QUESTION: My question is for Governor Dean.
I recently read a comment that you made where you said that you wanted to be the candidate for guys with confederate flags on their pickup trucks. When I read that comment, I was extremely offended.
Could you explain to me how you plan on being sensitive to needs and issues regarding slavery and African-Americans, after making a comment of that nature?
(APPLAUSE)
DEAN: Sure. Martin Luther King said that it was his dream that the sons of slave holders and the sons of slaves sit down around a table and make common good.
There are 102,000 kids in South Carolina right now with no health insurance. Most of those kids are white. The legislature cut $70 million out of the school system. Most of the kids in the public school system are white. We have had white southern working people voting Republican for 30 years, and they've got nothing to show for it.
They vote for a president who cut 1 percent of this country's taxpayers' taxes by $26,000, which is more than they make. And I think we need to talk to white southern workers about how they vote, because when white people and black people and brown people vote together in this country, that's the only time that we make social progress, and they need to come back to the Democratic Party.
(In response to Al Sharpton):
DEAN: We're not going to win in this country, and even worse, Democrats, if we don't have a big tent. And I'm going to tell you right now, Reverend, you're right. I am not a bigot. And Jesse Jackson Jr. endorsed me and has stood up for what I said.
DEAN: And Reverend Jesse Jackson went down to South Carolina last week and went to a trailer park which was inhabited by mostly white folks making $25,000 a year. We need to reach out to those people, too, because they suffer as well.
I understand the legacy of racism in this country, and I understand the legacy of bigotry in this country. We need to bring folks together in this race, just like Martin Luther King tried to do before he was killed. He was right. And I make no apologies for reaching out to poor white people.
(In response to Edwards asking if he was wrong to make the rebel flag comment):
DEAN: No, I wasn't John Edwards because people who vote who fly the Confederate flag, I think they are wrong because I think the Confederate flag is a racist symbol. But I think there are lot of poor people who fly that flag because the Republicans have been dividing us by race since 1968 with their southern race strategy.
I am tired of being divided by race in this country. I am tired of being divided by abortion, by gay rights.
I want to go down to the South and talk to people who don't make any more than anybody else up north but keep voting Republican against their own economic interests and that's what I am saying.
COOPER: Governor Dean, your response, and then we'll move on.
(APPLAUSE)
DEAN: I'm not going to take a back seat to anybody in terms of fighting bigotry. I signed–I am the only person here that ever signed a bill that outlawed discrimination against gays and lesbians by giving them the same amount…
(APPLAUSE)
What I discovered is that fear of people who opposed that bill, which is the majority of people in my state, was mostly based on ignorance.
We have to reach out to every single American. We can't write–we don't have to embrace the Confederate flag, and I never suggested that we did. But we have to reach out to all disenfranchised people.
Robert Kennedy brought people together in Appalachia. Jesse Jackson did it. And we're going to bring people together in this country.
I understand that the Confederate flag is a loathsome symbol, just as I understood that all the anti-gay slurs that I had to put up with in Vermont after I signed that bill were loathsome symbols. If we don't reach out to every single American, we can't win.
I have had enough of campaigns based on fear. I want a campaign based on hope.
QUESTION: I'm a freshman at Brown University. And going to college this year, I was confused with an important decision. My mom advised me one way; my dad the other. And so my question for you all is–and it's not quite boxers or briefs, but Macs or PCs?
So, Governor Dean, Mac or PC?
DEAN: PC. PC.
Governor Dean, if you could respond perhaps to what Congressman Kucinich said.
DEAN: Sorry, I didn't hear the question.
COOPER: If you could respond a little bit to what Congressman Kucinich said. Does the U.N.–can they really handle the job?
DEAN: I don't think we have any choice.
Let me just tell you what the difference between me and General Clark and Senator Kerry and Senator Edwards and Senator Lieberman are.
I thought it was bad judgment to support that war in the first place, because the president–I supported the first Gulf War, I supported the Afghanistan war. Our people had been killed. We have a right to defend ourselves.
But this time the president of the United States did not tell the truth to us about why we were going. And I think one of the most important things in a president is to have judgment and patience. I think it was a mistake for Congress to give the authority to the president to go into Iraq. And if I had been president, we wouldn't be there right now.
Secondly, the way to get out–we can't just cut and run. Carol Moseley Braun is right about that. What we have to do is do what George Bush's father did. He had over 100,000 troops in Iraq from foreign countries, mostly Arabic-speaking or Muslim troops.
We need to bring troops from Arabic-speaking nations in so this is an international reconstruction and not an American occupation. And I think, yes, the U.N. can do that.
QUESTION: My question is this: Who were you when you were 20 years old? And did you ever think that you would run for president?
COOPER: Changing the subject a little bit, Governor Dean, I know you took a year off after college, spent a little time skiing. Is that something you would recommend for college graduates?
DEAN: When I was 20 years old, I was a junior in a college in New Haven, Connecticut. And I was totally turned off politics. I thought that the President of the United States was a crook, which turned out to be right. It was Richard Nixon.
(LAUGHTER)
And I thought that the Vietnam war was a mistake. And I had no idea I was going to end up in public service. I was teaching school in the inner city middle school, which was–I also learned at that time that teaching was one of the hardest professions in the world, because you're required…
(APPLAUSE)
… because it requires you not only to connect with kids–I usually had a card game going on in the back of the room, which shows you how effective I was–you also have to stand for five hours without going to the bathroom, which may be good training for president.
COOPER: Governor Dean, we know–you talked earlier about what you did in Vermont regarding…
DEAN: Oh, I'm sorry.
COOPER: You talked earlier about what you did in Vermont regarding civil unions. And you've also been quoted as saying, quote, “that gay marriage,” quote, “makes me uncomfortable, the same as anybody else.”
I don't know if we have it. We had a photo from The New York Times this Sunday, two guys who went–oh, we don't have it–anyway, two guys who went up to Canada to get married. What about that makes you uncomfortable?
DEAN: You sound like Tim Russert. I said that, the day after the Supreme Court decision, or the day of the Supreme Court decision.
Look, when I signed the civil unions bill, I didn't know anything more about the gay community than I did 25 years earlier. I did it, not because I knew a lot about the gay community, it was because I believed every single American deserves equal rights under the law, not just the ones you play golf with or you live next door to, but every single American deserves equal rights under the law.
So, you know, I have come to know the LGBT community over time because I signed the first equal rights under the law bill for gay and lesbian Americans.
But, you know, I think most Americans don't understand the gay and lesbian community. And that's part of getting equal rights, is to reaching out to Americans who don't understand and help them to understand.
And the single-most important act in helping gay and lesbians get the same rights as everybody else is not my signing the Civil Unions Bill, it's people who are gay and lesbian standing up and being proud of who they are and saying so. And that way, Americans get to understand them as human beings, which is the process I went through and every heterosexual goes through.
From Kerry (about Dean): “He's been endorsed more times by the NRA than the NEA.”
Response: DEAN: I told a group of press people in Iowa that the reason I knew I was the frontrunner is because I keep picking buck shot out of my rear end all the time.
Here's my position on guns. I support the assault weapons ban. And I fought the renewal of the assault weapons ban. I do not support the elimination of liability for gun owners. I support background checks. And I support background checks for people who buy guns at gun shows.
However, I come from a rural state where people hunt. We have the lowest homicide rate in America. So my attitude is, let's have those federal laws. Let's enforce every single one of them. And then let's every state make additional gun control, as they see fit.
New Jersey and California are going to want a lot more gun control. Let them have it. We need a base of federal laws that make sense. And then we need to make additional laws, as states think they need it. And I think that makes a lot of sense for every state in the country.
COOPER: All right, we are getting a lot of e-mail pouring in. Probably a predictable question just got asked. It is an e-mail from a viewer: “Which of you are ready to admit to having used marijuana in the past?”
And they want us to go around and ask each of you.
Governor Dean?
DEAN: We'll all keep our hands down on this one.
COOPER: And Governor Dean?
DEAN: Yes.