DEAN: The Maverick
washingtonmonthly.com
Nothing in political reporting compares to the enforced intimacy of sitting with a candidate in the backseat on a long car ride, as I did with Howard Dean one Saturday in late summer 2002. There are no distractions, just two guys talking, as the one with the tape recorder tries to take the measure of the other who wants to be president while the topics range from Jean-Paul Sartre (Dean has an encyclopedic memory of his political philosophy courses at Yale) to the lineup of the 1961 Yankees. Up until now, Dean, the governor of a rustic bed-and-breakfast state, has been something of a stealth candidate--and this was only his third lengthy interview with a national reporter. In the campaign's early days, you could still pose an obvious question and receive a candid rather than canned response. So, I ask, how did you decide to run for president? "It's a hard question to answer," Dean began. "The answer should be that I deeply care about it, and I thought it all out. But the way it happens is that I'm very intuitive, so I was driven toward running before I knew why I was doing it. I know that doesn't make any sense. It sounds like I'm just a very ambitious person who wants to be president."
I resisted the temptation to mention that naked ambition has spawned countless other candidacies. But Dean does it for me: "There's a big difference between me and some of the other Democrats. There are two Democrats running because they want to be president, that's all they can tell you." (An obvious, if slightly petulant, reference to probable rivals John Kerry and John Edwards.) "I want to be president because I want health insurance, I want to balance the budget, I want a decent foreign policy. I want to lead people, not follow. I don't want to just do what it takes to be elected." (Whoops, here comes the stump speech.)
Surprisingly, Dean opted for something suspiciously close to honesty: "I decided in August [2001],"--the month that his father, a retired stockbroker also named Howard, died at age 80--"that I wasn't going to run again [for governor]. It then quickly came to me that I had a choice of joining boards and swearing at The New York Times every morning and saying how outrageous it was. Basically, I was in a position where I thought I could run for president, so I decided that I was going to." That answer is about as unvarnished as an experienced politician ever gets. For all his sincere, if still vague, sentiments about health care, the economy, and foreign policy, Dean is not running as an embodiment of a political movement. There were no "Draft Dean" Web sites or trial balloons floated by his fellow governors. Rather, faced with a life change in his early 50s, Dean recoiled at the vision of the road ahead--a few corporate boards, a blue-ribbon commission or two, the semi-retired, didn't-you-used-to-be-somebody, bland life of a respected former governor. Having stared into the abyss of irrelevance, Dean preferred to roll the dice at a craps table soon to be filled with other candidates who would arrive with huge piles of chips and chits earned in Washington. |
