ENERGY POLICY Dean defends '98 private deliberations

He says his panel was different from Cheney's task force, which he criticizes.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean, who has criticized the Bush administration for refusing to release the deliberations of its energy policy task force, as governor of Vermont convened a similar panel that met in secret in 1998 and angered state lawmakers.
Dean's group held one public hearing and after the fact volunteered the names of industry executives and liberal advocates it consulted in private, but Dean refused to open the task force's private deliberations.
In 1999, he offered the same argument the administration uses today for keeping deliberations of a policy task force secret.
"The governor needs to receive advice from time to time in closed session," Dean was quoted as saying. "As every person in government knows, sometimes you get more open discussion when it's not public."
His own dispute over the secrecy of the task force that devised a policy for restructuring Vermont's nearly bankrupt electric utilities has escaped national attention, even as he has attacked a similar arrangement used by President Bush.
Dean's defense
In an interview with The Associated Press, Dean defended his recent criticism of Vice President Dick Cheney's task force and his demand that the administration release its private energy deliberations.
Dean said his group developed better policy in a bipartisan manner, seeking advice not just from energy executives but also from environmentalists and advocates for the poor. He said his task force was more open because it held a public hearing and divulged afterward the names of people it consulted even though deliberations were held in secret.
The Vermont task force "is not exactly the Cheney thing," Dean said. "We had a much more open process than Cheney's process. We named the people we sought advice from in our final report."
Dean said he still believes it was necessary to keep his task force's deliberations secret, especially because the group was reviewing proprietary financial data from Vermont utilities.
"Some advice does have to be given in private, but I don't mind letting people know who gave that advice," he said.
'Risky attack'
An expert in political rhetoric said it was risky for Dean to attack Bush and Cheney on an issue where he was vulnerable.
"In general, what is good for the vice president should be good for the governor. A candidate who attacks on grounds he is vulnerable is foolish," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a University of Pennsylvania professor who helps run a Web site that compares presidential candidates' rhetoric with the facts.
Dean's campaign said it was "laughable" to equate the two panels.
"Governor Dean confronted and averted an energy crisis that would have had disastrous consequences for the citizens of Vermont by bringing together a bipartisan and ideologically diverse working group that solved the problem," spokesman Jay Carson said Sunday. "Dick Cheney put together a group of his corporate cronies and partisan political contributors, and they gave themselves billions and disguised it as a national energy policy."
In September, Dean argued that the task force Cheney assembled in 2001 and the Bush energy policy that were unduly influenced by friends of the Bush family and Enron energy chief Kenneth Lay. He demanded that records of its deliberations be made public.