That's one reason that Bush loyalists are optimistic that softening his image will pay political dividends--and that they are suddenly so aggressive about it. "As governor of Texas," says Commerce Secretary Don Evans, one of the president's closest friends, "he saw the family values of somebody walking hundreds of miles across a desert to find a job to provide for their family back home. As he says, family values don't stop at the Rio Grande."
Democrats will paint such rhetoric as a cynical 11th-hour conversion of political convenience, and they'll pound away at that theme in the months ahead. Can the swaggering cowboy really become Mr. Sensitive this year? To a large extent, that's what the 2004 campaign will be all about.
Dean wears the same suit day after day on the road, because he travels with only one suit. If he brought along a second suit, he says, he would have to carry a suit bag, and he will not carry a suit bag.
Since the suits are not great looking to begin with--Dean says his clothes "ferment" in his closet at home--his staff has one imperative: Protect the fabric.
After a tarmac event in Little Rock, barbecue was served, a wind came up, and paper plates of food began flying through the air. Dean's staff immediately surrounded him, holding up file folders, papers, posters, anything to keep the food from landing on him. "On the Dean campaign, saving the suit is Job 1," a staffer says.
But what happens if his suit does get stained and he still has six days to go before he returns home? "In that case, I will be wearing a suit with a stain," Dean says.
Even clean, however, the suits often look a little lumpy. The pockets bulge, and not with notes or policy papers. The candidate likes to hide cookies in there. He has a formidable sweet tooth (his personal pledge to lose 12 pounds over the holidays appears to have had all the success of an unfunded mandate), and though he claims that his favorite food is strawberry milkshakes, his secret vice is gumdrops.
When he was governor of Vermont, the desk outside his ceremonial office in the capitol had a small drawer in which Dean hid his gumdrop stash. He would go out to greet visiting dignitaries, slide open the drawer and pop a few in his mouth. One day, to his horror, he found the drawer empty. To everyone's amazement, the governor stood there dipping his finger in the leftover sugar crystals and then licking them off.
Common cents. His other obsession these days is quarters. His entire campaign for president may be a ruse to collect each of the new state quarters. He now has every one that has been released except Arkansas. (The last quarter won't be released until 2008, when Dean will be either running for re-election or licking sugar off his fingers in obscurity.) He says he is doing this "just for fun."
A mint condition 2003 Arkansas quarter is available on the Internet for 57 cents, but anyone who thinks Howard Dean would pay 57 cents for a 25-cent piece does not know Howard Dean. "I am the cheapest S.O.B. you ever met," he says proudly.
How cheap? He will not buy cable or satellite TV, even though this means his wife, Judith Steinberg, must traipse down to his headquarters in Burlington to watch his debates. (Sometimes she, like most of the rest of America, just skips them.)
He paints his own house. No big deal, you say? Consider that the first union that endorsed him was the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades. So in the future might he actually go out and hire a painter? "I doubt it," says his campaign spokesperson, Tricia Enright.
He fixes his own toilet and mows his own lawn. (Steinberg tells people she awoke one morning at 6:30 to see him out there mowing because he had promised to do so before getting back on the campaign trail.)
He is also a rabid recycler. At the end of a recent commercial flight, when the flight attendants were collecting discarded newspapers, Dean asked if they were going to be recycled. No, he was informed, they were going to be tossed out. So Dean took the newspapers, traveled around the country with them for the entire campaign trip, and then carried them back to Burlington, where he recycled them.
He does not believe in fancy hotels. (His press corps, which is on expense account, does. This is yet another point of contention between them.) He doesn't order room service. If you want to catch a glimpse of him, go down to the lobby of his hotel early in the morning. You will see him get off the elevator in a sweat shirt and sweat pants and go over to the newsstand as soon as it opens so he can get his morning papers. "I usually wake up at 4 in the morning and think about politics for three hours," he told reporters recently.
He does have his fun side, however: He sometimes comes back on his campaign plane and plays Oh, Hell with reporters--a game chosen, it appears, because he is one of the few people who understand the rules.
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