High Over the Desert, Plane Talk With Dean

Howard Dean’s presidential run has been a rocket ride, a flight that has sent him higher, faster than even he expected. So what has been the low point?

It came one night last summer, after the umpteenth campaign road trip, when he dragged himself home at 2 a.m., then turned around and left three hours later without ever seeing his family. “That was the pits,” he said.

Dean shared that domestic disappointment and other thoughts, musing on everything from a balanced budget to the art of napping, in a session this week with reporters packed elbow-to-elbow aboard his campaign charter, flying high over the Southwestern desert.

Call it Howard Dean, unplugged.

Or at least a bit less tightly wrapped.

The former governor of Vermont is not a man known for his warmth or fuzziness. As button-down as his blue dress shirts, he recoils almost physically, it seems, from the confessional politics of a Bill Clinton, who gladly shared tales of growing up with a wife-abusing stepfather. Dean’s family is strictly off limits -- his wife, a fellow physician, shuns the campaign trail, and reporters ask, only half-kidding, if she’s even aware that he’s seeking the White House.

Still, Americans want to like their presidents as well as respect them, so Dean has started opening up a bit, offering some interior glimpses to the growing media entourage sharing his travels across the country.

If a bit of plane talk can soften the edges of a man best known for plain talk, so much the better. It certainly worked for George W. Bush, who became the bantering star of a campaign documentary, “Journeys With George.” So, on Tuesday night, Dean shambled back to the bench seats in his white Gulfstream jet and plopped down on the brown leather for a 45-minute turn that was part press conference, part bull session.

How, exactly, does one survive the presidential campaign grind?

“You do it by putting one foot in front of the other and keeping your eye not just on the prize, but keeping your eye on what you have to do every day.”

What’s the secret to practicing good medicine?

“It’s your job to help [patients] heal themselves. Present them with an optimistic plan that they can follow.”

Who among his Democratic rivals would he support if he was not running for president?

Nice try.

And about those power naps?

Grab shut-eye wherever and whenever you can. “I don’t sleep long, but just sleeping a short time makes a difference.”

Dean, a longshot starting out, admitted being surprised at his rapid ascent, something he expected a bit later in the process, after the initial voting in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The same goes for the daily barrage of increasingly harsh attacks from his opponents. “That’s certainly taught me some new perspective about human nature,” Dean said with a sardonic smile.

Being the front-runner has also conferred a certain responsibility, he says, and he is now more careful to weigh his public statements -- although not always that careful. Asked about his recent reference in a radio interview to “a theory” that President Bush had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Dean insisted he was simply responding to a question. In fact, Dean brought the matter up, although he immediately disavowed the notion.

He likened his actions to the architects of the war in Iraq. “How does what I did differ from what [Vice President] Dick Cheney or George Bush or [Defense Secretary Donald H.] Rumsfeld or ... [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D.] Wolfowitz did during the time of the buildup to the invasion of Iraq? There were lots of theories that they mentioned, many of which turned out not to be true.”

He admitted tweaking the president by appropriating a line from Bush’s 2000 campaign -- the promise to restore “honor and dignity” to the Oval Office after the scandals of the Clinton years. Dean’s promise is to restore honor and dignity to the nation’s foreign policy.

Asked about another of Bush’s campaign promises -- to change the tone in Washington -- the proudly pugnacious Dean said he would strive for harmony if elected -- so long as the “right-wing Republicans” in Congress agreed to cooperate.

“I get along very well with moderate, business-oriented Republicans,” Dean said.

“I don’t get along very well with right-wingers because I feel as if they have a tendency to come into our homes and tell us how we’re supposed to live our lives. I usually don’t like that, and I’m sure most Americans don’t like that.”

On another topic, Dean suggested that a cutoff of oil exports to the U.S. by Saudi Arabia, the target of frequent criticism in his stump speeches, might not be such a terrible thing.

“That certainly would have the effect of rapidly accelerating renewable energy,” he said, adding that the technology exists to lessen U.S. dependence on foreign oil, if not the political will.

And, for all his criticism of Bush’s deficit spending, Dean said a balanced budget would be impossible to achieve during the first four years of his administration. That would have to wait until early in his second term, he said.

Dean also spoke of the adrenaline rush from speaking before the large, adoring throngs he usually attracts, and he offered sketchy memories of attending the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco.

He was 15 and spending a month in the Bay Area with a group of high school pals. The father of their host had tickets to the convention and Dean remembers watching the moderate Nelson A. Rockefeller booed by supporters of the conservative Barry Goldwater. It apparently had little effect on the young Dean; he came to the convention a Republican, just like his dad, and left the same way.

After landing in Las Cruces, N.M., Dean thanked the half-dozen or so reporters who had surrounded him in the back of the plane. He addressed a rally of about 500 supporters, shook a lot of hands, then headed back to Vermont for another 2 a.m. arrival.

This time, he stuck around a day.