It's hard to imagine a place seeming farther from the White House than State Street in Montpelier, Vermont. A bucolic hamlet nestled alongside the Winooski River, Montpelier, a town of 8,000, must be the only state capital without a McDonald's. On a brisk May morning, the sun glints blindingly off the gold-domed capitol building. Shops along State Street sell the latest issues of Yoga and Feng Shui, while boutiques with names like Moon Mountain and Cool Jewels offer beads and crystals. Independent bookstores abut the headquarters of Vermont's Progressive Party, the funky Capitol Grounds coffeehouse, and, of course, a Ben & Jerry's.
From this unlikely perch, Vermont Governor Howard Dean is launching along-shot 2004 presidential bid. Even his best friends have greeted hisintentions with astonishment and disbelief. "It's amazing to me that someone setsout to climb that mountain, particularly as far out on the plains as he is," saysWilliam Sorrell, Vermont's attorney general and an intimate of Dean's. "He's gota long walk even before he reaches the foothills."
Never mind that Vermont is famously mountainous ski country; the fact remainsthat Dean, who opted not to seek re-election this November after serving fiveterms as governor, is busily tilling the plains of Iowa, New Hampshire, SouthCarolina, and other early primary states. He has also trekked out to the moneystates -- New York, California, and Texas -- although he admits that he's "somewherebetween an asterisk and 1 percent" in pre-election polls.
So just how does a largely unknown governor from the tiny People's Republic ofVermont plan to get himself elected president? First of all, despite Vermont'sreputation as perhaps America's most liberal state, Dean is at pains to make itclear that he's not one of the flakes that cascade from the skies during Vermontwinters. In fact, he's a hard-nosed, penny-pinching fiscal conservative who seemsto delight in sticking his thumb in the eye of the Democrats on the party'sever-shrinking left wing. That said, he was also the first 2004 contender to kickat the cornerstone of President George W. Bush's domestic agenda, saying, "Thefirst thing we need to do is roll back those tax cuts."
Unlike the infield's worth of Washington Senators who are suiting up tochallenge Vice President Al Gore's re-election bid, Dean is a governor. Andunlike the attorneys of the firm Kerry, Edwards, Lieberman, & Daschle, Dean is adoctor. Score two for Dean. But that's not counting his ace-in-the-hole: healthcare. Vermont's health-care safety net is the nation's most comprehensive. Morethan 90 percent of Vermonters have health insurance, including nearly all of thestate's children, and Dean is waging a virtual one-man jihad against thepharmaceutical industry. If health-care costs continue the dizzying upward spiralof the late 1990s, if the number of Americans without health insurance continuesto soar, and if Congress -- as seems virtually certain -- fulminates but ends updoing nothing about either access to health care or a prescription-drug benefitfor Medicare recipients, Dean could find himself riding that tiger all the way toWashington.
"He's got a complete leg up on what is going to be the number-one issue of2004, which is health care," says James Carville, the Democratic consultant whoengineered the ascent of another small-state governor a decade ago. "If he couldraise money, he'd be dangerous."
Raising money, Dean knows, is his embryonic campaign's mostdaunting task. "I'm going to be dead last in fundraising," he says, though he'scounting on being able to pull in $8 million to $10 million going into 2004'sfirst three primaries. "We're going to rely heavily on people who can write checksfor $25, $50, $100," says Kate O'Connor, the governor's chief political aide."We're going to campaign from the bottom up. We're being realistic, knowing thatfor the $1,000 donors, Howard Dean isn't going to be their first pick."
Dean established a political action committee (PAC), the Fund for aHealthy America, last fall, but so far it has collected about $140,000, and itsfirst formal fundraising event is scheduled for late June in Fire Island, NewYork. That the PAC chose to host its event at a summer retreat for New YorkCity's wealthy gay and lesbian community is no accident, as Dean is counting onsupport from Democratic gay activists. In 2000 the Gore-Lieberman campaign raisedat least $10 million from gay donors. And Dean has a special advantage with thiscommunity: By signing Vermont's 2000 landmark legislation allowing gay andlesbian civil unions -- the first law of its kind -- Dean became something of a folkhero among gays.
Since last fall he's spoken to at least a dozen gatherings of gay leaders inNew York, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Washington, California, and elsewhere. Whenveteran lesbian activist Torie Osborn attended a gathering of Hollywood actorsand preening pols last year, she says, Dean stood out: "It was a roomful ofstars, and he was the brightest." David Mixner, a longtime activist who raisedmillions for Gore and, earlier, for President Bill Clinton, had lunch with Deannot long ago. "I found him delightful," says Mixner. "I think he will be pleased.Even people who are supporting other candidates might write him checks for $250,$500, or $1,000. He risked his career over the civil-unions issue, and it's acommunity that doesn't forget its friends."
Still, gay activists are sophisticated political investors, and at least someof the early money is on John Edwards and Dick Gephardt, activists say. "In termsof the big-money Democratic Party insiders, [Dean] will be a force, but therewill be competition," says Osborn.
Compared with the burgeoning and well-oiled machines being assembled by someof his would-be Democratic rivals, Dean's PAC is charmingly modest. So far itconsists entirely of Kate O'Connor, who handles her PAC duties on a part-timebasis from a small office in Montpelier while juggling her state duties. "Well, wedo have somebody who's a college student right now, who's volunteering part time,and we're bringing in another person in June," says O'Connor, who's workedclosely with Dean since 1989 when he was lieutenant governor. Since then,O'Connor has been collecting, organizing, and filing thousands of contacts fromacross the country, including a silo of new ones harvested from Dean's recentpolitical travels. Right now, all of those business cards and contact sheets arepiled up in her office.
"I have boxes of stuff," O'Connor says. Organized by state? "Oh, yeah!" she says, laughing. "I have boxes for every state." How does she remember who they all are? "It's not easy." Eventually, she hopes, those boxes -- computerized -- will be part of a Carville-style war room. "Now we're lean and mean," she says.
Many of the contacts Dean has developed date back to the 1990s, when he servedas chairman of the National Governors Association (NGA) health committee, then asco-chair of the NGA's Task Force on Health Care, and finally as chairman of theDemocratic Governors Association (DGA). Since 1995, he's been the DGA's mainrecruiter for gubernatorial candidates, a post that has given him the chance tocrisscross the country for five years, meeting and greeting.
"I think some of the governors will help Dean behind the scenes, and some willhelp out in the open," says Joe Trippi, the veteran political consultant who'shelped run presidential campaigns for Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, RichardGephardt, and Jerry Brown. Trippi worked on all of Dean's gubernatorial wins, andhas signed on to provide strategy for Dean 2004. Though he's not being paid(yet), Trippi is helping his candidate map out field operations in NewHampshire -- where Dean hopes to claim near-favorite-son status -- as well as in Iowaand South Carolina. Trippi admits that Dean faces an uphill battle. Butpresidential campaigns always narrow down to just two people, he observes. "Goreprobably has one of the gates cinched, and the question is, who gets the othergate?" he says. "My guess is that whoever gets the other gate wins."
Dean's doing his best to lock it in for the early primaries. He has madecountless visits to New Hampshire and half a dozen trips to Iowa since last fall.According to The Des Moines Register, he has visited Iowa more often than any other hopeful, and he's planning an extended swing through the state in June. His PAC kicked in $5,000 to the Iowa state party and has donated money to some local candidates, too. Part of Dean's appeal in Iowa, and in gun-friendly New Hampshire, will be his opposition to gun control. "I have an A rating from the National Rifle Association," Dean reminds Iowans. And he is especially close to Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack.
According to the Register's lead political reporter, David Yepsen, Dean's political style matches up well with Iowa. "He knows how to do small-town, one-on-one campaigning, which big-state politicians often have trouble doing," says Yepsen. "He's folksy, and he takes time to chat." Another plus, Yepsen says, is that unlike some of his rivals, Dean will be unemployed in 2003, giving him lots of time to spend building support for the Iowa caucuses.
Medium height, wiry, and fit, Dean has a swift grin and atendency to redden beneath his politician's tan when he laughs. He speaksrapid-fire, often in bursts, and his eyes flash when he says something provocative,which is often. He is proud of his bluntness -- so much so that he not only speaksbluntly but pauses now and then to tell his listeners that he is, indeed, blunt.With alacrity, he accepts the suggestion that a Dean campaign might resembleArizona Senator John McCain's "Straight Talk Express," even down to thatsenator's famous effort to wear down reporters with incessant contact.
More Michael Dukakis than Bill Clinton -- we are, after all, in stonyNew England -- Dean is not warm and cuddly, and he is not easily given tointrospection. He keeps his notoriously media-shy wife, Judith Steinberg, also aphysician, out of sight, and she declines all interview requests. Word is thatDean is quick to anger. "The governor has a temper," says John O'Kane, manager ofgovernment affairs for IBM Microelectronics Burlington. "He's thin-skinned. Wechoose our words very carefully around him."
Dean's plainspoken directness might seem like a Vermont Yankee trait, but inhis case it's the New York Yankees. Born in 1948 into a wealthy New Yorkfamily -- his father and grandfather were stockbrokers, his mother an artappraiser -- Dean grew up in the Hamptons and on Manhattan's Upper East Side,attending elite private schools before going to Yale University. The New YorkDeans were Rockefeller Republicans, and Dean recalls accompanying his father tothe GOP's 1964 convention in San Francisco, where at age 15 he watched NelsonRockefeller get pummeled by the Barry Goldwater right.
Some analysts, including the University of Vermont's Garrison Nelson, aveteran observer of state affairs, still consider Dean a Rockefeller Republican,but one who, like his friend Jim Jeffords, discovered that the GOP no longerprovides a home for that wing of the party. "I think he learned in retrospectthat the kind of Republicanism that Rockefeller represented, i.e., fiscallyconservative but socially liberal, was probably dead within the RepublicanParty," says Nelson. Increasingly uncomfortable with the Republican right butequally repulsed by the Democratic left, Dean slowly began gravitating to theexact political center.
After college, Dean followed his father to Wall Street, spending two years asa broker. Dissatisfied with that life, he chose to travel and then to spend a yearin Aspen, Colorado. Back in New York, he enrolled in classes at ColumbiaUniversity's School of General Studies, volunteered in the emergency room at St.Vincent's hospital -- "I wanted to see if I could stand the blood and the gore," hesays -- and eventually decided to enroll at the Albert Einstein College ofMedicine, graduating in 1978. Months later, Dean did his residency at theUniversity of Vermont Medical Center and then, with his wife, established amedical practice in Shelburne, just down the road from Burlington on the shoresof Lake Champlain.
Cynics say Dean settled in Vermont because it offered him a perfectentrée into politics. "He needed a state as a springboard," says Nelson."He was barely in the state, and right away he got involved in politics." Deanadmits that he had political ambitions even before medical school, but insiststhat Vermont intrigued him for other reasons. "I had a lot of connections here,"he says.
Soon after moving to the state, Dean found himself in the living room ofEsther Sorrell, a former senator and godmother of Vermont Democratic politicswhose home doubled as a political salon in the late 1970s. Bill Sorrell, theattorney general and Esther's son, says, "I was in sixth or seventh grade beforeI realized the dining room table was for eating, not for holding piles of voterlists." He recalls Dean as a frequent visitor on Friday nights, when Vermont'spoliticos would gather to talk politics and watch Vermont This Week on TV. Not long after that, Dean ended up as chairman of the Chittenden County Democratic Committee, which served as the launching pad for his entry into electoral politics.
Elected to the state legislature in 1982 and in 1984, Dean becameassistant minority leader -- thanks in part to his sheer persistence. TheUniversity of Vermont's Nelson quotes Ralph Wright, the longtime speaker of theHouse, comparing Dean to a "tagalong kid, the kind whose mother says you have tolet him play." The stars aligned for Dean in 1986, when he found an opening torun for lieutenant governor. He was re-elected in 1988 and again in 1990, underboth Madeleine Kunin, a Democrat, and Richard Snelling, a Republican. Thelieutenant governorship is a part-time job, and Dean continued to practicemedicine. But on August 14, 1991, while examining a patient, Dean received thephone call that changed his life. Governor Snelling had suffered a fatal heartattack.
From the start, Dean navigated a triangular course between the twoparties, clashing often with the Democrats over taxes and spending -- and helpingto drive many liberal-left Democrats into the arms of the Progressive Party andof Representative Bernie Sanders, Congress's lone socialist. Inheriting a fiscalcrisis from Snelling, Dean slashed the budget and dramatically reduced taxes.During the 1990s, Dean repeatedly unsheathed his veto pen, and he often alliedwith a growing contingent of conservative Blue Dog Democrats and Republicans tooutmaneuver the Democratic leadership on issues such as taxes.
In his fiscal conservatism, Dean has been guided for more than a decade by abehind-the-scenes kingmaker named Harlan Sylvester, a senior executive at SalomonSmith Barney in Burlington who chairs Dean's council of economic advisers.Sylvester praises Dean for forcing through a dramatic tax cut during his firstyear in office, over the objections of "the left of the party [who] wanted to soakthe wealthy," Sylvester explains, leaning back in his chair in an expansive officejust off Lake Champlain. "One-quarter of 1 percent of Vermonters pay 16 percentof state income taxes," he says. "That's 829 people, and a lot of them areclients of mine. Four of them moved out of state rather than pay Vermont taxes."
Dean's support for tax cuts may be unorthodox, but he has little appetite forsoul-searching about his party. "The ideological debate in the Democratic partyis a waste of time," he snorts. "I have no patience for ideologues." Nonetheless,it's clear what ideology guides him. "My politics has been aimed at the middle,"he says. "I don't believe in giving away the store. I'm not an old-fashioned,1960s liberal." And as Vermont's elected Democratic officials watched Deanconsistently win re-election with three- and four-to-one majorities againstRepublican opponents, says Peter Freyne, a political writer for the Vermontweekly Seven Days, "they've taken notes and adjusted appropriately."
Not surprisingly, business groups have tended to back Dean since 1991. "He'sbeen a strong supporter of many of our baseline issues," says Chris Barbieri ofthe Vermont Chamber of Commerce. IBM's O'Kane says, "For the most part, businesshas viewed him favorably." IBM is far and away the state's largest employer, andDean has assiduously courted the company, meeting quarterly with its executivesfor 11 years. When the plant in Essex Junction pulled for a highway constructionproject that environmentalists opposed, Dean took the company's side. In mid-May,rumors circulated that IBM might scale back or close the plant. Dean told a pressconference, "There have been very few things that they've asked for that theyhaven't gotten."
For all that, the crown jewel in Dean's Vermont legacy remains the state'shealth-care system. A web of state programs -- an expansive Medicaid plan, Dr.Dynasaur, the Vermont Health Access Plan (VHAP), VHAP-Pharmacy -- provide anextraordinary level of care to Vermonters over a broad income range. Dr. Dynasaurguarantees coverage to children in families with an income up to three times thepoverty level, meaning that a family with four children and an income of $72,936gets free care for its kids. VHAP provides coverage and low-cost prescriptiondrugs for adults not eligible for Medicaid. And Dean's vaunted Success by Sixprogram provides for early child care and parental guidance, including homevisits by case workers, for virtually all children born in Vermont.
When Dean first waded into the health-care wars in the early 1990s, he proposeda sweeping plan for universal coverage -- but, like President Clinton's, Dean'splan drew fire and collapsed in the legislature. Since then, he has pursued anincremental approach that has shown real results. Doing so has meant walking afine line, however; while his initial support for universal health care has ledsome business groups and conservative Republicans to grumble, his subsequentcaution has alienated supporters of more fundamental reform. Deborah Richter, aphysician and leader of Vermont Health Care for All, accuses Dean of sabotagingthe creation of a Canadian-style single-payer system, which has consistently hadsignificant backing in the state legislature, the endorsement of the VermontAFL-CIO, and even support from many small businesses and doctors. Dean simplydismisses single-payer as an unrealistic goal. "I don't want another Harry andLouise campaign," he says.
But there is one industry Dean hasn't shied away from fighting full-on, andthat's Big Pharma. "They consider me an enemy, I'm sure," he says -- and he'sright. He's pressed the NGA to demand action to force drug prices down. He'shelped set up a national coalition that lobbies Congress to close loopholesallowing drug makers to extend patent protections unfairly. And he's even urgedVermonters cross the Canadian border in order to buy drugs, which are vastlycheaper there.
Doctors, of course, never sell snake oil. If the Dean camp is right inthinking that health care will be at the very center of Americans' concern abouteconomic security in 2004, Dean might very well end up doing his next residencyin Washington.
