As Governor, Dean Was Fiscal Conservative
Presidential Candidate Imposed Discipline on Vermont Legislature's Efforts to Spend
By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 3, 2003; Page A01
BURLINGTON, Vt. -- The new governor faced a roomful of fellow Democrats in 1992, liberal warriors eager after two years of Republican rule to right every perceived wrong in Vermont. But Howard Dean issued no call to arms.
All of your progressive ideas, Dean told his party caucus, won't amount to anything if Vermonters don't trust you with their money -- and they don't. We're seen as tax-happy liberals who spend money unwisely.
Dean's words foreshadowed years of acrimonious battles with his party's formidable liberal wing, which controlled the legislature. From 1991 to 2002, Dean issued more vetoes than any previous governor. But he slowly bent Democrats to his will. When he left office in 2002, Vermont had a fairly balanced budget, while states across the nation bled fiscal red ink.
"He made us very disciplined about spending, even if we didn't really like it," said former state Senate president Dick McCormack, who sat in that caucus room in 1992. "I was a liberal Democrat, and I fought him a lot, but he made the Democrats very hard to beat."
Dean's emerging national reputation as a liberal tribune, a man whose rhetorical fires have seared President Bush for invading Iraq and cutting taxes for the wealthy, obscures the centrist course he steered during his tenure as governor of Vermont. In this small, northern New England state where the sole House member is a self-proclaimed socialist and the state legislature tends to come in three ideological flavors (moderate Republicans, liberal Democrats and left-wing Progressives), Dean gained a reputation as a careful, even cautious, steward.
That gubernatorial record could turn off some liberal true believers. Or it could allow Dean to execute a political pivot in next year's presidential primaries. A New England governor with a budget-balancing reputation might prove useful as the primaries move south of the Mason-Dixon line. "The national role reversal is that Democrats have become the party of the balanced budget," said Eric Davis, a Middlebury College political scientist. "Howard Dean can lay claim to that."
As governor, Dean preserved hundreds of thousands of acres of forests and lakes and mountains that had come under intense development pressure, passed a landmark health insurance program for children, insisted on pumping money into town centers rather than into sprawling suburbs and signed a bill that allowed gay couples to enter into civil unions.
At the same time, the former doctor resisted raising income taxes, vetoed some social spending for the elderly, and showered tens of millions of dollars in controversial tax breaks to attract businesses to Vermont, although most of the company officials acknowledged they would have relocated or expanded without subsidies. Dean poured relatively little money into state colleges and the university, where tuition costs are the highest in the nation.
"I'm a fiscal conservative, and I believe in social justice," Dean said in a recent interview. "I'm most proud of our fiscal stability -- I left the state in better shape than I found it."
Former governor Philip H. Hoff served three terms in the 1960s, and is regarded as the grand old man of liberal Democratic politics here. His support for Dean comes leavened with skepticism. "I'm quite clear that he sublimated his liberal impulses," Hoff said. "As governor, he fell under the sway of business interests."
On the most contentious issues facing Vermont -- civil unions and a statewide funding formula for education -- Dean acted only after the state Supreme Court took the lead. "He was very much an incrementalist," said Davis, the Middlebury professor. "He tried some grand steps on health care, but he came to see a succession of small steps as the key to governing."
Dean's governing style was not cozy. He has a doctor's bluntness about him, an astringent style that owes more to his native Manhattan than to some fuzzy Vermont country doctor stereotype. "Doctors are used to being high priests," said John McLaughry, a former Republican state senator who often dueled with Dean. "If they tell you it's psoriasis, by God it's psoriasis. That's Howard."
Dean, whose smackdown style is much remarked upon as he runs for president, would accuse the Democratic-controlled state senate of inhabiting La La Land, dismiss conservatives as mastodons and sometimes do all of this while speaking very loudly. His staffers became known as Howard's smoothers, forever reaching out to offended legislators.
"I wish I'd saved all of Howard's handwritten apologies." Former state senator McCormack chuckles and recalls the tone -- although not the precise wording -- of the governor's notes. 'Dear Dick, Perhaps I was a little hard. I shouldn't have called you a communist . . .' "
Peter F. Welch, a prominent liberal state senator who once considered a primary challenge to Dean, said Dean's great strength was his ability to govern effectively. "The moral tension in politics is to have an openness to the ideal while retaining the capacity to be pragmatic and get something accomplished," Welch said. "Howard could do that."
Record as Governor
The phone call came as Dean administered a physical to a patient. Gov. Richard A. Snelling, a blunt-talking Republican businessman, had suffered a fatal heart attack by the side of his pool. Howard Dean, who was serving his third term as lieutenant governor, became governor.
It was an inauspicious time to take the helm. The state was mired in a recession, and Snelling had agreed on spending cuts and an income tax increase. "Governor Snelling had the courage to raise taxes," Dean said at the time. "I have the courage to cut spending." In fact, he cut deeper into agency budgets than Snelling had planned.
Dean was elected governor in his own right in 1992 and embarked on a reform campaign: to bring a single payer health system to Vermont. He waged vigorous battles with the insurance companies. But his efforts came asunder in the 1994 legislative session.
It was a watershed for Dean. He became a devotee of the small step forward. Over the next decade, he successfully expanded a health insurance program to guarantee health coverage for every child in the state and insisted that the state health plan pay for mammograms. The state now has a prescription drug benefit for those with incomes up to 400 percent of the poverty level.
Critics, particularly on the left, say he lost his nerve. They note that Medicaid costs have soared, that Dean pushed higher deductibles for patients, and 9 percent of Vermonters remain uncovered by insurance (a low percentage by national standards).
Put this criticism to Kathy Hoyt, Dean's former chief of staff, and she sighs. She said that President Bill Clinton's health reform plan had collapsed in Washington as Dean's proposed his single payer reform. "It would have been very difficult for one little state to take on the costs of a single payer system without national support," she said. "Sometimes you have to step back and ask: Is this realistic?"
Dean, over the objections of liberals, let Snelling's income tax increase sunset in 1994. He vetoed several social welfare spending bills. He was, always, the embattled man of the middle. "He was very artful," said Elizabeth Ready, the state auditor and a liberal former state representative. "He was always saying: 'You've got your nuts on the left, your nuts on the right, and you've got me.' "
Terry Bouricius, a former state legislator and a leader in the Progressive Party, once filed an impeachment motion against Dean for cutting programs for the poor by administrative fiat. "He's a very, very right-wing Democrat," Bouricius said. "What Bush is doing now with cutting income taxes is just an exaggerated version of what Dean did."
That's Green Mountain overkill. Dean recognized early on that the popular stereotype of Vermont as Berkeley-on-snowshoes is overdrawn. Vermont is a state of modest means with a characteristically New England acceptance of a role for government in softening the sharp edges of capitalism. In the 1930s, Republican Gov. George Aiken joined President Franklin D. Roosevelt in championing rural electrification. Another Republican governor in the 1970s passed a nationally groundbreaking environmental land use law.
But Vermonters bridled, then and now, at a state government that meddles too much. As newcomers move into politics -- Dean, former governor Madeleine Kunin and Rep. Bernard Sanders (I) each hail from New York City -- they step carefully. So Sanders the socialist challenged corporate power but kept taxes low and defended gun owner rights when he was mayor of Burlington. Dean's policy cupboard included health insurance and abortion rights -- and support for gun owner rights, the death penalty and a balanced budget.
"Capitalism is a great system, and to make it work you must have social justice," Dean said. "But it's all in the balancing. Government is the mediator."
Counterrevolution
In December 1999, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled that gay couples are entitled to the same legal benefits and protections as heterosexual couples. Dean, who had maintained a studious silence on the subject, immediately asked the state legislature to take up the matter. He signed the bill into law in April 2000.
Cultural conservatives, not least the considerable Catholic farm belt, revolted. They launched a Take Back Vermont campaign with three goals: repealing civil unions and a recent state property tax, and tossing Dean out of office. Neighbors turned backs on neighbors in churches, and rallies devolved into very un-Vermont-like hissing and booing.
Dean the incrementalist was caught in a cultural whirlwind.
"I certainly can't claim credit for leading that revolution -- gay marriage hadn't been on the radar screen before that vote," Dean recalled. "But I did say, we'll obey the law and this bill is the right thing to do."
As the 2000 gubernatorial election grew more and more heated -- Dean sometimes wore a bulletproof vest -- the governor became more passionate about defending gays and fighting "the cultural right." Dean, characteristically, found his strongest voice not after private meditation but in the hurly-burly of governing and campaigning.
Dean was reelected, narrowly, and Republicans captured the state assembly. And . . . nothing happened. Civil unions remained the law as did the statewide property tax. The Take Back Vermont movement faded away. As Frank M. Bryan, a University of Vermont political science professor, noted, "We overturned 3,500 years of Judeo-Christian tradition in three months, and nothing happened."
So the question arises: If Dean was so effective leading that fight, why didn't he risk more battles on the sort of issues that are dear to the liberals? Ready, the state auditor, laughs when asked the question.
"Because Howard Dean's neither a phony nor a liar," Ready said. "He's just not a liberal."
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