Feature

Memories of a Dean Administration

Criticized by some for backing third-tier candidates in hopeless races, Dean counters by saying he’s trying to emulate what Newt Gingrich and the religious right did in the nineties in building a GOP political talent base. “The majority of candidates we support will not win. And I’m doing that on purpose,” he says. The traditional Democratic organizations fund the safe bets, he says, insisting he wants to encourage a new generation of would-be pols trying to make inroads in GOP states like Mississippi and Utah. “The majority of what we try to do is to seed for the future—young people running who are going to get their feet wet.” He brings star power to these campaigns: More than 450 people crammed into a St. Louis arts-center conference room in late June, waving old Dean signs, to see him headline a rally for Jeff Smith, a poli-sci lecturer now running in a contested Democratic primary for Dick Gephardt’s soon-to-be-vacant congressional seat, and for Maria Chappelle-Nadal, an African-American former state employee running for state representative. The audience cheered when she credited Dean’s call to arms for motivating her to get on the ballot. “He inspired me to really grow,” she told the crowd. “I’m not afraid to say what I believe.”

While Dean has taken on an array of commitments—making paid speeches to generate income, writing a book and a syndicated column, teaching at Dartmouth—nothing engages him more than this new mission, which offers him a power base should he run for office again. “All the seed money he’s passing out will pay off down the road,” says Jenny Backus, a respected Democratic operative who was unaffiliated in the primaries and is now consulting for Kerry. She adds that Dean’s success in energizing activists makes him extremely valuable to the national party. “I think Howard Dean is going to be red-hot in this election cycle. He’s got the credibility to talk to Nader voters and get them to come back to the Democratic Party.”

No one could have imagined, given the bitterness of the Dean-Kerry contest, that the two men might actually end up liking one another. “Kerry was astonished when he called me after the election and I said I’d support him,” says Dean. “He’s a great person. I like him. I’m a pro.”

“Kerry talks to all the ’04s, but a lot of it’s pro forma,” a longtime Kerry staffer says. “With Dean, he’s looking for real tactical advice. They’ve found they have a lot in common.” After all, these two Yale-educated East Coast men with elite pedigrees have more similarities with each other than with, say, son-of-a-mill-worker John Edwards and son-of-a-milk-truck-driver Dick Gephardt. While Dean won’t discuss his conversations with Kerry, many believe his advice is to tear a page from Dean’s own playbook and focus on energizing the Democratic base rather than going after swing voters. Dean says,“I think Ralph Nader is the single biggest obstacle to keep John Kerry from being elected president.”

Another top Kerry ally says, “I don’t know what Dean wants, but for the time being he is being extremely helpful to us.” Dean, a doctor who spent his campaign bragging about providing health insurance for all Vermont children under 18, would certainly make the short list for such jobs as Health and Human Services secretary. “First Kerry has to win,” says Dean, brushing off the thought. “You can’t start parceling out Cabinet jobs until after November 2.”

Dean has turned his “I Have a Scream” speech into a running gag. At a Chicago Cubs game, he was sitting in the rooftop seats overlooking Wrigley Field, and the man seated beside him kept asking, “You going to scream?” Finally Dean replied, “I’ll scream if the Cubs win.” Sure enough, in the ninth inning, after the Cubs clinched the game with a double, Dean hollered “Yahoo!” at the top of his lungs and then rattled off the club’s schedule: “And we’re going to San Francisco and Los Angeles and Philadelphia!”

“I’m a Rush Limbaugh kind of guy,” the man replied, “but you’re all right.”

Political-science classes in 2048 will likely still be studying Dean’s extraordinary rise and epic meltdown. “When people ask me why Howard didn’t win, I tell them it’s because he didn’t listen to his mother,” says Andrée Dean, a sweet, mischievous smile on her face. A lifelong Republican until her son launched his run, she says that she urged him to “behave more presidentially in his speeches and stop bashing Bush.”

Repeat this conversation to Dean and he replies, “My mother was right! That was advice I should have taken. I wanted to do that in September, but a lot of folks in the campaign said, ‘Don’t become presidential, because you’ll lose your base.’ I agreed to that, and it was a mistake. I wouldn’t have changed any of the decisions, but I would have pulled back on the rhetoric.”

If she could do it again, Judy Dean says, “I would have gone out more.” By the time her husband finally picked up the phone, the weekend before the Iowa caucuses, it seemed a desperation ploy, done at the urging of Senator Tom Harkin and his wife, Ruth. As Judy Dean recalls, “Mrs. Harkin talked to him and said, ‘Judy really has to be out here.’ Howard called me on a Saturday, and I wasn’t on call. He hated to ask me, he’s so considerate, he hated to ask me, I could tell. And when he asked, I said, ‘All he’s asking is for me to come out for a day,’ and I said, ‘Yes, yes!’ Howard saw I kinda liked it, so he was less reluctant to ask me in the future.”

Her husband was offended by the speculation in the media about whether they had a bad marriage. “There was a lot of bitchiness in the media about Judy,” he says, adding that he thought she was wonderful on the campaign trail. His wife says that having her marriage under a public microscope didn’t bother her. “I just know we have a really solid marriage and I’m happy and he’s happy,” she says.

In mid-June, Dean was mobbed by well-wishers at a service-employees union health-care rally at Chicago’s Lincoln Park attended by more than 500 people. Using signature lines from his old stump speech—“We’re going to take back America and send George Bush back to Crawford, Texas”—he exhorted the crowd to vote for Kerry. “When John Kerry takes the oath in the Oval Office on January 20, we will have health insurance!” He exited slowly through a gauntlet of people thrusting scraps of paper into his hand for autographs. “This is pretty intense,” he said in the car afterward. Then he added: “I’d rather be president.”