The Real Howard Dean

...an income sensitivity provision—legislators from both sides of the aisle say he was not "terribly useful...

...Yes, there have been Vermontborn Presidents, but they built their political careers elsewhere...

...Dean's bipartisanship was forged out of Vermont political reality...

...As Vermonters See Him The Real Howard Dean By Samuel B. Hand Burlington Vermonters bred on the maxim that neither Ethan Allen nor God populated their state sufficiently to produce a credible Presidential candidate are amazed at the reception of former Governor Howard Dean's bid to become the Democratic standardbearer...

...Malcolm Severance, a Republican who supported the bill, has described the adoption debate as the proudest, most exciting moment of his political career...

...In 2000 Dean again faced Dwyer, as well as a candidate from the Left, Anthony Pollina of the Progressive Party...

...Steinberg, a dedicated physician, would be to leave her practice in Vermont for life as the First Lady...

...As the head of a citizens' waterfront group, he spearheaded a successful drive for a new bike path along Burlington's lakeshore and acquired broader name recognition...

...A few weeks later both doctors appeared in court with Paul...

...His wife and his two children have not campaigned with him, and locals speculate on how keen Dr...

...Few here doubt that Dean would sweep the state if a Presidential election were held tomorrow...

...Organized labor, unfazed by Vermont's Wall Street rating and unhappy about Dean's reluctance to support its demands, backed him as the least undesirable alternative...

...Yet it took Brigham to focus the Legislature on the issue...

...Dwyer, the one anti-Civil Union Act candidate, dropped to 38 per cent, while Pollina on the Left did not draw enough votes to deny Dean a popular majority...

...To be sure, his popularity in his own state feeds heavily on local pride...

...Dean was thus forced to deal with Senate and House barons from opposing wings of both parties while plotting his political course...

...The media, of course, focused most of its attention on the Deans...

...Ironically, despite his having stayed on the sidelines, the Governor could not escape association with the law's restricting local control of school budgets and programs...

...Declaring that unfair, he proposed an equalization formula for Vermont's schools that would be financed with 1 per cent of the existing sales tax plus a money pool drawn from the 23 "gold" towns having the highest tax bases and lowest tax rates...

...Moreover, until his last term Dean had to work in the notoriously undisciplined House with a Democratic speaker who owed his selection to Republican support and occasionally appointed a Republican to a key committee chairmanship...

...In the light of this record, it is reasonable to wonder how Dean came to be labeled a liberal...

...Snelling, whose conservative bona fides were unquestioned, had designed a plan to erase a huge deficit he inherited, and Dean implemented it...

...It was not that the Governor's ambitions for higher office came as a surprise...

...Dean's efforts to shield his family from the media blitz were compromised shortly before he formally proclaimed his candidacy, when his son Paul was caught along with four other youths attempting to burgle beer and champagne from a local country club...

...Vermont's Constitution does not require a balanced budget, yet for the past dozen years it has had one—an achievement to be credited to Snelling, Dean and Republican James Douglas, who was elected in 2002...

...Joan Donath, a private citizen, hopes that Dean will be allowed to "provide the same astute political management for the nation as he has for the state...

...He would soon be Vermont's longest serving governor since 1791, when it became a state, and the votes he had attracted were quite impressive...

...In 1982 Dean won a seat in the State Legislature...

...During the 2000 electoral campaign a number of out-of-state visitors confused the "Take Back Vermont" slogan with an appeal to buy maple syrup, cheese or some other Vermont product and take it back home with them...

...Dean's narrow victory, with barely 50 per cent of the vote, was a close call only because the Vermont Constitution mandates that if there is no popular majority the election is decided by the Legislature...

...Many legislators, rather than master its details, were said to have based their vote on whether their towns were giving or receiving...

...He is the author of The Star That Set: The Vermont Republican Party 1854-1974, and a coeditor of The Vermont Encyclopedia...

...In 1995, well before Brigham, Dean had put education reform "at the top of the agenda...

...Apart from Vermont's few electoral votes (three), the greatest obstacles to Dean's national candidacy have been perceived to be a bipartisan political posture and his insistence on separating his family from his political life...

...Veteran Burlington journalist Peter Freyne maintains that until Dean threw his hat in the ring his name and the term liberal never appeared in the same sentence...

...Shortly after the election Dean announced that he would not seek another term, and he devoted his last two years in office to campaigning openly for the United States Presidency...

...THE TWO BILLS, plus lingering resentment from legislation passed before Dr...

...His incrementalism and opposition to undertakings he deemed beyond the state's economic capacity helped mold a moderate image...

...During the flush years revenue surpluses were deposited into a reserve fund or spent on one-time projects...

...He spent so much time outside the state that critics from the press and both parties questioned whether he could properly fulfill his responsibilities in Montpelier...

...The former governor was asked whether he thought his son's offense was somehow linked to his father's frequent absences from home...

...This was something that bothered him a great deal, Dean replied, but "Judy pointed out the parents of the other four kids weren't running around the country...

...Dean, who thus sought to separate property taxes from improving education, claimed to have bipartisan support for his scheme...

...Bernie Rome, an unsuccessful aspirant for a Republican nomination to run against Governor Dean, has contributed to his Presidential campaign fund...

...It charged that the people's rights, particularly property rights, had been abrogated by the "growing bureaucracy" in the state capital and demanded their restoration...

...In its final form, it set a minimum amount of funding per pupil that applies to all school districts, and required those providing more than the minimum to put a percentage of the additional amount into a "sharing pool" to be distributed to less affluent communities...

...Nevertheless, Dean was his party's uncontested nominee for lieutenant governor in 1986 and went on to win the general election...

...After his re-election in '84 he became assistant minority leader...

...While in practice with his wife, Dr...

...Since Republicans outnumbered Democrats in the 2001 Legislature, it would otherwise have been possible for them to choose the Republican candidate...

...The Governor husbanded his popular support by sidestepping major contentious initiatives...

...Now those impressed with Vermont quality appear to be buying Howard Dean...

...Opponents of the bill were outraged...

...Freyne exaggerates, but not by much...

...In earlier generations, when Vermont's Republican Party was in its ascendancy, politically ambitious young men gravitated in that direction...

...His next election, in 1998, was strongly contested by Ruth Dwyer, a spokesperson for the Republican Right...

...Like the other boys, he was sentenced to a court diversion program for first-time offenders that, if fulfilled, wipes out any criminal record...

...The AP's Chris Graff, doyen of the Vermont press corps, described Dean as "young, inexperienced and seemingly liberal" when, as the Lieutenant Governor, he was thrust into the top office upon Republican Governor Richard Snelling's sudden death in August 1991...

...He arrived in Vermont in 1978 with a BA from Yale and a newly minted MD from Yeshiva University's Albert Einstein College of Medicine...

...As early as 1992 Senator John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV of West Virginia had introduced him at a Democratic National Convention as a future President...

...Although the consequent Equal Educational Opportunity Act of 1997 embodied elements of Dean's proposal—e.g...

...Another State Supreme Court decision, Baferv...

...Possessed of a passion for politics, he gravitated to the Democratic Party, allegedly less for partisanreasons than because it was the more likely route to elective office...

...Dean arrived on the scene, sparked a "Take Back Vermont" movement that peaked during the 2000 gubernatorial contest...

...Republican State Senator Vincent IIuzzi recalls that while Lieutenant Governor Dean presided over an evenly divided Senate, he successfully opposed a Snelling-backed proposal to use money from bonds for a road paving project...

...The Republicans captured the House, but oddly the fierce reaction to the Civil Union Act (Dean was at times advised to wear a bulletproof vest) was not reflected in the gubernatorial totals...

...In his final year as lieutenant governor he presided over an evenly divided Senate, and during his five terms as governor the Democrats only held majorities in both houses of the Legislature twice...

...Besides his messages traveling well, for Dean an intangible plus has been Vermont's mythic status as the embodiment of some ideal of the American community...

...But his fiscal record, his protests against a unilateral foreign policy, and his call for "new directions" have increasingly registered beyond Vermont—whose three members of Congress voted against the Iraq war, and which has suffered a disproportionate number of war dead...

...In his first two gubernatorial campaigns he won over 70 per cent of the vote, and in his third over 68 per cent...

...The reason apparently was that the act included a statewide property tax...

...Dean, a native New Yorker, chose the road less traveled by...

...By then Dean had come a long way from the summer day in 1991 when a patient to whom he was giving a physical examination told him Governor Snelling had died of a heart attack...

...His personal interest, for instance, prompted him to attempt a broad restructuring of the state health care system, but when it was apparent that would fail he proceeded piecemeal...

...Democrats in the State Senate complained that he was prodevelopment to the detriment of the environment, and that his welfare reform "saddled" recipients with a workrequirement...

...Schools were funded mostly from property taxes, enabling districts with higher property values to provide higher quality education...

...He also proposed a sensitivity feature that would give low income residents of the wealthy towns rebates on their property taxes...

...But Dean quickly grew comfortable with civil unions, asserting that everyone merited equal treatment under law...

...In its opening paragraph the Civil Union Act affirms that "marriage means the legally recognized union of one man and one woman," but by extending the marriage benefits and protections to same sex couples who have formally entered into a "civil union," it created a legal distinction without a difference...

...Samuel B. Hand, a new NL contributor, is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Vermont...

...State of Vermont, in 1999, provoked greater controversy and had a major national impact...

...Given the alternative of either including same sex couples into the existing marriage laws or providing a parallel "domestic partnership" system, the Legislature chose the latter...

...They also consideredhis Presidential quest quixotic...

...Spending increases were capped at 3.5 per cent annually...

...Offered the opportunity to try for governor when Kunin retired, he preferred to run again as lieutenant governor, but within eight months fate put him in Snelling's seat...

...Dean was also charged with actually being more cautious than Snelling in accepting Federal matching funds...

...While the spirit of the law was applauded, it was enormously complicated...

...At times acerbic, he more often exudes sincerity and personal charm, as those who have encountered him on the waterfront bike path or elsewhere attest...

...It didn't make sense," Illuzi says, "to take out a 20-year mortgage to buy a hot mix that lasts three years...

...State associates remember little about him more radical than the bike path initiative...

...As the greatgrandson, grandson and son of New York investment bankers, Dean had deeply ingrained Wall Street values that he nourished, with a conservative investment banker as his principal financial adviser...

...Judith Steinberg, whom he met in medical school, he became active in the party...

...There are some who have denounced Dean as a "meanspirited Bill Clinton," but former legislators such as Alice Bassett, who rued Dean's lack of liberal fervor, volunteer at his Presidential headquarters...

...supporters, particularly in the gay community, were highly critical...

...When a Republican National Committeeman tried to depict Dean as similar to Vermont's Independent Congressman Bernie Sanders, a self-styled Socialist, Candice Page, the Burlington Free Press' lead political reporter and a direct descendant of a 19th-century Republican governor and senator, dismissed the notion—and not because Dean came from Park Avenue and Sanders from Brooklyn...

...A health insurance program for youths under 18, "Dr...

...With the "Take Back Vermont" movement whipping up emotions, legislators on both sides of the civil union issue lost seats...

...The principal architect of the Civil Union Act was Tom Little, Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee...

...The first of these, handed down in 1997 in Brigham v. State of Vermont, ruled that under the state's Constitution substantially equal access to quality education was a right...

...Except as a political strategy, it is difficult to think of Dean as dedicated to political partisanship...

...For instance, his hosting a meeting of the Conference at the restored last home of Vermont's Revolutionary War hero, Ethan Allen, gained the event (and him) far wider coverage than it usually generated...

...Alice Cook Bassett, who served with him in the Legislature and sometimes carpooled with him to Montpelier, recalls that he expressed few strong ideological convictions but left an impression of standing decidedly to the right of other Democratic legislators...

...Early on Governor Dean impressed voters by both bolstering the state's solvency and cutting taxes...

...By mobilizing the opposition to the Equal Educational Opportunity Act, she secured 41 per cent of the vote...

...A more recent Vermont arrival, a curmudgeon of indeterminate political persuasion, countered that what the two men have in common is the support of the National Rifle Association...

...Few Vermonters expected him to advertise himself as the Democratic wing of the Democratic party...

...In 1980 he participated in Jimmy Carter's Presidential campaign, and the next year he was elected chairman of the Chittenden County Democratic Committee...

...This was the ruling that under its Constitution the state was required to extend to same sex couples the benefits and protections it afforded heterosexual couples...

...This was enhanced by his opposition to methadone clinics and the growing of hemp, because he felt they would contribute to heroin use...

...He served two two-year terms with Democratic Governor Madeleine Kunin, who has noted that he "made no waves...

...In addition, Dean had milked his chairmanship of the National Governors' Conference for maximum publicity...

...Dinosaur," and a preschool program, "Success by Six," were his biggest accomplishments...

...The controversial aspects of Dean's days in Montpelier seldom arose from his priorities, but rather from State Supreme Court decisions...

...As a physician, though, he remained committed to more accessible health care forall Vermonters and used his final State of the State Address to stress the point...

...One wit suggested he signed it in the closet...

...A year later he cut over $70 million dollars from a budget of under $700 million...

...But his prudent policies often failed to resonate with legislators or labor leaders...

...More surprising, even to his most avid supporters, is seeing him labeled a liberal governor...

...Dean, who opposed the formal recognition of gay marriage, divorced himself from the proceedings and signed the bill without ceremony, saying he was compelled to do so by the court decision...

...At the announcement ceremony Dean appeared with his wife and daughter, a Yale undergraduate, but not his son...