on it.

And I just figured this was next.

That was it.

And whether winning or not, I didn't have a plan.

I knew what I wanted to run on, which was incredibly boring as toast.

I wanted universal health insurance.

I wanted a balanced budget.

That's what I was running on.

Those are such strange ideas.

I know.

And it wasn't going to win.

It wasn't going to win the nomination either.

But

when you start reaching out to people and saying, I'm running for president, do they say to you, are you kidding?

Well,

you know, Andy Tobias, who wasn't supposed to be doing this, was one of my biggest supporters.

He was the treasurer treasurer of the DNC, but Andy's gay.

And I would say three-quarters of the money that came in early when nobody ever heard of me was gay money.

And what Andy would do is call up his friends and say, Why don't you give $1,000 to Howard Dean?

And they'd say, Howard Dean, he's not going to win.

He has no chance.

He said, Do you want to get right with yourself for what he did for us?

You give $1,000 to the person you think is going to win, and then you give $1,000 to Howard Dean.

So that's what kept our body and soul together for the first few months when I was boringly running on health care and balancing the budget.

One of my favorite bids is that your mother called, she said that your running was, the quote was preposterous and besides, it's very expensive.

That sounds like my Scottish mother for sure.

So you had to win her over.

Yeah.

Well, you know, I didn't have to win anybody over except me.

And you start showing up

when you go to events in those early days.

Again, I assume there are not a lot of people that are showing up.

So what is,

I get what you're saying, that you were driven on your own to do this and the other decisions you've made politically.

But

it must be a little hard to walk into a room and not have that many people there.

Not hard for me.

You know,

I had no expectations.

I just put one foot in front of the other and keep going.

I mean, I didn't think, what if this and what if that or anything?

Now, if I had, I might have been better off.

Although if I had, I probably wouldn't have run.

I guess I walk into sometimes when I'm out on the trail in this campaign into stops that candidates are doing in New Hampshire or Iowa.

And sometimes there are a couple hundred people there and sometimes there are like 15.

And I've had six when I first started out.

Although one of my, that has to be a little tough.

I mean, when I sometimes feel bad for the candidates when I see them like that.

You know, I feel bad for the ones that think they're entitled to more.

Really?

I mean, I did have a crew around me who was great.

The people who were dedicated to the campaign early knew me personally or came to know me personally.

Although there were a few missteps.

My first trip to Iowa

in the snow, of course, in 2000, probably it was early 2003 or late 2002, I was picked up in Alexis and driven to the middle of farm country to meet with a group of farmers.

Not a great deal.

We decided we needed a little more advanced work before

that.

The current fed seems to be minivans.

That's how a lot of the candidates are.

Well, we had those two eventually.

So,

and then it starts.

You had your six-person event.

You had your Lexus drive to the farm.

The timing, this race has gotten started much earlier in the cycle than

the 04 race did.

You announced formerly in June of 03.

So you think about it.

Well, yeah, but

Isaac, it was well underway by June of 03.

What they did was they campaigned for six months and then they announced.

I mean, I'd been going pretty well full bore.

I was taking a lot of trips out of state before I left office.

So I would say mid-2002, we had already been to Iowa and New Hampshire a bunch of times

and raised money for a PAC called something like Healthy America or something like that.

Do you remember the moment when it started to catch?

Yep.

The moment was when I denounced the Iraq war, and everybody else in the field, all the serious players, had supported it.

And it was interesting because

I'm not particularly dovish for a Democrat,

but I had lived through the Johnson-Nixon War in Vietnam when both presidents lied their heads off to the American people, and 55,000 Americans were killed, and millions of

Southeast Asians.

And I just didn't think you, and I read a lot, and I read the Guardian and the Independent, in addition to all the American papers.

And I knew that MI6 was saying that there were no weapons of mass destruction.

There certainly wasn't an atomic program, which Cheney was trying to hint at there was, because he knew there wasn't, but was trying to get us into it.

And then I knew that the administration was lying.

And I had been through that before, and I wasn't going to go through it again.

So that's why I came out against the war.

And it turned out all the other major players had voted for it or supported it.

And

that's what galvanized the Democratic Party.

And I remember the exact speech.

And Trippi actually was the one that suggested it.

You're talking about Joe Trippi, who was your strategist there.

Yep.

And we were upstairs in a hotel ready to go down and talk to the DNC in February of 2003.

And

we sketched out the speech in 10 minutes.

And I went down and said, what I want to know is, why are all these Democrats voting for the Iraq war when there's no evidence that anything the administration is saying is true?

And then the next line was, what I want to know is, why are all the Democrats in this race supporting Bush's tax cuts, which favor the rich against their own constituencies?

And the DNC went absolutely crazy.

Terry McAuliffe was the most uncomfortable person I ever saw, except for Dick Gephardt and John Kerry, who were next.

Terry McAuliffe, who, of course, now maybe running for president himself.

Right.

He was the chair of the DNC at the time.

But the grassroots loved it.

They absolutely loved it, and that was it.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So was it like one day

the event that you do before that speech, you've got a small crowd, and then the event that you do do after that speech has a huge crowd.

It wasn't like that, but that started getting me noticed.

And what made me the frontrunner was in June when we outraised John Kerry, who was the anointed person from the inside the beltway, folks.

And that was that's that put me in the lead.

It must have been gratifying then to, but when you start showing up, and then now there are hundreds or thousands of people there to see you.

It wasn't.

I mean, for me, I just don't function the way most politicians do.

And if I did, maybe I would have been in the White House.

Who knows?

But I don't.

And I just, you know, it was exhausting.

I mean, we went on this thing called the Sleepless Summer Tour.

And we had this thing called the bat, and we would raise donations.

And of course, in those days, you didn't raise the kind of money they're raising today.

But we flew around the country with big crowds.

And I think we had 10,000 in Seattle.

We even went to, I kept insisting on stopping in Idaho because I knew there were Democrats there.

And even though we weren't going to win in the general, maybe we could get them all excited.

And someday, this is actually how the 50-state strategy started.

And we'd go and we'd raise money.

And then I found out much later that all the insiders in Washington were watching on cable television as the bat kept going up and finally hit a million dollars.

And when we went to Bryant Park in New York and finished the tour, but I was on my last legs.

I wasn't sure I was going to make it through the last speech.

Yeah.

It's funny, a million dollars being the benchmark where now it's

one other thing that was an aha moment.

When I went to Seattle,

I came out and this enormous crowd was filling the square, and I thought, God, I'm responsible for all these people.

That was an aha moment.

I thought, oh, my God, this is my responsibility now.

And what does that feel like?

The responsibility of this is the best way to do it.

It was very sobering.

A woman came up to me who was my age, and she looked at the crowd and she said, I didn't think there were all these people like me.

Because, you know,

we look at Trump now and everybody's demoralized.

But at that time, Bush and Cheney were the worst thing that happened to America in a long time.

And all these young people were upset.

But a lot of the older people who had dropped out of politics,

all of a sudden they had hope again.

And I realized that was not just something that was great politically, it was a big responsibility for me.

And when I lost in Iowa, and I, you know, I came in third when I was supposed to come in first.

The scream speech really had nothing to do with why I lost Iowa.

I'd already lost Iowa.

And that's kind of the kiss of death when you're supposed to come in first.

And I felt the only thing I didn't feel that bad about losing.

I felt really bad about letting all the supporters down.

When you think about what these candidates who are not at the top of the polls right now or having necessarily the best fundraising numbers or maybe are just being written off despite good poll numbers or good fundraising numbers,

what do you think they should keep in mind?

I think they have to know themselves, be comfortable with themselves, and know why they're running.

And keep your head down and keep going.

Do you think it'll be harder this time around in this election than it was in 2004?

Yeah, I do, because I really ran against

what the Democratic Party was becoming.

And they can't do that because

we're all running together against Trump.

Right.

Which is interesting because that race was the last race against a Republican incumbent, right?

And so there are some parallels.

Obviously, there are things that make it very different.

Trump changes the equation in almost every way.

But it was, at the time, Bush and Cheney seemed like the worst thing to Democrats, and now Trump certainly does.

Do you think it's a parallel situation?

No, I don't think it is.

I mean, of course, there's always a parallel because this only happens every four years and it's a good deal.

I think it's really different.

First of all,

the feeling about Bush and Cheney was not that different than the feeling about Nixon and and Agnew.

You know, there was, you know,

I don't think that Bush was corrupt, but I think Cheney was.

And I mean, in terms of, I don't think he was taking money, but like Trump's people, but I do think that he was saying things that weren't true, and he knew they weren't true.

And so there was this question that a little like Nixon and Agnew, that these people were not doing what they should have been doing for the country, and people were dying as a result.

So there was that.

But the big difference is that in the 2004 race, it was a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party.

In this race, it's not.

It's a battle to save America from a deterioration and move away from the rule of law.

You don't think it's a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party?

No, I don't.

I think that's a complete concoction of the media, and it makes me furious.

I mean, it's just ridiculous.

The Democratic Party is moving left.

It's just horseshit, if you'll pardon my Chinese.

That's right.

Well, the fact of the matter is, we elected 40 new members of the House.

You have three or four that have a high profile that are left, which I happen to think AOC is terrific.

I may not agree with her ideas, but it's just her energy, it's just what we need.

But the vast majority of those 40,

we won those seats in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Orange County, California, and central Pennsylvania.

Explain to me how those people are all flaming liberals.

They're not.

Well, and to your point, right?

Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar and Rashidi Talib, who are the, I guess, the three that you're talking about,

all are in seats that were held by Democrats last year.

The seats that put them in the majority are the seats that you're talking about.

That's right.

So, I mean, look,

I think also I'm beginning to think the terms liberal and conservative are now obsolete.

I think the new generation that's taking over the Democratic Party

is

more diverse, much more diverse, which I think is great.

It is energetic.

They are not particularly ideological.

I think AOC probably

Rashida Tlaib is probably a little, Ilan Omar maybe a little bit.

I think most of them are just pragmatists.

And I think they are fact-based.

I think they

merit and arguments, metrics makes a difference for them.

And I think they're interested in working together and ironing out differences.

It's a very new generation.

They're taking over the Democratic Party, and they don't particularly have a great allegiance to the Democratic Party, not because they don't like the Democrats.

It's because because they don't trust institutions.

And I think that's all healthy for the country.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Can I just tease that out of you a little bit?

Because you're saying that we shouldn't put too much emphasis on what they've done to the Democratic Party, but then you're talking about

how they are redefining the Democratic Party.

No, I think all 40 of them are redefining the Department of Power.

I mean, if you looked at the freshman Congresspeople, they finally, they look like the Virginia slate that won in 2017.

They are unbelievably diverse, unbelievably female, and young.

And that is the core of our base: are women, young people, and people of color.

I want to take you back to your race just for a few more minutes.

There was, of course,

you got very close to seeming like you were going to win the nomination.

And then the race, the primary race, kind of turned very quickly to Carrie.

There was this feeling of like, well, let's get serious.

Well, no,

that may or may not be true either.

I can tell you what it felt like.

I knew three weeks before Iowa that we were in trouble.

I could feel it slipping away.

We hadn't called the number one

for months since June.

There was just too many organizational failures.

And frankly, I was a flawed candidate.

You know, people loved me because I spoke out, said what I thought.

You know, once somebody asked me, dude, I like Trump voters.

And I had to think about it for a minute.

And then I went, I actually kind of do because they all used to vote for me when I was governor.

I mean, leaving aside the racists and the neo-Nazi types that are voting for them.

I'm talking about the ordinary people who just wanted somebody who was outspoken.

And that was me.

Well, that's all fine and good.

You know, but

sometimes it's a little better to be political once in a while if you're planning on being president.

And I wasn't very political, and I was not very well organized either.

So is that what it was?

It was just the organization started falling.

I mean, that must have been,

in my memory of it, of the race, and obviously I wasn't living through it like you were,

the high watermark was when Al Gore endorsed you.

He was the previous nominee.

And it was like, oh, wow, okay, Dean is going to be the nominee.

Bill Clinton thought I was going to be the nominee.

He called me.

And then within not too long, I guess it's weeks forward from that is when you felt like it was slipping away, right?

So

that

whiplash must have been something, no?

It was.

It was very tough.

I remember in Iowa, I don't remember if it was before or after Al endorsed me, that going to these huge crowds, and nobody else was drawing crowds like this.

And then I'd go to an event, and I'd go to another really big crowd in another part of the state.

And then all of a sudden, I realized that it was like a Grateful Dead concert.

It was the same kids, and they were all out of state, and they'd get in their cars and go to the next one, and they'd all fill a place, and I'd have a thousand people, but they were, you know, they weren't a thousand votes.

Most of them weren't even registered, and it was the same audience again and again and again.

And then I realized what I had was a really tight

family of people that we were all together, but it wasn't growing.

We hadn't done the spade work that we needed to do.

And I don't blame staff for that.

Look, we came in with a candidate from a state with 600,000 people.

I mean, it was just, we were exhausted.

It was just, I was disorganized.

I didn't think I was the right kind of leader for the campaign.

I would say things.

I remember that.

Just as an example of a really stupid thing that I did in the summertime before I was leading the pack, but I was already, well, I guess maybe I could have been leading the PAC.

It was around June when we outraised Kerry.

I was giving a major foreign policy speech in LA to the LA Foreign Affairs Group or something, whatever it was called.

And it was the day Saddam was captured.

And so instead of calling back and talking by the defense team, which was very good, I had, you know,

Sandy Berger and people like that, you know, who

knew what they were talking about.

Susan Rice was, of course, she was advising other people too, which is what those foreign policy people do.

But it wasn't like I had dumb people there advising me.

I didn't call them.

I crossed out a few sentences in the speech and put, and we are not safer now that Saddam has been captured.

Well, that was true, but it was an incredibly stupid thing to say when people were feeling good about the fact that Saddam had been captured.

The military had every right to be proud.

And it was absolutely the truth.

We weren't any safer that Saddam was captured.

He hadn't been president of Iraq for four or five months.

But it was...

Ready, he was in the spider hole.

Yeah,

you don't have an obligation to say everything that comes into your mind, and I couldn't seem to quite get that.

Aaron Powell, and that seems to be where I think if one of these candidates who is right now

not at the front of the pack starts to move forward, that may be the kind of thing that they would have to think about and face.

Yes,

some of them will.

But even in Congress, I had no experience with federal politics at all other than being the chairman of the National Governors Association, which was a pretty good starting place for Clinton.

So it was not like that's no experience.

And I was impatient with all the nonsense that goes on in Washington.

I've just never been somebody to mince my words and

say everything politely.

I just say what I think.

And

I think that was a detriment to the campaign in the end.

It's what drew people to me, but it's also what scared people.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: You tapped into, as we've been talking about, a lot of frustration and anger that there was in the Democratic Party.

And then

it felt like the anger at Bush was not enough to

get to where you wanted it to get your candidacy.

I'm wondering, again, now comparing it to where we are now, do you worry about Democrats getting too caught up in their anger at Donald Trump and focusing on that?

Yes.

The candidate who's going to beat Trump,

and I don't know who it is, because I don't know who it's going to be, who's going to be nominated, obviously, is going to be somebody who doesn't pay a lot of attention to Trump.

I'll give you an example of somebody I think could be Trump, although I don't think this is the only candidate.

When Amy Klobuchar announced,

she was announcing in a snowstorm, and Trump tweeted some juvenile thing and made fun of her.

And instead of saying something back, she goes, she looks at the press and she says, oh, what do you think Donald's hair would look like in a snowstorm?

And then bang, the economy, Social Security, healthcare.

That's how you have to treat Trump.

Trump will make himself the issue in this race.

If he does it, he probably is going going to lose because he's not a very attractive guy and most Americans agree with that.

If our candidate does it, we're going to lose.

We have to talk about the economy.

We have to talk about bread and butter issues, whether it's health care, universal health care, whether it's race, whether whatever it is.

Those are the issues that confront the American people, not whether Trump is an idiot or not.

The American people have already made up their mind about that.

It's not likely to be changed no matter which side they're on.

We need to talk about what's good for the country because Trump is incapable of doing that in a meaningful way.

We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back in a moment with more from Howard Dean to talk more about that question about 2020.

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So, Governor, you were talking about

the 2020 field.

You mentioned AB Clubshark.

Are there other candidates that are impressing you so far?

Sure.

But

I have this gig with the DNC.

It's not paid, but I'm trying to put together a ⁇ it's not with a DNC, actually, it's an independent ⁇

because it has to be independent by law.

We're basically trying to do what the Republicans did two cycles ago very, very well, which is have a data-sharing operation which will encompass all the data that we all have and share it.

And there's been a lot of infighting in the Democratic Party for a variety of reasons.

And we finally brokered a peace agreement between the state chairs and the national chair, and everybody's on board.

And I think everybody understands this is a national emergency for the country.

So, but if I have that role, even though it's not a DNC role, it has to be a neutral role because this organization is going to share

data with candidates

as well as

all up and down the ticket, including the presidential.

So I'm not going to pick a candidate, and I'm going to be careful.

I used Amy just because she came to mind, but of course there's tons of candidates who could get the nomination right now, and there are a whole bunch of them.

And the invisible primary, which is mostly based on fundraising and gossip, is pretty strong.

And there are some candidates out there who have raised a lot of money into the millions.

And I think all of those are potential winners.

And if somebody else wants to join them because their fundraising gets good, they'll be a potential winner, too.

One of the ones who's been doing pretty well, better than anybody I think would have expected, including himself, is Pete Buttajudge, who's a person you have a little bit of history with.

You endorsed him when he ran for DNC chair at the beginning of 2017.

And the argument you made was that he, at that point, I guess, was 34, 35, that there was a generational change that the Democratic Party needed to make.

He did not do very well in that race.

He dropped out right before the votes started being counted, and the thought was that he'd probably get about five votes.

But he is doing much better in this presidential race.

I won't ask you then to comment specifically on Buddha Judge, but do you think, given what you were saying about some of the new members of Congress, that the party needs to do more to

embrace the generational change that you see coming?

I think they're doing, look, here's the, this is difficulty.

This is generational succession, which is not happening in the Republican Party.

And when it is, it's the kind of the, you know, the people who think greed is good, the 40- and year old who grew up under Ronald Reagan

our generational change is people under 35 and it's very very different

and yes we need to do it however you know the Democrats are not immune to human emotions and it is natural and the DNC is one of the organizations that does this is to resist change the folks in the DNC have worked all their lives to get where they got they're very proud of where they got they're not ready to be displaced by another generation but it's going to happen unless we figure out how to make our

telomeres suddenly grow longer.

So, my argument is you can do this the hard way or the easy way, but it's going to happen.

You might as well make it easier for this generation because they're going to need a lot of our help because this is a generation that doesn't believe in institutions, and you have to have institutions, although they're presumably going to look a lot different when this generation finally takes over.

They're well on their way.

Picking up 40 seats is a huge step forward, both for all of us and for the new generation that is going to take over and reshape this country in ways that I think most Democrats are going to be very, very happy with.

Aaron Powell,

you tapped into young people when you were running in a way that then Barack Obama tapped into.

The same people.

Right.

And then many of them, the same kind of people that were the younger folks who were with Bernie Sanders in 2016, and we'll see where they fall in this race.

Do you

worry at all about young people turning out to vote in the 2020 election for Democrats or for the Democrat who ends up being the nominee?

Not as much as I used to.

And, you know, when I said the same people, I don't mean the same group.

I mean literally the same human beings.

Blue State Digital, first of all, I don't take any credit for being the first candidate to use internet fundraising.

I didn't know anything about the internet, and I'd argue that I still don't.

Well, we had no money, and we let all the 23-year-olds who were inspired by the campaign do whatever they damn well pleased.

And they created this whole thing.

There was no Facebook, there was no Twitter, there was

barely webcams.

And so they created all this.

Some of them started from my campaign, started Blue State Digital.

We hired them to redo the DNC because there was no tech base of the DNC when I got there.

And then Obama hired them away from the DNC in 2006.

But what Obama had that we didn't have was, first of all, I would argue a better candidate.

But second of all, they had discipline.

I mean, you know, say what you want about David Plough.

He ran the best campaign, the two best campaigns I've ever seen in anybody run.

I always thought the Republicans generally ran better campaigns than we did because they're much more disciplined.

There was no no campaign that's ever been as disciplined as Barack Obama's.

But it was the same people that were fueling the campaign.

And they've continued to go on.

Now they're all running for office, which is fantastic.

It's great.

I mean, it's right.

Or they're running the campaigns.

Or they're running the campaigns.

There are people

who were sharing one-bedroom apartments, working on your campaign, who are now managing campaigns.

That's true.

Or

graduated beyond managing campaigns.

Or in legislatures all over the country.

There's another candidate that I'm not going to ask you for your political evaluation of, but a person that you've known for a long time because he's another Vermont guy.

That's Bernie Sanders.

He was elected to the House right before you became governor,

but he was already the mayor of Burlington.

Tell me, do you remember the first time you met Bernie Sanders?

I do, but I'm not going to tell the story in public.

Well, that's just very enticing.

I would say yes.

I was a bike path activist, and he didn't like Democrats.

But I have to say that, you know, we've had our moments, especially since he built his early career attacking Democrats.

But I think we respect each other.

And

one thing you have to give Bernie Sanders credit for is we almost certainly would not be talking about Medicare for all today if it weren't for Bernie Sanders.

So, you know, I think we've made our peace.

We respect each other

and we have a cordial relationship.

And I really can't get into, you know, which, I don't want to get too much into the gossip about about who might do what.

But he's certainly going to be a candidate for the, I mean, you know, he's one of the people who's, at this point, absolutely a favorite.

I don't see how anybody could count him out of the race.

Anybody who does would be an idiot.

And he's going to be into the, until the end or something close to the end, no matter what, because he has a very strong base that's not likely to leave him.

Now,

can he grow that base in the presence of 18 other candidates?

That's going to be his challenge.

And whatever happened to that bike path in Vermont?

That got built.

Especially after I, well, he actually, well, I don't want to get too far into it, but he did finally

build, he built the first piece of it.

And then when I was governor, of course, there was plenty of funding that flowed towards it.

And it goes all the way to Montreal now.

It's a bike path that goes to Montreal.

It does.

It does.

Hannah, have you biked that path?

Not all the way to Montreal, but I bike it every day.

All right, so let's end on this.

Let's say it's October of this year, maybe even a little bit later.

The caucuses aren't until February.

Let's say it's December.

And a candidate that we're not even talking about in any real way right now

is rising the polls, raising a lot of money, calls you up and says,

Howard, I'm freaking out.

I don't know how I deal with this.

What do you tell that person?

Oh, you know,

I talk to everybody.

Anybody who wants to talk to me, I talk to.

I mean,

I have a huge regard for Kirsten Gillibrand.

I've helped her in her career.

Betto, I don't know, but a lot of people who I do know and respect think he's terrific.

So, I mean, there are a lot of good candidates in the race.

And Salwell, I know.

I mean, there's a lot of good people, some of whom probably aren't going to go very far.

I think John Delaney is terrific.

I've heard him give one of the best trade

analyses of where Democrats should be on trade of anybody I know.

There are a lot of unbelievably smart, capable people running for president.

The question is: is:

can you get through the process?

And I'm a big believer in that.

After I finished, it was a brutal process.

I learned what happens when you get to be the front runner of the press who was anxious to help me in the way up for clickbait, turns on you and is anxious to help you take you down, which they eventually helped do with the I Have a Scream speech, which, as you well know, was really sort of fabricated because none of the print people in the room thought anything of it.

Well, we couldn't hear it, right?

Exactly.

Neither could I.

But anyway, I mean, so, but that, I mean, so, you know, it's a very, very tough, ugly process.

And it's what I tell, I do a lot of teaching now.

The first thing I say about politics is you have to remember politics is a substitute for war.

They're both about succession and asset allocation.

And that's why the stakes are so high, and that's why it's an ugly, ugly business.

And you know what?

I don't think if you can't get through that process, you should be president of the United States.

I really don't.

I think you have to be tough enough to take that punch because when Putin comes demanding Alaska back,

Iowa is going to seem like nothing.

And you better be able to get through Iowa and New Hampshire and Nevada and South Carolina and all the other states.

I shouldn't be giving lists of states here.

That's very dangerous territory for me.

But if you can't get through that,

you're not naming states just out of nothing.

That's right.

There's a scene in, I think it must be the last season of the West Wing when there's been the race for the new president and Alan Alda is the Republican candidate.

He's lost,

and it's him going about his day now.

Suddenly, the election's over,

and he doesn't have the Secret Service with him anymore.

He has to get his own newspaper and all that stuff.

When it all ended for you, was there a day like that where it was like, oh, here I am again, just Howard Dean?

It was actually, it wasn't a relief because I, of course, would have liked to win the nomination and see if I could beat Bush,

which would have been quite a task because they were very well organized, as Republicans usually are.

But, you know, actually, I was exhausted.

I had a great moment with Al Gore.

I should tell this story because it's one of the most valuable stories I learned.

When it was obvious I was going to lose, my last primary was going to be Wisconsin, and I was in the top of an old railroad hotel in Milwaukee.

And I knew I was going to lose, and the phone rings at midnight.

So I'm stalking around the room in the dark on the phone, and it's Al Gore.

And before I let him get a word in Edgeways, I rant and rave.

I said, what do I owe the Democratic Party?

You?

Because, you know, in Iowa, the whole four of them met together every day.

I mean, the press secretaries to figure out, which is kind of routine.

Everybody does it.

But I thought I felt picked on and all this.

So I was ranting and raving at Al.

And I say, you tell, explain to me what I owe the Democratic Party.

You know, why should I support the nominee?

Explain to me, you know, blah, blah, blah.

And he was incredibly patient and waited and waited.

And finally, I stopped ranting and raving.

He said, you know, Howard, this really isn't about you, it's about the country.

Just stopped me dead in my tracks.

Here was a guy who had the presidency stolen from him by the Supreme Court.

And he is saying that.

He is a true patriot.

And he just made me.

I've never forgotten.

It was a lesson in humility that all this ranting and raving, because you feel like you're

wronged in some way, is childish.

And it is about the country in the end, not about you.

And good for Al for telling me that, because it wouldn't anybody else could have told me that.

Because the second he said it, I thought, this guy's lost far more than you've ever lost, and you better shut up and listen to him.

So do you think if you had to make that call to one of the candidates this time around by the end of the primary fights, that are you confident that they would all respond to it the way that you responded to Gore?

Well, it's very different.

I mean, Al Gore was elected President of the United States and the Supreme Court with a five-year-old.

Let me ask the question maybe differently.

If Al Gore called them, do you feel like they would all respond the way that you responded?

I don't know, but it's sort of another test about what kind of a politician you are.

Are you a politician for your own benefit or for somebody else's benefit?

And Gore was clearly in politics for somebody else's benefit, and that was a valuable lesson I learned.

If you're not in it for somebody else's benefit, you probably shouldn't be in it at all.

I think that's a good place to leave it.

Governor Howard Dean.

Thanks.

Thanks for joining us on Radio Atlantic.

Thanks for having me, Isaac.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

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