Democratic National Chairman hosts student panel at Drexel

As Drexel University hosted the Fourth Democratic Candidates' Debate of the race for 2008 on Oct. 30, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee and former presidential candidate Howard Dean sat with area college journalists for an open roundtable.

He opened by explaining what he called a "grassroots effort" that will start next week to recruit Democratic voters. The Neighbor to Neighbor Program is an initiative that will involve door-to-door campaigning by democratic volunteers. Dean explained that each volunteer will knock on the same 25 doors three times in the next year, and that they will also be responsible for recruiting two other individuals to fulfill the same mission.

"The way to counteract hate radio - Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and all those people - is to show up, knock on the door, and let them know that we're not anything like what those guys say," said Dean.

In a later question about the influence of the ultra-conservative news media, he answered light-heartedly:

"More than 50 percent of people your age get their news from Jon Stewart and the Internet," he said.

He went on to stress the importance of college-aged students in the next election, commenting on the increasing number of voters under 30 years of age. According to Dean, between 2002 and 2006, the number of voters in that demographic rose 24 percent.

"The interesting thing is that most people your age are registering independent and then voting democrat, which means we have to earn that vote every time." said Dean. "Every one of our campaigns has to be about people your age, or else we pay for it for 60 years."

He was confident that the youngest group of voters tends to identify with the Democratic Party's ideals, in part because of the great diversity that it contains.

"In your age group, unlike our age group, everybody votes in roughly the same proportions," he said. "It doesn't matter if you're black, white, or brown; you turn out about the same ratio."

When asked to give a grade to college-aged students on their political involvement, Dean was generous.

"I would give you an A. I think your generation is grossly underestimated in terms of what it has accomplished," he said.

As the subject matter of the roundtable turned to the foreign policy of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq, Dean became increasingly partisan.

"In order to make America safe, you have to be tough, and the Republicans are very tough. But you also have to be smart, and they are not so good at that," he said.

He explained that the general modus operandi for Democrats in promoting peace in the Middle East will be to focus on increasing standards of living rather than combat-based initiatives. The exit strategy he outlined, which included temporarily retaining a presence at bases outside of current combat zones, would take about a year and half.

"The truth is we're not going to get out of Iraq until we have a Democratic president," Dean said.

While he was wary of Bush's policy in Iraq, he was mostly concerned with the effects that increases in spending there have had on domestic affairs.

"You borrow 200 billion to run the war and then you can't come up with five billion to make sure that everybody under 18 has health insurance in this country?" he asked rhetorically. "Those are not American priorities."

As the discussion drew to a close, Dean focused again on the importance of the youngest bracket of voters. He listed financing education, protecting the environment, and balancing the budget as the most relevant issues to college-aged students in the 2008 election, and assured the panel that these were top priorities for all of the Democratic candidates.