Governor Dean on FTN about the two wars.
The war on the middle class and the war in IraqWe think there is a war that hasn't been discussed and that's the Republican war on the American family. A million people have lost their health care every single year that George Bush has been President. We need a minimum wage, America needs a raise. The congress has gotten their raises but the American people haven't gotten theirs, so I think you are going to see a lot more middle class tax fairness but you're not going to see across the board big tax increases on anybody. That is just the usual scare tactics that the Republicans always bring out in order to try to win elections".
"I think we will pay for that (middle class tax fairness) by making sure that those big oil companies who just reported record profits are going to pay their fair share, because they haven't been doing it under the Republicans."
And he also talks about the other war that is devastating us...the war in Iraq. He says even if Democrats win back Congress, the president is still the boss about the war.
"The president will still be in charge of foreign policy and the military so the influence of a Democratic Congress will be I think a positive influence but I don't imagine that we're suddenly gonna force the President to reverse his course. We don't have the ability to do that, but I think we will put some pressure on him to have some benchmarks, some timetables, and a real plan other than stay the course. What you'll see happen is the Iraqis will finally get down to the business of a political settlement. Right now, they are basically using our troops so that each folks', each one of their different parties can get advantage hoping that we will be there long enough so they can take advantage. That puts our guys in the middle, and our troops are great and they don't deserve that. They deserve to be served better by their civilian leadership.
"One of the things democrats believe if we should take over and if we eventually take back the presidency is that we are going to need to leave a force of special operations folks in the Middle East. Not in Iraq, but on the periphery of Iraq so that we can deal with terrorism in a timely manner. We don't believe having, since the President chose to send us there and has created conditions of terrorism in Iraq where there were none there before, we don't believe now that we can suddenly pull everybody out. We would like to bring as many people home as possible as fast as possible, but most of the Democrats that I know believe that we are going to have to leave a special operations force in the Middle East in order to deal with the terrorist situation."
Here is the video page from Face the Nation. I thought Howard Dean did a super job, and I thought Scheiffer took Mehlman down a notch.
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/ftn/main34... And no, they did not appear together, though CBS was trying to spin it that way.