THE CONTENDERS : Howard Dean
Short-Fused Populist, Breathing Fire at Bush
Mantra Coincides With Discontent
By Evelyn Nieves
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 6, 2003; Page A01
Sixth in a series
Howard Dean was angry. Ropy veins popped out of his neck, blood rushed to his cheeks, and his eyes, normally blue-gray, flashed black, all dilated pupils.
"The only hope Democrats have to beat this president," he said, his left fist punching the air, "is to behave like Democrats and stand up for what we believe!"
"YEAH!" the crowd cheered, standing and applauding.
"Can we afford tax cuts," Dean continued, reddening to his gray temples, "when we have the largest deficit in the history of the country?"
"NO!" the crowd shouted back.
Dean was addressing a California Teachers Association convention in Los Angeles.
But the former governor of Vermont could have been in Iowa or New Hampshire or Wisconsin. Although he first gained notice for opposing the war in Iraq, these days Dean likes to hammer the "radical right-wing wacko" Bush administration on nearly every issue. President Bush is all wrong, he says: wrong on the economy, wrong on the environment, wrong on health care and affirmative action and peace and justice for all.
Dean talks about this every chance he gets, gets worked up about it nearly as often and sweeps along his audience -- largely the party faithful -- every time.
He says he is running for president because he is too upset at the direction the country is heading not to do something about it. Howard Brush Dean III, 54, a Park Avenue-bred medical doctor, is the Democrats' angry Everyman, heading to Washington to make things right.
"This sounds very idealistic and naive," he said on a hot afternoon in Iowa between sweaty rounds of house parties, "but we're going to lose our country if somebody doesn't do something idealistic. When I say that a lot of Democrats are more mad at the Democrats than at the Republicans, I get a lot of nods. This party has made a fundamental mistake in not challenging the administration."
Whether it's his message ("You have the power to change this country" is a campaign mantra) or his method, or both, Dean's passionate, bare-fisted pounding at the Washington power structure is obviously working, at least for now.
After six months of full-time campaigning, he has gone from being the asterisk to the rising star of the nine Democrats vying for the nomination to challenge Bush. In aggressively confronting the administration, Dean has tapped the discontent, and even anger, among the party's ranks with the self-assurance of the doctor he once was and the combativeness of the governor he became. Now Dean, the shortish (about 5-foot-8) contender with the flushed face and the rolled-up sleeves, is the one with the buzz and the blogs.
At least 38 Web sites are devoted to his campaign, and online volunteer organizing has packed the pubs, cafes and living rooms where Deansters meet. If 20 people are expected at a Dean event, 50 or 100 show up. If 100 are expected, 200 or 400 show. And so on.
"It's a problem," quips Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager. "We have to keep finding bigger places."
'Tongue Is Faster Than His Brain'
If Dean is the candidate crowds come to hear, he has also become the one pundits have come to watch, for better or worse. They won't soon forget his dour sparring with Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) during the candidates' first debate in South Carolina in May, or his shaky appearance on "Meet The Press" two Sundays ago. And that mouth. A product of New York, Dean can speak so fast that words come tumbling out, landing in a messy heap.
In recent months he has been called "brusque," "brash" "blunt" and "belligerent"; a few more choice words on his part and critics will be questioning whether Dean has the diplomatic skills needed to be the leader of the free world.
One story circulating in Washington is about the time he met with the editorial board of Roll Call. Elections analyst Stuart Rothenberg, who writes a column for the newspaper, asked Dean why, if he was so proud of signing the first same-sex civil union bill in the country, he had done so in a closed-door meeting rather than in a public ceremony, as a Democrat in Vermont had described. Dean, Rothenberg recalled, paused, leaned back in his chair and exclaimed: "That's [expletive]! Nobody from Vermont said that!"
"Sometimes Howard's tongue is faster than his brain," said Peter Freyne, a columnist for Seven Days, a weekly newspaper in Burlington, Vt. It doesn't help matters that Dean speaks off the cuff; out of hundreds of campaign speeches he has delivered, only four were written in advance. The rest were ad-libbed. "He's smart and energetic," Freyne said. "I've been calling him Ho-Ho for years, because he's like the little engine that could."
So far, Dean, who agrees that he is blunt, is brushing off the critics. "I didn't like how I did in the first debate, because I was nervous and cranky," he said. "But I disagree about the 'Meet the Press' interview. I thought I did great. Tim Russert asked really hard questions. No other candidate would take that kind of questioning for a full hour."
Even supporters on Web logs said they thought Dean looked unprepared. He fumbled on some basic questions, such as the size of the military; hedged on the issue of gay marriage and couldn't or wouldn't say where he stood on mandating balanced budgets or the prescription drug plans before Congress.
But no matter. The day after his June 22 "Meet the Press" interview, he officially announced his candidacy for 2004. Then he won the MoveOn.org online straw poll with 44 percent of the more than 300,000 votes cast (20 percentage points higher than the second-place Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio). And there's that $7.5 million his campaign raised in the second fiscal quarter, more than any other Democrat, with more than $1 million of it gushing in through the Internet on the last three days of June.
Medical Deferment From the Draft
The insurgent campaign Dean is running takes confidence, and he has it in spades. The man who would be president after 11 years as governor of a one-area-code state is confident enough to tell voters that if he could balance the budget, provide almost universal health care and protect open space in Vermont (pop. 609,000), he could do it for the whole country.
Eric L. Davis, a professor of political science at Middlebury College in Vermont, sees Dean's candidacy as a logical extension of his faith in his abilities. "My sense is that he felt that he had done a good job as governor," Davis said, "and that he had felt confident that he had acquired a set of skills that he could use. He was looking for the next political challenge, and running for president provided that challenge."
Dean comes from money -- his father, grandfather and great-grandfather were investment bankers; he summered in Sag Harbor, part of the Long Island playground that includes the Hamptons, and went to Yale. During the Vietnam War, he received a medical deferment from the draft for an unfused vertebra in his back and moved to Vermont in 1978 for his medical residency. Entering politics there was relatively easy.
Dean says he has always dabbled in politics. He was on the student council in high school and an admissions committee in medical school. He volunteered for President Jimmy Carter's reelection campaign in 1979, was elected to the state legislature in 1982 and then, four years later, won the part-time job of lieutenant governor. When Gov. Richard A. Snelling (R) died of a heart attack in 1991, Dean stepped in, leaving medicine for good.
Most Vermonters would say that Dean the Passionate Populist who extols health care and equal rights for all is a Different Dean from the one they know. He did sign a universal health care bill for children while governor. And he did sign the bitterly debated civil union bill after the Vermont Supreme Court ruled in 1999 that same-sex couples should have the same legal rights as married heterosexual ones. But Dean was no fire-breather.
He insisted on balancing the budget above all else. He went from being against the death penalty to supporting it in limited cases. He refused to fund social programs without making sure the state could pay its bills first.
"His being called a liberal is one of the great white lies of the campaign," said Tom Salmon, a fellow Democrat and governor of Vermont for two terms during the Nixon-Ford era. "He's a rock-solid fiscal conservative," Salmon said, "and a liberal on key social issues. But we're talking key issues."
Garrison Nelson, a professor of political science at the University of Vermont and a frequent Dean critic, says the Different Dean has been fascinating to watch. "Howard Dean pounding the podium taking back America is a new Howard," he says. "Now, whether the new Howard is the real Howard is a matter for speculation. Is he taking the left as a campaign strategy?"
Dean says he doesn't mind being called a liberal and welcomes progressives to the campaign. ("I'd be delighted if the Greens supported me!") But he chuckles at the liberal label, considering that "I am probably the most conservative of the candidates when it comes to gun control." It's a states issue, he says, and his state, with its low crime rate, doesn't need it.
"I think it's pathetic that I'm considered the left-wing liberal," Dean said. "It shows just how far to the right this country has lurched."
Over and over on the campaign trail, he tells audiences that he is a fiscal conservative who believes balanced budgets serve the cause of social justice. "Here's why," he'll say. "When you balance the budget, you have money in hard times to pay for the things you need." Yet if he generally sounds more like a Paul Wellstone progressive than a Bill Clinton centrist on the stump, even borrowing the late Minnesota senator's line about representing "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," well. . . .
"I distrust ideologues," Dean said, "and that's being played out now at anger at the right. It played out in college at mistrust of the left. . . . I was against the war, but I wasn't a protester."
It Started With a Bicycle Path
The Howard Dean that Judith Steinberg of Roslyn, N.Y., fell in love with didn't seem interested in politics at all. Steinberg, the daughter of two physicians, met her future husband at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. He wasn't planning to become president someday.
"I just assumed he wanted to be a doctor," said Steinberg, 49. "That's what we discussed."
A few years after Dean moved to Vermont in 1978 to serve his residency, Steinberg joined him, and the two practiced internal medicine together in Shelburne, just south of Burlington.
"When he was a resident, he got involved in a movement to create a bicycle path in Burlington along Lake Champlain," Steinberg said. "But I didn't really consider that politics. Then he went and became a local representative, but I didn't really consider that politics, either. The first time I considered it was when he ran for lieutenant governor. But then, that was part time and he was still a doctor."
Dean also traces his political evolution to the bike path campaign, which led to the scenic byway half a block from his house. It showed him he could make a difference, he says. But he adds that he must have had politics in his subconscious all along. Someone reminded him recently, he recalls, that he once wrote a college paper saying, "By age 40, I would be in Congress, married with three children." (Instead, he was lieutenant governor, married, with two children -- a daughter who is a sophomore at Yale and a son who is a senior in high school.) He was eyeing the White House back in 1998, considering challenging Vice President Al Gore, but backed off when his family convinced him it wasn't the right time. In May 2002, Dean was the first among the current Democratic contenders to say he would run against Bush.
"Every time he did something [political]," Steinberg said, "I would think, well, he's really smart and a great guy, and he could do this. When he said he wanted to run for president, I thought the same thing."
At the California Democratic State Party convention in Sacramento, just before the war began in March, Dean's speech ("What I want to know is what in the world so many Democrats are doing voting to support the president's unilateral attack on Iraq?" it began) electrified the audience. Afterward, delegates rushed his campaign table like bargain hunters at a rummage sale, scooping up the bumper stickers and pins and filling the volunteer sign-up sheets.
"He was serving meat," said Art Torres, the state Democratic Party chairman, "and that was a hungry audience."
It seems delegates were also hungry at the Wisconsin Democratic Party convention in Milwaukee last month, where Dean won the straw poll. He had the most vocal cheering section at the convention, the most campaign signs and the only pep rally. At an annual Flag Day picnic in Waterloo, Iowa, where Dean, perspiring in his shirt sleeves, spoke just before the cool, collected Kerry, picnicgoers described him as "exciting," "passionate" and "courageous."
And consider this scene: On a hot Sunday afternoon at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel in Los Angeles, the California Teachers Association was nearing the end of a two-day conference. More than 800 delegates loaded with file folders sat in a ballroom with the stuffy, bottled-up feel of an airplane. They were ready to go home. But first, Dean was going to speak.
That in itself was unusual. The 333,000-member union, the largest in the state, is stingy with invitations to politicians. (It took four years for Gov. Gray Davis to receive one.) But Dean, the only current presidential candidate invited to speak to the association so far, had generated a buzz. Some union officials had heard Dean speak in April at the state Democratic convention in Sacramento, and they wanted to hear him again. Others, who hadn't heard him, wanted to know what the fuss was about.
Dean came on like Beethoven, capturing the crowd with his first four notes.
"I taught eighth-grade social studies for three months," he said, "so I can personally say that I am the only person running for the presidency of the United States that knows what it's like to stand up without being able to go to the bathroom for five hours."
Bingo.
After 15 minutes, Dean told the audience he was going to wrap it up.
"Awwww" pulsed through the ballroom.
"That's the first time I've seen that," said Wayne Johnson, who was the union's president until the end of June. "No one in all the years I've been with this organization, no speaker, has ever had that kind of reaction."
The candidate was already being whisked away to address a rally. Outside the hotel entrance, a hush went through the crowd. Dean was starting to speak. He was turning red. Even from a distance, you could see he was getting fired up.
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