http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17608-2003Sep29.htmlFor months, the rap on Dean was that he was too liberal to win the general election. Lieberman has been leading the Dean-is-a-liberal-baddie charge for weeks. Now along comes Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.), who is fending off a challenge by Dean in the crucial state of Iowa (see Sept. 17 Talking Points), firing away from the governor’s left flank with charges that he cozied up to GOP bogeyman Newt Gingrich in the mid-1990s. Gephardt was on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday repeating charges that Dean sided with Gingrich in trying to cut Medicare.
It's somewhat of an odd charge, given that Dean, then chairman of the National Governors Association, first caught the eye of the national media with his exceedingly harsh denunciations of the new Gingrich-led Congress in 1995, the year after the historic Republican Revolution. The Dean campaign has noted that Dean appeared at several press conferences and events with Gephardt in 1995 to protest GOP plans to overhaul the welfare system and press for a balanced budget amendment.
In the archives of The Washington Post we find this story that Balz wrote in January 1995:
"The chairman of the National Governors' Association, Democratic Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont, yesterday ripped into the Republicans' welfare reform plan as a policy 'to starve children and kick old people out of their houses’ and attacked Republican governors in extraordinarily harsh language for helping to negotiate it.
"Dean said the plan, outlined Friday in Washington, is the work of 'extremists who have taken over Congress.' In a telephone interview, he vowed, 'I'll be damned if I'm going to let extremists take over the National Governors' Association.'"So which is: too liberal to win or too conservative to trust?
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