Howard Dean

The Lake Champlain waterfront had all the charm of a junkyard when a young physician named Howard Dean moved here from New York in 1978. But Dean and others wanted a place to go bicycling, so they formed a group to buy up land and clean up the abandoned barges and boxcars littering the lakefront.

The effort, built on private donations, grants and volunteer labor, produced a nine-mile-long recreation area with splendid views of New York’s Adirondack Mountains. It also launched the political career of a now-54-year-old Democrat who hopes to be the first president elected from this remote state.

Dean vaulted from the Citizens’ Waterfront Committee to state representative to lieutenant governor -- to a 5 1/2-term governor who extended health coverage to all Vermont children and signed the nation’s only state law legalizing same-sex partnerships. He became known equally for his incisive mind and his occasionally sharp elbows.

“The more I did, the more I realized that I could effect change,” he said on a stop home between trips to Iowa, California, South Carolina and other key primary states. “I realized that you could change the world by more than one life at a time, which is what you do in medicine.”

Over and over, Dean has declared: “I want a different kind of America.” Since he became the first Democrat to establish a presidential organizing committee last June, he also has waged a different kind of campaign.

He has few handlers and a young staff known as “Deanyboppers.” His supporters gather at “meet-up” functions that resemble political Tupperware parties. Much of his $2.6-million campaign chest has been raised on the Internet.

Dean, a wrestler as a youth, has hiked the 270-mile Long Trail in Vermont’s Green Mountains and canoed the state’s Connecticut River. He has a listed phone number and neither smokes nor drinks -- not even coffee. His wife, Dr. Judith Steinberg, dislikes politics, maintains a medical practice and vows to continue working as a doctor if her husband is elected president.

He quickly broke away from the Democratic pack by condemning the war in Iraq -- a move that gave momentum to his outsider status.

At the first Democratic candidates’ debate in South Carolina, Dean sparred so fiercely with Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry that the other seven contenders seemed to fade into the woodwork. Polls in New Hampshire and elsewhere place him close behind Kerry, the party front-runner.

But Dean’s obstacles are not limited to his fellow New Englander. The former governor presided over a poor state with only 650,000 residents and just three electoral votes. Vermont has few minorities, no large cities and an almost nonexistent union presence. Despite serious problems such as widespread heroin addiction, Vermont has a bucolic image as a theme park of health and happiness. One year while Dean was governor, the state recorded a total of five homicides.

Dean, a graduate of Yale University and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, is known in Vermont for his mastery of arcane information -- from statistical data to the rap sequence from the movie “Bulworth.”

But he can be prickly and sometimes mangles his facts. Even Dean admits that his “sure-footed” decisiveness “sometimes comes across as a little more certain than some people would like.”

“Not everything is filtered through his brain,” said Don Hooper, who heads the Vermont chapter of the National Wildlife Federation. “And occasionally that gets him in trouble.”

Dean said he decided to run for president because he opposes virtually every aspect of President Bush’s administration.

“I just think the direction he has taken this country in is dreadful,” Dean said. “I thought to myself: ‘Are you going to do something about this? Or are you going to sit around and mumble about it for the next 20 years?’ ”

There was no “Eureka!” moment, Dean said, and as a boy growing up on Park Avenue, this Republican financier’s son did not dream of leading the country.

“Are you kidding?” he said. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do.”

He tried Wall Street, but he chafed, and looked for something different. Three years after he finished Yale, his younger brother, Charlie, was killed in Laos by communists who thought he was a spy.

Dean, seldom prone to public reflection, hesitated when asked whether the death of the brother with whom he shared a childhood bedroom was an emotional catalyst, spurring him first to attend medical school and then toward a career in public service.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” he said slowly.

He headed to Burlington for a residency at the University of Vermont, and soon became the political protege of the state’s Democratic grande dame, the late Esther Sorrel. Dean kept up his medical practice while serving in the Legislature and was so energetic that colleagues dubbed him HoHo.

But about 1998, Dean grew restless as governor, said Middlebury College political science professor Eric Davis. “He gave serious thought to running in 2000,” Davis said. “But Al Gore basically scared him out of the race.”

By then, Dean had served as chairman of the National Governors Assn. and also chaired the Democratic Governors’ Assn. Without raising taxes, he had balanced his state’s budget, setting aside a substantial rainy-day fund.

Dean’s innovations in Vermont included some of the nation’s most sweeping provisions for mental health coverage. He consistently earned top approval ratings from the National Rifle Assn. He advocated renewable energy sources and plunged about $100 million into land preservation.

Stumping in New Hampshire, Dean touted his domestic successes and his determination to “make sure this party comes back to its center.”

He ticked off his platform priorities: a balanced budget, universal health care, fully funded special education. At Dartmouth College, he added his commitment to global efforts to combat AIDS, and his belief that “abortion is none of the government’s business, period.”

The president’s No Child Left Behind program, Dean said several times, destroys local authority and should be called “Leave No School Board Standing.” He broadened a question about military funding to reply, “Part of defense is renewable energy.”

Dean’s quick criticism of the U.S. invasion of Iraq was an easy call in Vermont, said University of Vermont political science professor Garrison Nelson. The state’s three-person congressional delegation voted unanimously against the resolution to take action in Iraq -- the only state to do so.

But when the war ended quickly, Dean lost ground, Nelson said. “For example, when he said that getting rid of Saddam Hussein was ‘probably’ a good thing to do, what did he mean, ‘probably?’ ” Nelson said.

In Vermont, said John McClaughry, Dean was such a centrist that some in his own party considered him “a Republican in drag.” McClaughry, a Republican who heads the Ethan Allen Institute, a public policy think tank in Kirby, Vt., said: “A lot of people in Vermont look at Howard Dean today and they don’t see the Howard Dean who was governor. He has reshaped himself to appeal to a faction of the Democratic constituency.”

Despite a pedigree just as patrician as Bush’s or Kerry’s, “Howard never has acted like a rich, to-the-manor-born type -- even though he has the bank account,” said Peter Freyne, a columnist for Seven Days, an alternative weekly newspaper in Burlington. Freyne said Dean’s background serves him well: “Most people don’t understand money; they don’t teach it in school. Howard grew up understanding money.”

But Freyne echoed a nagging doubt that many Vermont residents have about Dean. “He doesn’t always listen enough,” he said. “He decides on the way to go, and he goes that way.”

Dean says his views are not inflexible. He cited, for example, his longtime objection to needle-exchange programs, a practice that he believed encouraged the spread of heroin addiction. After reading an exhaustive study that indicated otherwise, he said, “I changed my mind overnight.”

As governor, Dean rearranged his schedule to coach sports for daughter Anne, now 19 and a freshman at Yale, and 17-year-old son, Paul, a junior at Burlington High.

His wife stayed so aloof from state politics that some people called her the invisible first lady. She made few appearances and skipped at least one of Dean’s inaugurals for the two-year post as governor. Through Dean’s office, Steinberg declined to be interviewed.

Saying he resents politicians who exploit their families, Dean maintains there is no reason for his wife to campaign, because “she is a doctor, not a politician.” He added: “This would be a different first lady. But Hillary Clinton was a different first lady.”

The grass-roots quality of Dean’s race harks back to the days when he helped lay bricks at the Burlington waterfront. “All I wanted was a bike path,” he said.

But, added the aspiring Democratic president, “I figured if you were going to work this hard, you might as well have something to say about what is going on.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Howard Brush Dean III

Born: Nov. 17, 1948;

New York, N.Y.

Parents: Howard Brush Dean Jr., stockbroker (deceased) and Andree Dean, art appraiser.

Education: Yale University (B.A., 1971); Albert Einstein College of Medicine (M.D., 1978).

Spouse: Dr. Judith Steinberg, family practice physician.

Children: Anne, 19; Paul, 17.

Current job: Presidential candidate.

Previous jobs: Governor and lieutenant governor of Vermont; Vermont state representative; family practice physician.

Military service: None.

Source: Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times

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About This Series

This is the second installment in a weekly series profiling the candidates for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. For the Q&A;, the candidates are responding in writing to an identical set of questions, and their responses have been edited for space