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Tavis: Howard Dean is, of course, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and the former governor of Vermont, who ran for the Democratic nomination back in 2004 for the White House. In three weeks, he's hoping his party can win enough seats to take back one or both houses of Congress. He joins us tonight from Washington. Dr. Dean, as always, nice to have you on the program, sir.

Howard Dean: Tavis, thanks for having me on.

Tavis: So is it one or both?

Dean: Well, we're gonna find that out. Both houses are in play now, the Senate and the House both. I wish the election were held tomorrow, but it's not being held tomorrow, and we got a lot of work to do in the next three weeks.

Tavis: Let me ask you whether or not you believe that an election of this magnitude, an election of this importance, can, in fact, turn on one issue as some pundits seem to suggest, which would be, of course, the Foley factor?

Dean: I don't believe that. I think that the Foley factor is a problem for the Republicans because it demonstrates the Republican's willingness to put their party above what's good for the country. Instead of choosing to defend a child, they chose to circle the wagons and hope to get by, and hope nobody would notice what was going on. They did that with Katrina when they made a mess of that. They were dishonest about the Iraq war. They haven't managed the budget well. So it's part of a greater pattern that reminds us of the incompetence of the Republicans.

Tavis: Let me ask whether or not you think it is a foregone conclusion, as many Americans do, that either party, when it stays in office too long, becomes corrupt?

Dean: I think that's sort of the history of America. I think our problem in the Democrats was not so much that we became corrupt, it wasn't anything close to the amount of corruption that we have now among the Republicans. But we did become detached, and that's a problem. And one of the things I'm doing in the Democratic National Committee is we're fighting in all 50 states. I don't care if the state doesn't vote for the Democratic candidate in 2008. I wanna be in the field, talking to people about why Democrats are good for America, in every state.

Tavis: I'm certain that you saw, as did so many of the rest of us, the cover story on you a couple of weeks ago in the 'New York Times Magazine,' and there are some folk, indeed in your own party, who've taken to task your notion of this 50 state strategy. So let me just back up for a second and ask you to explain what you mean by 50 state strategy, and why certain people have taken exception to that idea.

Dean: Well, there's always folks that wanna do things the old way, but we've been doing things the old way for 30 years, and we haven't been winning a lot of elections, especially at the House and the Senate level for the last 12 years. In some ways, the Republicans have a problem now because after 12 years, they've become arrogant and corrupt and out of touch.

We didn't become corrupt or arrogant, but we were out of touch. If you're not asking for people's votes in places like Mississippi and Alabama and Utah and Colorado, then you're not even on the radar screen. I think it's discourteous, and it sends a bad message to voters if you don't care enough to at least ask for their votes. So we're now engaged in asking for everybody's votes.

We ask for votes not just from our core Democrats that we always hope are gonna support us. We ask for votes for evangelicals and people of faith. We ask for votes from conservatives who wanna see the budget managed well. We ask for vote from people who are scared of terrorism, and don't think the president's done a good job managing terrorism.

We're willing to ask for anybody's votes. We know we're not gonna get them all, Tavis, but the act of asking is a sign of respect, and I think that's something the Democrats have to learn.

Tavis: Fair to say that with all of the cards that seem to be stacked in the deck for Democrats this time, fair to say if you guys can't win this time, you ought to pack up and go home for good?

Dean: You can never say that, and we're not gonna pack up and go home for good. The Republicans took 30 years from 1964 to 1994 to get into power. If we can do it after 12, that would be a great thing. But my attitude is you just keep fighting until you win.

Tavis: In the last presidential election, John Kerry got fewer votes from Hispanics than Al Gore did four years prior. President Bush made inroads with the Hispanic community. I think one can argue, unless one is completely stuck on stupid, one has to argue now that given the Republican politics of the last year or two, where Hispanic voters are concerned, that the Republican Party has got to be in some trouble.

I was just reading this morning a new study that finds that there will be, there are, seven percent more Hispanics eligible to vote this time around than there were in the election two years ago. How do you see those Hispanic, those Latino votes going this time around?

Dean: We know how they're gonna go, because we met with a great many leaders in the Hispanic community, including Hispanic evangelicals who supported the president the last time who are not supporting the Republicans this time because of their very harsh view about immigration. Even today, in places like Oregon, they have candidates for governor, for example, asserting that illegal immigrants vote and using that as a witch hunt issue.

Well, illegal immigrants don't vote in Oregon. They just lie. This is typical Republican stuff, divide and conquer. The problem is they've taken on a very fast-growing group of voters. We know what Hispanics think of what the president has done. It's now 80-20 in the Hispanic community in favor of the Democrats, instead of 60-40, as it was two years ago.

And we're gonna work very hard with the leadership in the Hispanic community to get people registered to vote, and to get them to the polls. Because those are likely gonna be overwhelmingly Democratic votes.

Tavis: Ken Mehlman, on my radio program now famously said earlier this year that 2006 would be the year of the Black Republican. Two thousand six, he declared, would be the year of the Black Republican. He made that quote to me on my radio program. I looked up the next day, and it was in every media outlet in the country. Here we are now on the eve of these midterm elections, and there are a few well-known African Americans who are running for major offices. How do you read whether or not the Republican Party is starting to siphon off, one, two, three percent at a time, the African American vote that the Democrats have held for so long?

Dean: Tavis, I actually think this is gonna be the year of the African American Democrat. I think you're gonna have Deval Patrick, the new generation, first governor elected outside the south who's of African American descent. Doug Wilder, of course, was the first ever.

You're gonna have Harold Ford, who's right now 10 points up on his challenger. The Republicans are throwing everything they can in Tennessee to stop Harold Ford. He's gonna be, I believe, the first African American Senator elected from the South ever by the popular vote, and since Reconstruction otherwise.

We have worked really hard in the African American community and the religious community, in the political community, and particularly among young Black professionals, which I think frankly were the group that we were most likely to lose.

We're working really, really hard now to speak about opportunity, to talk about the new Democratic Party. Not just to focus on what we've done in the past, which is to open doors for the Black community with the civil rights support, and so forth, but what we're gonna do in the future in terms of education, job opportunities, small business opportunities.

We have a program, as we've talked about before, called From the Table to the Ticket. Not enough to talk about a seat at the table anymore. Now we want people like Harold Ford, Deval Patrick, Barack Obama, others, Thurbert Baker, attorney general in Georgia, other folks on national tickets and statewide tickets. And I think we're back where we need to be, but we got a lot more work to do so we can get more diversity on our statewide tickets.

Tavis: You mentioned Barack Obama, and of course the 2008 presidential election. Thank you for the segue, Dr. Dean, I appreciate that. In case you haven't seen Barack Obama on the cover of 'Time' magazine this week with a cover story about why he could be the next president of the United States, let me ask you, what do you make on the fact that on the cover of 'Time' magazine and everywhere else, there's a conversation about a guy who, quite frankly, is still wet behind his ears.

Has not established a track record, is just learning his way to the bathroom in the Senate, as the cover of major publications as the best hope for Democrats with all these seasoned folk who are standing on the sidelines? Some of whom are dropping out, saying they're not gonna run, like Mark Warner?

Dean: Well, I'm somewhat sympathetic, because I was one of those folks about two years ago. (Laugh) That nobody ever heard of, and all of a sudden, they're in the 'Time' magazine. I'll tell you, it burns up all the people, all the seasoned folks. But it all works out. I tell you what I think is great. I was in Tennessee about a year ago, and I met with the Black caucus in the state legislature.

And there was a guy there by the name of Nathan Vaughn who had been elected in an all-White, 99 percent White district in northeast Tennessee. I said, 'How did you do that?' He said, 'I spoke about my values.' I think both White voters and Black voters, and all voters, for that matter, have changed a lot in the last 40 years. People just don't look at race first. They wanna hear about people's values first.

The reason Barack Obama is popular is 'cause he's got terrific values. The reason that I think Harold Ford and Deval Patrick are gonna be successful in their races is 'cause they got great values. And White voters are gonna vote for African Americans or Hispanics, just the same as African Americans have been voting for White candidates for years. It's a new day in America. And it's fragile, and we've got a ways to go, but we're working hard.

And the dream of Martin Luther King has really, I believe, been recognized. He would be shocked, I think, although delighted, to see somebody like Barack Obama being thought of for president. And I think he'd be even more delighted to know that the city he died in was now producing, likely, the next Senator from the state of Tennessee.

Tavis: Let me ask you whether or not you think that when you have folk like Mark Warner, former governor of Virginia, saying they're not going to run, you won't have a problem getting a field of candidates to run for the White House in '08. Everybody wants to be president. At this point, though, when people like Warner say they're not going to run, does it trouble you at all that you might not have the kind of field that you want?

Dean: We'll have a great field. I think Mark Warner's terrific. I know exactly why he didn't run. The thing that bothered me the most when I was running was missing my son's senior year in high school. And Mark's got three teenagers, and that's why he didn't do it. This is a very tough job and a very tough business. It is all-consuming. He did it for a year.

He realized what kind of a sacrifice he was gonna have to make for his family, and he decided that he could serve in a different way, and you have to respect that. But there are a ton of really great candidates, and I think even with Mark's withdrawal, I gotta believe there's 12 or 13 people now, serious people, talking about potentially being president of the United States.

Tavis: Is Howard Dean one of those 12 or 13?

Dean: Absolutely not. When I took this job, (laugh) I said I would not run in 2008, and I have no intention of doing so.

Tavis: Let me close by asking this, as I'm about to segue now into a conversation with David Kuo. You know his story, he's all over the news today. Former insider in the Bush administration, one of Bush's point persons on faith in the White House, has written a book called 'Tempting Faith.' On '60 Minutes' last night, he has referred to many members of the Bush administration as having attitudes that were boorish.

He has called them nuts, those are his words, boorish and nuts, people he worked alongside in the White House with regard to their attitude about Christian evangelicals. So outside the White House, he argues, this is the constituency that everybody thinks they're playing to. But inside the White House, in this Rove administration, he calls his former colleagues boorish and nuts on this issue. What do you make of this explosive book?

Dean: It doesn't surprise me very much. The Republicans manipulated the entire country when they took us into Iraq. Look what happened with Katrina, look what they did with the Medicare drug program, passing stuff in the middle of the night that was written by the pharmaceutical companies. These guys manipulate everybody. Why should the evangelicals be different?

I'll tell you one thing we're doing with evangelicals. We have a faith outreach program. And since we're not in power, we can do this out of the genuineness of our hearts. There are a lot of shared values between us and the Christian community. And we're not gonna agree with them on everything, but we are gonna agree with them on things like making sure kids don't go to bed hungry at night.

We are gonna agree on preserving the Earth that God gave us. We are gonna agree on making sure that people have adequate health insurance, and that we're reaching out and helping the poor. Those are things that are core Democratic values, and they're core evangelical values. So what I want to focus on, as the head of the Democratic Party, is what we share in common. And I think this is a big failing in the Bush administration. They thought this was all about politics.

It's not about politics, it's about policy, and it's about making the world a better place. And I think we ought to reach out. If we do get in power, and I hope that we will after November seventh, I am gonna push really hard to reach out and accept and work with all the people, including those who disagreed with us, and who've fought against us, and get common ground. Because common ground is what the country's all about, and it's what we've been missing for the last six years.

Tavis: Well, with three weeks to go, you've got work to do. So I'd better let you go. Nice to have you on.

Dean: Tavis, thanks for having me on.

Tavis: The chairman of the Democratic party, Dr. Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont. Up next on this program, former Bush advisor David Kuo. A new book called 'Tempting Faith.' We'll talk to David Kuo in a moment, stay with us.