Sunday, January 11, 2004

By Maeve Reston, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

NORWICH, Vt. -- On many winter mornings, the venerable Norwich institution of Dan & Whit's General Store is still the center of activity in town. As neighbors pass over the creaky old floorboards to pick up their coffee, they swap hellos and critical information about whose roads have been plowed.

Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean gets up close and personal with the crowd after a pre-debate rally at Hart Plaza in Detroit. Click photo for larger image. Related articles A wobbly start, but Clark now flying straighter Pollsters agree it's a long way to November Comparing the candidates' Web sites Coming next Sunday: An overview of the stakes and status of the 2004 presidential election as Iowans prepare to cast the first votes that count. Index to all Democratic candidate profiles

Sometimes the conversation turns to politics, and when it does, topic No. 1 these days is the man who governed this diminutive state of 600,000 for more than a decade.

A year ago, most folks passing through Dan & Whit's laughed when asked whether they thought former Vermont Gov. Howard Brush Dean III could make it to the White House. Now, Dean's home state admirers and detractors say they are amazed that he's risen to the top of the Democratic heap.

Many Vermonters also are scratching their heads at some of the more liberal positions Dean has staked out as a national candidate, such as his call to repeal all $1.7 trillion of the Bush administration's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. When asked to describe the pre-presidential Dean, they usually come up with words like "moderate" and "centrist."

Harlan C. Sylvester, one of Dean's gubernatorial advisers, laughed when asked what he thought of Dean's proclamation last year that he represented the "Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party."

"That's not really him," said Sylvester, who served as Dean's chief economic adviser for 11 years. "He's not an ideologue. ... But you have to do what you have to do to get elected."

Former Vermont Gov. Thomas P. Salmon, a Democrat who led the state for two terms in the mid-1970s, said Dean has chosen "to be perceived nationally as one of the ultra liberals in the campaign ... [but] that ideological place is not the place where he was as governor of Vermont. What can be said with absolute clarity is that as governor of Vermont he was very fiscally responsible, which is a conservative philosophy, and he was pro-business."

Despite this moderate legacy at home and even as the November general election draws closer, Dean still isn't tacking toward the middle. At a Nashua VFW post last week, a voter asked him what his strategy was to "capture the center" so Republicans couldn't brand him a wild-eyed, "knee-jerk" liberal in the fall campaign.

Dean could have answered in a dozen different ways: pointing to his Republican roots as the son of a Wall Street stockbroker or mentioning the substantial Republican support he received in most of his five gubernatorial election campaigns.

	Biography: Howard Brush Dean III Age: 55 Political experience: governor of Vermont, 1991-2002; lieutenant governor, 1986-1991; member, Vermont House of Representatives, 1982-1986. Education: B.A. in political science, Yale University, 1971; M.D., Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University, 1978. Profession: practicing physician, 1981-1991. Marital status: married to Judith Steinberg, a physician, since 1981. Children: Anne and Paul. Money raised: more than $40 million, No. 1 among Democrats. Issues: repeal all Bush administration tax cuts; use $88 billion of the money to provide health insurance for every young person up to age 25 and for low-income adults; generally opposes unilateral military action. Quote: "The biggest lie told by people like me to people like you at election time is that if you vote for me I'm going to solve all your problems. The truth is, the power to change this country is in your hands, not mine." Website: www.deanforamerica.com

Instead, speaking with more practicality than passion, he spoke of his commitment to the Democratic liberal base as key to winning the White House.

"Our guys run to the middle and leave our base alone. That's why we lost so many governors in the last election," he said. "If you want to win this election you've got to do what we're doing. You've got to really get the base excited and proud to be Democrats again."

A penny pincher at heart

So the question remains: Is Dean claiming the liberal mantle out of political pragmatism or because his left-leaning soul is finally emerging as he runs for president at the age of 55?

Dean has defied labels all his life. He and his three brothers grew up on Park Avenue and East Hampton in New York and attended high school with other children of privilege at St. George's School in Newport, R.I.

The Dean boys earned their allowances and took summer jobs. Even now, Dean brags that he still wears a suit that he bought for $125 at J.C. Penney in 1987 and uses the same tuxedo he's had since high school.

In his college years at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., at a time when many in his generation became engaged in left-leaning causes, Dean studied political science but watched from the sidelines.

Dean did not support the Vietnam War but steered clear of protest organizations like Students for a Democratic Society. Though he got a low draft number -- 143 -- in the 1969 lottery and says he would have gone to Vietnam, he was never called up because of an unfused vertebra in his back.

After spending a post-graduation year near Aspen, Colo., skiing and taking side jobs, such as pouring concrete and washing dishes, Dean followed his father to Wall Street. Unhappy as a stockbroker, he began volunteering at night at the St. Vincent's Hospital emergency room in lower Manhattan and decided to pursue a career in medicine.

In 1975, Dean enrolled at Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in the Bronx, where he met his future wife, Judith Steinberg, a Princeton graduate and a daughter of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia. Dean did his residency in the ambulatory care program at the University of Vermont, and, after Steinberg finished school, they opened an internal medicine practice together in a small community outside of Burlington, Vt.

Dean first got involved in politics in the late 1970s, licking envelopes for President Jimmy Carter's re-election campaign in Vermont. He helped form a citizens group that pushed for a nine-mile bike path along Lake Champlain in Burlington.

Dean went on to serve two terms as a state legislator and was elected lieutenant governor in 1986, a part-time job.

He continued to practice medicine until Aug. 14, 1991, the day after Vermont's Republican governor, Richard A. Snelling, died of a heart attack. Dean immediately assumed the post.

Dean's innate fiscal conservatism came in handy, given the situation he confronted as a new governor. His budget chief Tom Pelham recalls that the deficit stood at $65 million, about 10 percent of the operating budget.

"The state had walked itself on the end of a plank financially," said Pelham. "The governor was faced with the reality of having to constrain spending, but also he had the instincts to do it, too.

"He's personally a pretty cheap guy. We'd sit in staff meetings and he'd have holes in his socks and his suit coat would be ripped. I don't know where it came from in his life, but he's not one to spend money frivolously," Pelham said.

Dean starting taking small slices from social programs like welfare and aid to the blind and disabled. A number of social service groups called the cuts "devastating," but Dean got rid of the deficit in three years.

"For Vermont, [the cuts] were major," Pelham said. "He had to pull together a coalition of Republicans and moderate Democrats to have his budget proposals succeed. Everyone knew that he would veto the budget. He would try to work in coalition-building, but if that wasn't successful and it came to a brinkmanship, people knew that he had the backbone to hold the ground he believed in."

At the same time, Dean put more money into his high priorities like economic development and health care, especially for children, which has been his signature issue ever since he entered the state legislature. After failing in an initial push for universal health care insurance, he moved in smaller steps.

At the beginning of his term, 10 percent of Vermonters were covered by publicly funded insurance; when Dean left office, that figure had risen to 25 percent. By that time, according to his campaign, 92 percent of Vermont adults and 96 percent of the state's children had either public or private health insurance.

Thriving on political combat

The thorniest issue Dean faced in his 11 years as governor was the Vermont Supreme Court's 1999 decision that same -- sex couples were entitled to be legally united.

Dean now supports civil unions but not gay marriage. At the time he had refused to take a stand before the courts had ruled, admitting that the whole debate "makes me uncomfortable, the same as anybody else."

After the high court rendered its decision, Dean directed the legislature to provide gay couples the same rights as married couples of opposite sexes. He signed the resulting civil unions bill into law in private, arguing that a public ceremony would have been disrespectful to those who had strong moral objections.

Those who are more removed from Vermont's political circles, like George Fraser, the co-owner of Dan & Whit's General Store, just shake their heads in wonderment when asked about Dean's rise.

"I certainly didn't see him coming with the strength he has shown nationally," said Fraser, a Republican who has never voted for Dean. "I would have guessed his very best shot would have been as a vice president."

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