This past afternoon I made my way up to Plaistow, NH to catch Dean's town-meeting on economics and small business. I was largely impressed by everything substantive that he had to say and his excellent manner of answering questions*
One thing he needs to work on, though, is explaining his rationale for disagreeing with his fellow candidates on the retention of the middle-class bracket of Bush's tax cuts. When he spoke about this directly he spent most his time commenting on how it wasn't much of a tax cut in the first place (the middle-class portion, that is). Which begs the question of "why not leave it intact?"
He did in fact give his reasoning, but only later and indirectly. Towards the end of the meeting he stated that his greatest priorities as president would be (possibly not in order): Funding for special education, healthcare, national security, and the federal deficit. After these, he said, there are lots of good things that he'd like to accomplish, but that they were niceties that he'd put behind his main four.
Not on the list of four was "tax relief". This is how he should be explaining his position explicitly. He would come across much clearer stating that sound economic practice will raise employment levels for the middle-class, raise salaries for the middle-class, and that beyond that "tax relief", while it would be nice, is not a priority on his budget concept when compared to these other items.
*He'd start by giving a couple minutes of background of his position on the general topic at hand and then come back to the question and answer it directly in the context of his larger platform. It was a technique that both addressed questions directly and offered greater insight into the candidate.
