Surprise Governorship Changed Dean

The governor of Vermont was gone, felled by a heart attack while cleaning his swimming pool. Word came from the Statehouse in a somber phone call to Howard Dean’s medical office in the Burlington suburb of Shelburne.

It was 8:30 a.m., Aug. 14, 1991. Gov. Richard Snelling was dead and Lt. Gov. Dean was now in charge.

Frozen at his desk, Dean hyperventilated. He gasped for long seconds until he drew on the armor of self-possession he used with patients. “As a doctor, I knew things had to be done right away,” Dean recalled recently. “I had to project calm and confidence. It wasn’t a choice: ‘You better do it.’ ”

Dean steeled himself, then rejoined his first patient of the day, Charles Bigelow, a retired University of Vermont professor wired to a heart monitor for a routine physical. “Well,” Bigelow remembers Dean saying, “my life has just taken a significant change of direction.” But the patient saw no hint of anxiety: “He was the same calm, cool physician he always was.”

Until that morning, Dean had been an ambitious Democrat mired in the caretaker’s post of lieutenant governor. Suddenly, he was saddled with a Republican administration and a budget emergency. After spending five years balancing his ceremonial state job with doctor’s duties, Dean’s political career had been transformed by another man’s death. He had no time to prepare and little administrative experience to draw on.

The difficult early months of Dean’s accidental governorship left their mark, shifting his ideological focus and forcing to the surface instincts normally muted by political caution. The warring impulses that now guide and undermine him on the campaign trail -- a gutty decisiveness, the reflexive maneuvering between the left and the center, his peevish, acid-tongued strays into controversy -- all emerged full-blown during his critical first passage as Vermont’s governor.

Within hours of his swearing-in, Dean moved to reassure Vermont’s 600,000 residents, retain Snelling’s staff and pare a $65-million budget shortfall -- a crippling overrun for this sliver of a state. They were his first steps on a centrist, fiscally cautious course that restored Vermont to economic health, won him 11 years in Montpelier’s gilt-domed Statehouse and propelled him toward his presidential bid.

The experience was the foundation for his run for the White House, Dean says now, cementing an inner certainty in his ability to weather any peril. And it taught him that “you cannot be prepared to assume responsibility in the way you think you are until you get there.”

Dean had been drawn into the Green Mountain State’s politics by his campaign for a bike path along Lake Champlain. Encouraged by Democratic party activists, he was elected to the state House in 1982, representing a gentrifying Burlington working-class district. In four years as a legislator, Dean was reliably liberal, recalled Paul Poirier, then a Democratic House leader and later one of Dean’s transition officials.

“Howard voted for every increase in spending we pushed for,” said Poirier, now a mental health lobbyist. Dean acknowledges his early leftist cast, but points to occasional votes against capital expenditures as evidence of the fiscal prudence that later prodded him to the center.

Intent on moving up in Vermont’s pecking order, Dean first took a House leadership post, working with Poirier and Democratic Speaker Ralph Wright, a Boston-born old-school liberal. Then, scouting for a bigger role, he sought the lieutenant governor’s job in 1986. Dean drove across the state in a pickup truck, lugging a blue plywood “Howard Dean” campaign sign to every village parade that would have him.

Powerless Post

Dean won, the first of three two-year terms, but it amounted to a political booby prize. Democratic Gov. Madeleine Kunin had vaulted up from that perch two years earlier, but historically, few Vermont governors made the leap. Dean could not challenge Kunin, and when she passed on reelection in 1990 as the state’s finances hemorrhaged, Dean chose not to challenge the popular Snelling, a former governor, who was swept into office.

His powerless post had become a ceremonial straitjacket. Dean presided over the Republican-led state Senate, but he had no leverage with state agencies. Kunin and Snelling had little contact with him. Former allies in the House called him “Ho Ho” behind his back, a diminutive that reflected both Dean’s ambition and his low-wattage job.

He took to his squarish cubby beside the governor’s office, equipped with a nicked mahogany desk and folding chairs for extra visitors. Outside his door hung a gloomy portrait of S. Hollister Jackson, a rotund lieutenant governor swept away during a flood in 1927.

Dean envisioned a grander historical profile. He hosted a weekly public access TV show. He spoke at countless luncheons. He felt the job gave him a higher profile than just “being one out of 150 in the House.” At the same time, it freed him for his practice and raising his two children with his physician wife, Judith Steinberg.

Dean was biding his time, intimates say, widening contacts and waiting for the popular Snelling to retire before he could make his move. “He didn’t have to be there four years to know it’s a nothing job,” Wright said. “You’ve got two ways out -- retirement or someone dies down the hall.”

Even on the afternoon of Snelling’s death at age 64, Dean hunkered down in his old office, staying away from the governor’s quarters until he was sworn in. A state trooper had driven him out from Shelburne, where he had juggled phone calls, casting out among Democratic confidants to assemble a transition team.

“He wanted people he could trust around him,” said Kathy Hoyt, a veteran Montpelier hand who would become Dean’s chief of staff. But Dean also decided to keep Snelling’s advisors. They would provide stability, he reasoned, and voters “had elected Snelling, not me, and I had a responsibility to carry out his program.”

Snelling was a bluff, popular GOP moderate who had previously served four terms as governor in the 1980s. He also was a canny millionaire who ran his administration like a corporate boardroom, staffing his Cabinet with capable political operatives and corporate whizzes.

Most of Snelling’s people agreed to stay. Some hung on into the mid-1990s. It was not surprising in Vermont, where bipartisan cordiality is still prized and the state’s small size forces succeeding administrations to draw from the same talent pool.

Years later, many Snelling hires looked back on Dean’s first months with admiration. “I shook hands with Howard Dean and ended up working for him for nine years,” said Cornelius “Con” Hogan, who had been Snelling’s human services chief. “In short order, we found out he had the same ability Snelling had to absorb a large amount of information and sort it all out under amazing pressure.”

Before his death, Snelling had already moved to tackle the gaping deficit, cutting a deal with Wright and the speaker’s liberal faction. The Democratic speaker agreed to accept an austerity budget tied to the state’s growth rate. In return, Snelling would raise progressive tax rates to maintain crucial services. “All [Dean] had to do was follow the prescription,” said Wright.

But it was up to Dean to browbeat Cabinet aides into holding the line. No expenditure, he ruled, was sacrosanct. In 1993, the year after he was reelected, Dean bettered Snelling’s reductions by more than 2%. Even in the state transportation budget, shielded from brutal cuts by its protected funding from federal gasoline and registration fees, Dean found new trims.

“It wasn’t wholesale, but spending even a little less than Snelling was impressive,” said Patrick Garahan, who worked four years as Dean’s transportation chief.

Dean hung tough long after the state broke even. By 2001, Vermont had won the highest bond rating in New England. The state is one of only five in the country that retains a surplus, buffered from the recent national chain reaction of budget implosions.

Even stalwart Republicans grudgingly acknowledge the lasting nature of Dean’s move to the center. “In the context of Vermont politics, he was definitely middle-of-the-road,” said Garahan, until recently chairman of the state Republican organization.

Emboldened by electoral success, Dean would later augment his austerity program with a landmark health insurance program for children and conservation of hundreds of thousands of forest acres. “If you ask me the question, I’ll tell you I’m a centrist,” he said. “Truth is, I’m all over the place.”

Still, Wright and his fellow liberals felt betrayed by Dean’s failure to bankroll other liberal causes. As the state’s economic picture eased in the mid-1990s, they expected Dean to loosen purse strings for a panoply of social service programs. Instead, relations soured. Liberals accused him of ignoring them in a strategy aimed at winning over moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats in the Legislature. Dean scoffed back.

“He’d always be referring to us as ‘their ilk,’ liberal House member Ann Siebert said with a sigh. “It got to the point where I wanted to print up buttons that said: ‘Ilks Club.’ ”

Dean’s decisiveness sometimes turned to swagger. He darted unannounced into Cabinet offices and sparred snappishly with Statehouse reporters. He stretched out in his socks as he grilled his advisors. Those on the firing line noticed holes in his heels and a torn jacket sleeve repeatedly sent out for repair. But the frugal Dean rarely let their attention wander, pressing impatiently for results.

Critics complained he governed on impulse. Dean says he moved on intuition. “I shorthand things,” he explained recently. “I know what I’m thinking, but I don’t say every word of it. I was that way as a doctor. I eliminate possibilities unconsciously.”

The mountainside highway that took Dean from Burlington to Montpelier in the morning and back at night became an early target for action memos. Jagged debris from granite ledges that bordered Interstate 89 often crumbled down, spurring Transportation officials to order up a rock removal project. But when the roadside repair work led to traffic jams that slowed his pace home, Dean curtly ordered the project halted.

“He was inconvenienced, so he put a stop to it,” Garahan recalled. “He wanted as little work along that stretch of the interstate as possible.”

Dean rarely appeared to agonize over decisions. One of his first moves was to accept a controversial deal that allowed Vermont’s power companies to cinch a 25-year contract with Hydro-Quebec, a Canadian utility. The arrangement was opposed by environmentalists who worried it would lead to flooding that could displace a Cree Indian tribe. Dean could have scuttled the contract. Instead, he gave it his blessing.

Environmentalists howled, blaming the influence of several Dean aides who had worked as utility lobbyists. Dean, who had been an ardent conservationist as a legislator, had seemingly abandoned the cause.

“He decided that the state needed a strong business climate,” explained Poirier, who had been one of those lobbyists before Dean tapped him for his transition team. “It wasn’t that he sold out just like that. His filter had changed. He was running the whole state now, not just a little legislative district.”

Popping Off

Dean bristled at those who questioned his motives. He had long had a habit of popping off in public, but until he became governor, no one paid much attention. Now they did. Wisecracks lightened the mood during Dean’s drawn-out news conferences, but on occasion, his flippancy curdled.

An avid radio listener, he would phone talk show hosts from his state-issue car, raining instant responses on surprised critics. He traded barbs with a welfare mother who had called in to complain about his policies, Hogan recalled. When a station in the town of Waterbury ran a Republican legislator’s rebuke of a visit by Hillary Rodham Clinton, Dean called in, angrily comparing him to a barnyard animal, recalled the offended politician, J. Dennis Delaney.

“I was either Sen. Pig or Sen. Hog, one or the other,” Delaney remembers. Dean said he could not recall the incident, comparing it to a wave of “urban legends” now mounting about his legendary pique. Anson Tebbits, the station’s news director at the time, also drew a blank, but added that Dean frequently called in “out of the blue” to snap at critics.

“Most people are like me,” Dean said, dismissing his hothead reputation. “They say things they shouldn’t say sometimes .... I sometime say things that are impolitic. But they’re usually true. The ones that aren’t, I apologize for.”

Hoyt became the unofficial cleaner for Dean’s eruptions, soothing ruffled legislators and department heads. When Dean chided state Senate President Dick McCormack as “pigheaded” during a budget battle, she shuddered, then made amends as usual.

“I always wished I had a remote control I could push that would stop him in midsentence,” Hoyt said. Yet she realized Dean’s “flares” were “part of his appeal” with voters. “Speaking his mind was worth the consequences. Vermonters didn’t like politi-speak. The problem isn’t him. It’s the political world.”

The test of voters’ tolerance came soon enough. Dean was up for re-election in the summer of 1992. Republicans fronted John McLaughry, a hard-core conservative legislator.

McLaughry tried to stoke voter resentment against Dean for pushing for expanded health-care benefits. The two had already tangled in the state Senate, where McLaughry complained Dean “ran roughshod over the rules.”

But a year on, Dean’s impulsive political metamorphosis was playing like a well-plotted masterstroke. He had disappointed liberals with his lunge to the center, but they had no alternatives. Republican moderates stayed on the sidelines, quietly pleased by his budget-busting. Voters even came to appreciate Dean’s low boiling point.

Fate had made him governor. Howard Dean now made his own luck. “It took me a long time to learn all the intricacies of the job,” he admits. “But it didn’t take me long to realize what was necessary.”

Months before voting day, like the procession of Republican sacrificial lambs who would follow him, McLaughry recognized the formidable appeal of Dean’s newfound persona.

“I was realistic enough,” McLaughry said, “to know I didn’t have a prayer.”

Wednesday: John Edwards

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Howard Dean

Personal

Born: Nov. 17, 1948, in New York City

Hometown: Burlington, Vt.

Family: Married to Judith Steinberg; two children, Anne, a Yale student, and Paul, 17

Education: Yale University, bachelor of arts in political science, 1971. Albert Einstein College of Medicine, 1978

Career: Physician, 1981-1991; Vermont House, 1982-86 (assistant minority leader, 1985-86); lieutenant governor, 1986-91; governor, 1991-2002

By the numbers

$314,052

Amount the Dean campaign had raised by Jan. 1, 2003

$480,547

Amount the Dean campaign spent on TV ads during the last week of 2003

More than $15 million

Amount the Dean campaign estimates it raised in the last three months of 2003

35,000

The number of e-mails processed each day on the Dean For America website

75%, 69%, 71%

Dean’s share of the vote in Vermont’s 1992, 1994 and 1996 gubernatorial elections

56%

Percent who voted for Dean for governor in 1998

50%

Percent who voted for Dean in 2000

50%

Share of vote required to be elected governor in the state of Vermont

1,460,000

The number of hits a Google search for “Howard Dean” yielded

A closer look

* Dean, a five-term Vermont governor, began his political career (and reportedly ended his affiliation with the Episcopal Church) when he clashed with a local church over building a bike path along Lake Champlain on the church’s land.

* Dean’s two children, raised in their mother’s Jewish faith, play ice hockey and soccer. The Democratic frontrunner, who used to coach his son’s hockey team, tries to arrange his campaign schedule to accommodate the games.

* With the help of innovative Internet outreach, Dean’s campaign has popularized Web logs, or blogs, as a format for political communication, as well as broken Democratic fundraising records for two quarters in 2003 and the entire year.

The lowdown

Not since Jimmy Carter in 1976 has a candidate surged from obscurity to the kind of frontrunning prominence that Dean enjoys.

An insurgent who nonetheless enjoys a commanding fundraising lead, Dean has changed the way politicians use the Internet, probably forever.

But his shoot-from-the-lip style, so appealing to supporters, has resulted in a series of gaffes that have called into question his temperament and ability to bear up to prolonged scrutiny. Victories in Iowa and New Hampshire could all but lock up the Democratic nomination.

Analysis by Times staff writer Mark Z. Barabak

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Sources: The Almanac of American Politics, www.deanforamerica.com, Associated Press

Los Angeles Times