The Left's Mr. Right?

By background, Dean, a WASP native of Park Avenue, now 54 years old, is no more a man of the people than Bush. Both went to prep school and Yale in the 1960s (Bush was three years ahead), both figured out how to avoid serving in Vietnam, both gave up drinking after party-hearty years (Dean much earlier) and both tried business first, with Dean deciding after a brief stint on Wall Street that he didn't much like his father's occupation and wanted to go to medical school instead. He and his wife, Dr. Judith Steinberg, settled into a family practice in Vermont. The death of a politically active brother, Charlie, which may have happened at the hands of Laotian communist guerrillas, hit him hard, he told NEWSWEEK's Howard Fineman, and he was in therapy for a time.

In 1978, Dean got involved in politics when he championed the establishment of a bicycle path around Lake Champlain, then stuffed envelopes in Jimmy Carter's 1980 re-election campaign, preferring him to the more liberal Ted Kennedy. After a stint in the part-time Vermont state legislature, he became the part-time lieutenant governor. While examining a patient one day in 1991, Dean learned that Gov. Richard Snelling had died of a heart attack. As he jokes to campaign audiences, he finished the exam because the patient had waited so long for an appointment, then he became governor.

During more than a decade running the tiny (population: 600,000), 97 percent white state, Dean focused on fiscal responsibility, child care and health-care reform. He lowered the state's hefty income tax, improved its flagging bond rating with professional fiscal management and established a rainy-day fund that has proved useful recently as the state weathers the economic downturn better than others. On social issues, he resisted most liberal blandishments. But he did establish a child-abuse prevention program that helped cut abuse cases by 30 percent; he signed a bill that shifted money from wealthy school districts to poorer ones (ticking off novelist John Irving and others, who moved to wealthier communities in search of better schools), and, over time, he expanded health-care coverage to include all children and most adults.

Early on, Dean was forced to apologize for saying that if welfare recipients "had any self-esteem, they'd be working," and generally developed a reputation as a centrist. Vermonters say they barely recognize the fire-breathing neopopulist now exhorting liberal audiences to "Take your country back!" But the pugnaciousness is familiar enough. Last year he strutted like a little Napoleon onto the floor of the usually genteel Vermont State Senate, stuck his finger menacingly into the face of 76-year-old Sen. Bill Doyle, then shouted: "You're willfully obstructing this session!"

Dean almost lost his 2000 re-election campaign over the backlash against the first-in-the-nation legalization of "civil unions," which gives gay partners hospital visitation and inheritance rights. After a Vermont Supreme Court decision, the legislature sent him a bill, which Dean says he signed without a public ceremony in order to quell divisiveness. Some Vermont gay activists claimed he signed it "in the closet"; he insists he helped push the bill through.

Dean makes a point that civil unions are "not marriage" and that the whole issue is none of the federal government's business. But he concedes the issue will hurt him in the South, where polls show him trailing the president by larger margins than other Democrats. Merle Black, a political-science professor at Atlanta's Emory University, says Southerners would have "no use for him at all" and predicts that many Democratic officeholders in the region would fail to campaign with him. But Black thinks the problem is more stylistic than related to his position on particular issues: "He's a New Yorker. He's very aggressive. For voters who are not ideological, they look at candidates and see if they think he's a nice guy. I don't think Dean is that nice guy."