Return of the Angry Man

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Return of the Angry Man <br />
He might have simply disappeared after the Scream ended his presidential hopes. But as head of the Democratic Party, Howard Dean is still going to go to New Hampshire. And...

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Why would he want such a job? The short answer is that he was looking for work. And he's got the guts to try it. &quot;I looked at the DNC chairmanship, and it ain't the presidency,&quot; he says, &quot;but it was...

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On Dean's arrival here, he found a plush office at the brand-new Democratic headquarters on Capitol Hill awaiting him, complete with calf-colored leather sofas. This was thanks to McAuliffe, who despite his limo-driven, Hay Adams-lunching persona did some heavy lifting for the party. In 2001, McAuliffe took over an organization carrying decades-old debt. He lacked basic equipment and a voter file, thanks to years of insolvency, complacency and neglect. "We never invested because we had always been broke," he says. "And when Bill Clinton was in office he was such a great communicator that the lack of capability wasn't apparent because he was so good. Once he was gone . . ."

Over his four-year tenure, McAuliffe made the party solvent and professionalized operations. He raised more than $500 million, invested in computer technology and compiled a 175-million-voter database. But according to McAuliffe and Dean, much remains undone. The party is woefully inadequate when it comes to smaller, equally crucial aspects of party building. And that is where Dean takes over.

Example: Go to a Web site for Republicans in Oklahoma, Tulsagop.org. A crisp page appears, with a slide show that covers each issue of the day, from judicial nominees to stem cells. There are links to local GOP clubs, sharp color photos and an invitation to "participatory leadership training."

Go to Tulsademocrats.org, and you find an unpolished red-and-blue site with a handful of tabs. One of them says "Photos." Sounds promising. Click on it, and three words pop up.

"Flag Day 2003."

Dean and the Democrats can fashion whatever message they want, but if they don't have the infrastructure to get it across, it won't matter. "We have real problems as a party on just every level," Trippi says. "It's hard to point to something we're beating the Republicans at."

So it was perhaps fitting that Dean's Washington debut would be marred by a small but telling communications breakdown. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) took the stage at the H2O Lounge to introduce Dean, starting with a simple, "Good evening." Only it came out, "Good ev -- --"

Norton paused, and tapped the microphone. She blew on it, and tried again. "Good ev -- --"

More tapping and blowing.

"You know, I thought Democrats owned this place," Norton said. "Sabotage."

Only it came out, "sab-t-a -- "

Dean sidled up next to Norton. "We're holding off for a few minutes," he said. He turned and handed the mike to a technician. More tapping offstage.

From somewhere in the back of the room, a man's beery voice rang out.

"Don't scream, Howard!" he hollered.

You can see the problem.

Dean's most explicit quality is audacity. What makes a former governor from Vermont, a quaint nonconformist agrarian state of 610,000 that lacks the swat of even a New Hampshire, think he could run for president? Or that he can save Democrats from going the way of the Whigs?

One answer is that if Howard Brush Dean III is an outsider, William F. Buckley Jr. is a bounding arriviste. Dean may be a political interloper, but his social pedigree is one of pure entitlement. Ralph Wright, longtime speaker of the Vermont House, wrote a not-entirely-flattering description of Dean in his memoir, All Politics Is Personal: "Howard Dean never walked into a room with the slightest doubt that everyone who gathered there loved him."

He was born on November 17, 1948, the first of four boys, to Howard Brush Dean II, a stockbroker, and Andree Maitland Dean, an art appraiser. He is descended from the Rev. Nathaniel Huntting, the second minister of East Hampton, N.Y., who settled in the Long Island town at the end of the 17th century after studying at Harvard under Cotton and Increase Mather. Another ancestor, Benjamin Huntting, outfitted whalers in nearby Sag Harbor. His immense white-pillared mansion is now the town museum.

Dean comes from the old Eastern code that treats wealth as ethic. His father, "Big Howard," reared his sons along the lines of John D. Rockefeller, who once said, "Every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty." Big Howard made his living dutifully, and served his country dutifully. He suffered from diphtheria as a youth, and, when he was rejected for military service during World War II, he ran freight to the Allies in North Africa, Nigeria and Sudan, and helped resupply the Chinese nationalist air force against the Japanese.

Big Howard, who died in 2001, was a character, a stocky man with a deep voice and rigid rules but an antic sense of humor. He was a gagster who carried a collection of plastic bugs in his pocket. He couldn't stand stuffiness or ostentation. He was a staunch Republican and a member of the select Maidstone Club in Easthampton, yet he didn't seem class-conscious. His sons remember him playing golf at Maidstone one day, and hunting with local plumbers the next. "He didn't give a damn what the difference was," Dean says. He insisted that status was irrelevant and that his sons should pay their own way. "He earned every nickel and was a real penny pincher," Dean says. "We all were."

(Dean has passed it down to his children. A couple of years ago, friend Betsey Krumholz was working a ticket booth at Burlington High School, selling $40 passes for the football season. Dean and his wife, Judy Steinberg, came by, with son Paul trailing behind. Dean pulled out his checkbook and asked for two passes.

"Do you want a ticket for Paul, too?"

"No," Dean said. "He can pay his own way.")

The Dean family divided its time between an apartment on Park Avenue and a second home on Hook Pond Lane in East Hampton. But it's a peculiarity of a New York childhood that wealth doesn't entirely cosset you. The Dean brothers, Howard, Charlie, Bill and Jim, rode the bus and subway to their private, all-boys grade school, Browning. Bill remembers being mugged regularly for his bus pass.

The Dean household was noisy, and belligerent. "We were always competing to be heard," says Bill. "The only way I could do it was I just had to be louder than everyone else." Card games became wrestling matches. A family story has it that on the bus one day, some kid smacked Howard. His younger brother Charlie smacked the kid back. Just then, their grandmother happened to pass by. When a woman on the street said, "Look at those boys fighting, that's disgusting!" their grandmother said, "Those are my grandsons!" and smacked the woman with her pocketbook.

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The Dean boys were encouraged to debate over family dinner and to be politically engaged. Charlie, younger than Howard by 15 months, was by all accounts the most ambitious of the Deans, a gregarious,...

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Dean arrived in Burlington in 1978 to take up his residency at the University of Vermont teaching hospital. He was joined the following year by Judy Steinberg, a woman he met in medical school. They wed in 1981 and set up a family practice. Steinberg is a slight woman with a mass of brown hair who shrinks from public life and declined to be interviewed for this article. Steinberg, Dean tells friends, is the superior doctor and intellect, and he cites one of their medical school final exams. The curve was so severe that a passing grade was 30. Dean got a 34. Steinberg scored a 92.

Dean retreats to Burlington on weekends. On the day after he threw DeLay into jail, he could be seen in old green sweats, as he strolled along a lakeside path deep in conversation with Steinberg. On most Sunday afternoons, Dean and Steinberg walk or bicycle along the shore of Lake Champlain on a path Dean is partly responsible for building. It was his first political engagement, and if it's one of the more quaint aspects of his résumé, it's also a monument to his stubbornness.

Shortly after he came to Burlington, he helped found the Citizens Waterfront Group and led what became a years-long legal and legislative battle to preserve the lakeshore from aggressive development. The path, several miles long, was built in excruciatingly piecemeal fashion, and not without hard feelings. Dean pulled up old railroad ties, laid paving stones and even preserved an old tree that was being gnawed on by beavers by putting a fence around it. He gathered petition signatures in supermarkets. He quit his Episcopal diocese when it considered siding with developers.

Vermont politics is intensely neighbor-driven, and it was a neighbor, Esther Sorrell, who fostered Dean's interest. Sorrell was the state coordinator for Jimmy Carter, and her house was a hive of Democratic activity. Her son Bill -- who would become Dean's chief of staff and now is Vermont's attorney general -- remembers piles of leaflets and voter lists around the house. "I was 16 before I realized the dining room table was for meals," he says. Dean met Esther in 1978 on the sidewalk while she was tending her flowers, and was drawn in. On Friday evenings, Dean sat in her living room and ate her brownies while they watched "Washington Week in Review." One Friday evening around that time, Bill stopped by, and there was Dean "feeding his face" and absorbing political gossip. "This guy needs to get a life," Bill Sorrell thought.

Dean started at the bottom, stuffing envelopes and sponging stamps. "He wasn't too big or too good for anything," Sorrell says. But Dean's ambition accelerated: He became county chair after Carter's failed 1980 reelection campaign and, by 1983, was a freshman in the Vermont House of Representatives. There he developed his reputation for political audacity. Wright, in his memoir, remembers Dean as cheekily dismissive of protocol, leapfrogging elders to go for the job of minority whip. By 1986, he was lieutenant governor. Wright recalls Dean becoming bluntly livid when a rival legislator's committee slashed the salary of his administrative assistant. "He's a no-good sonofa*****," Wright quotes Dean as saying. "I swear to God if it takes a lifetime I'll get the bastard." Dean admits in his autobiography that he needed chastening. A senior Democrat, Marie Condon, cautioned him. "Someone had gotten my blood boiling, and I must have said I was going to retaliate," Dean wrote. "Marie took me aside and said: 'You're going to do really well here, but you've got to get over this chip on your shoulder that tells you to fix somebody's wagon if they cross you.' "

Dean was seeing a patient one August morning in 1991 when he got the call telling him that Republican Gov. Richard Snelling had died and that he was the new governor. Dean immediately reassured the state by keeping Snelling's staff and his policies in place, setting a tone of pragmatism he would maintain for most of the next 12 years, as he became the longest-serving governor in the country.

Dean endeared himself to Vermonters with his oddball informality. He eschewed inaugural balls and wore either a $125 J.C. Penney suit or a hockey jacket and hiking boots to the governor's office in Montpelier. He drove carpool for his kids and, while Steinberg maintained her medical practice, often watched the kids in the governor's office.

Wright was struck by Dean's unaffectedness when the two of them visited Washington in 1993, for President Clinton's address on health care to a joint session of Congress. Dean was invited to sit behind the first lady in the gallery and to stay over at the White House. The next morning Wright picked up Dean. "Awaiting our arrival was this boyish guy, looking for all the world like he was waiting for a bus to take him to summer camp," Wright wrote. "[H]e had a suitcase I'm certain was made out of cardboard. His hair looked like he had simply run his hands through it and had a pronounced cowlick sticking up in the back. He had buttoned his shirt unevenly and the knot in his tie was closer to his shoulder than his adams apple."

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How did it go? Wright wanted to know.

"I was tired. I went right to sleep," Dean said.

Well, did he see the Clintons for breakfast? "I didn't see anyone. I just got up, and showered, and came down here to wait for you guys."

"Governor," Wright said, incredulously, "you didn't even get to have a cup of coffee this morning?"

"I don't drink coffee. Besides, I wasn't sure where I was, and I didn't want to bother anybody."

Dean wore his clothes until they were threadbare, and he favored cheap suits and shoes. "Don't look at the socks," says Ochs. "If they match." He kept the office refrigerator stocked with generic soft drinks. "No name sodas. You couldn't find a brand you ever heard of," Sorrell says. His bicycle was a junker he bought at a garage sale for about $5, and, as Steinberg jokes to their friends, "he thinks he overpaid for it."

When the Clintons hosted a dinner for governors in 1996, Dean went into his closet and pulled out a tux he had worn in high school, and insisted it still fit him. "It didn't," Rogan says. "He looked like a sausage." Dean was suffering from a cold and, toward the end of the night, he had a particularly violent coughing fit -- and the tuxedo split open. "The whole front exploded," Rogan says. "It came apart." Dean had to borrow an overcoat to leave the White House. "And he went back and had that thing fixed," Rogan says. "He had it repaired."

As governor, Dean treated the citizens' money like his own. Sorrell remembers him pounding the arms of his chair in anger over the fact that he and the legislature had to assess a small sales tax. When he took over, Vermont was running a $65 million deficit. For 12 years, he was a fanatical balancer of the budget and also managed to lower taxes (helped by the Snelling policies he inherited).

Dean's management style in doing so was brisk, to put it charitably. He was impatient with procedure. Sorrell remembers Dean calling him in the early days of trying to erase the deficit. "Listen, I'm thinking about an income tax cut," he said.

"Whoa, Howard," Bill Sorrell said. "Whew. I got to chew on that one."

"Well you better chew fast, because I want to announce it today."

His style meant his staff was always trying to catch up with his policy, or his off-the-cuff pronouncements. At times, it bred confusion and discord. Dean liked to toss an issue on the table without warning and pit aides against each other. He'd sit back and listen to both sides. Sorrell, who controlled funding for programs, was often at war with the human services secretary, Con Hogan. "Howard would out of the blue throw an issue on the middle of table, knowing we'd be at each other," Sorrell says. Finally Sorrell called him on it. "What did you do that for?" he asked.

"I wanted to watch two gladiators go at it," Dean replied.

Dean's record shows a pragmatic doer who balanced budgets, cut taxes, extended health care to all of the state's children, was tough on crime and favored business growth. Vermonters are baffled at portrayals of him as a wild-eyed lefty. "That's not the Howard we know," says attorney Rick Sharp, a partner in the Citizens Waterfront Group. Dean was pegged as liberal for opposing the war in Iraq when 70 percent of the country favored it, but his position now looks more moderate.

There is considerable debate in Vermont about the extent of Dean's political courage. He tended to favor incremental measures and aggravated the left, the right, environmentalists, developers, farmers and gay rights activists equally. His most overtly courageous act was signing a civil unions bill in 2000, but his hand was forced by a state Supreme Court ruling. He signed it behind closed doors, refusing a public ceremony. Still, he signed it. Afterward, he was subject to screaming vitriol and wore a flak jacket when he marched in local parades. When he attended an annual maple festival in St. Albans, an elderly woman approached him and said, "You . . . queer-loving son of a *****." Dean replied, "You should clean up your mouth, lady. You certainly didn't learn how to talk like that in Franklin County."

Christopher Graff, the AP bureau chief in Montpelier who covered Dean throughout his tenure, summarized his record this way in 2003. "He defies labels, following a pragmatic not partisan path . . . He hates dependency -- whether it is drinking or drugs or welfare -- and abhors debt . . . He is, by his own admission, 'an odd kind of Democrat.' "

His time as governor was the period in which Dean's backbone was formed, and his mouth, too. Initially a wooden speaker, as he grew comfortable he became extemporaneous and outrageously frank. He once called his own legislature "a zoo." In 1994, when Democrats lost control of Congress, he took on Gingrich over school lunch programs. "They must be smoking opium in the speaker's office," he said.

Jim Dean contends that his brother's habit of blurting things out results from the fact that, as governor, he continued to think and act like an everyday citizen. Dean, he says, is no different from you and me: Politics makes him angry. "Most Americans, of any political persuasion, get up in the morning and read the newspaper, and they get a little cranky about some of the stuff they read," he says. "I don't consider him any different."

The crash of the Dean presidential campaign was by all accounts emotionally harrowing. Never had a campaign come from so far behind to get so far ahead and then collapse so quickly, Trippi says. It left everyone exhausted, and bitterly disappointed, and with the predictable recriminations that come with a losing campaign. "It was the greatest experience I've ever had in my life, and please, God, don't ever let me do that again," Trippi says. "I would gladly change my name and give every dollar I've ever made in my life not to have done it."

The person who took it best was Dean. He rehabilitated himself by puttering around the house in Burlington, doing chores and attending Paul's hockey games. It helped that the rest of the Dean family treated the whole affair with their usual wryness. Jim Dean's son said, "So, Dad, if Howard's not going to be president, does that mean we don't get our own tour of Area 51?"

In the fallow period, Dean and Jim launched the political action committee Democracy for America, and Dean lectured at Dartmouth College. Within a few weeks, Dean was making new plans. Supporters approached him about forming a third party, and he considered it. "I actually toyed around with whether a third party would make any sense," he says. "I concluded I didn't want to do that for two reasons: First, it would take forever. And there's only been one successful one in the history of the country, and I didn't think I was ready to compete in Abraham Lincoln's league."

When Dean instead decided to run for DNC chair, his brothers were appalled. Jim wrote him a letter urging him to reconsider, worried that his brother would disappear in the Washington "cesspool." He thought too many separate self-interests were pulling the party apart, arguing "over that 6 percent of political turf they have left."

But Dean considered the job doable, and winnable, even if others didn't. It was an act of sheer political will that he got himself elected, despite widespread opposition. Among those who opposed him was Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. "He wasn't my first choice," Reid says, "but I admire the way he got the job." An example of Dean's determined buoyancy came when he requested a meeting with Reid to make his pitch. After Dean emerged from Reid's office, Ochs recalls asking anxiously, "How did it go?"

Dean said, "Oh, it went great."

"Really?"

"Yeah, he's not for me."

"Okaaaay," Ochs said. "So, why did it go great?"

"Well, I like him," Dean said. "He just told me right off. He was real straight up about it. He doesn't think I'm the right guy. He doesn't think I should do it. But I like that. When I win this, we'll be able to work together."

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Dean burrowed deep into the DNC membership with a grass-roots campaign that echoed his presidential bid. He outworked eight other candidates with a one-on-one charm assault on the committee's 447 members, lobbying for votes with phone calls and visits. "He got the job the old-fashioned way," Reid says. Dean won critical endorsements from three Southern state party chairs: Florida, Oklahoma and Mississippi. One chair he won over was Oklahoma's Jay Parmley, who initially opposed him. "The last person I thought should be chairman of this party," Parmley says, "was Howard Dean."

But Parmley was also disillusioned by the attitude at national headquarters and was willing to listen. Though Oklahoma is a so-called red state, it's not as red as all that. Parmley had managed to help elect a Democratic governor, Brad Henry. And yet, Parmley had few resources from the DNC and couldn't direct-dial anyone in Washington. "The DNC didn't even seem interested, except for 16 to 18 states in a presidential cycle," he says.

Dean convinced Parmley that he wasn't afraid to fight in red states. And he was the only candidate with a specific plan, who understood the logistical and financial help needed. "He just made a lot of sense," Parmley says. "He understood that we were out here in the middle of nowhere and oftentimes stranded."

The result was that Dean, once marginalized and scorned after the primaries, outflanked his rivals. In the end, the powers that be of the party acquiesced. He was unanimously elected DNC chair on February 11. "The fact that he is now the DNC chair should tell people who don't understand Howard Dean a lot about him," says Rogan. "Everyone totally underestimates him. But he's a very smart guy, and a hard worker, and he's got a phenomenal political instinct. I realize a lot of Democrats are nervous about him, but they should just relax, and he will reenergize this party."

Early reviews of Dean's performance suggest he gets a good grade for reviving benighted local operations. "I think the job he's doing is remarkably positive," says Reid. Dean already has organizers at work in 16 states. Oklahoma, for instance, has four new ground workers, paid for by the DNC, who will be there for four years, not just for one campaign. "I don't think he's made a big mark on his chairmanship yet," says Scott Reed, Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign manager. "I do credit him for going back to some basics in blocking and tackling, as far as what a party should do in assisting state operations. That's a smart way to build a party instead of spending all of his time inside the Beltway running his mouth. To his credit he's gotten in there."

As for fundraising, the signals are mixed. There are grumbles that some large donors are chilly to Dean or that he is too focused on the Internet-based small donors. May reports showed Republicans had raised $43 million for the year, compared with $19 million for the DNC. But, the DNC says, Dean has raised more in his first few months -- about $1 million a week -- than any other DNC chair during an off-election year, and is ahead of the pace set by McAuliffe in 2001. Dean believes the small-donor base is sustainable, and that it's the best way to keep the party out of the hands of special interests. In two weeks alone online, the DNC raised more than $500,000 to help build state parties. Dean has passed the cash to Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota, West Virginia, Wyoming, Nevada, Nebraska, Mississippi and Kansas, among others.

He acknowledges that he is still getting to know the large donors, many of whom he had never met. He predicts that once he's better acquainted, he can close the gap with Republicans. "I think it's hard to call up somebody and ask them for a big C-note without knowing anything about them," he says. "We're doing the things we have to do."

But message remains a problem. It's one thing to let Republicans poison their own water on Iraq or Social Security. But voters continue to have a soft view of what Democrats stand for. "If the message they have to carry, and messengers they have to support, are repackaging lousy-tasting liberalism, the people still aren't going to swallow it, and that's the issue," says former RNC chair Rich Bond.

The DNC plan is to shape a cogent message around three or four issues party leaders can agree on over the summer. "We're going to get together and find out what they think they ought to run on to win, what is it they really believe," Dean says. "And the list isn't going to be the same in Alabama as it is in Minnesota. But there will be some things in common." Dean at least seems to have an inkling of what the message will sound like: His speeches are a drumbeat of jobs, fiscal conservatism, gas prices, national security, health care and getting lawmakers out of your living rooms. "Common-sense concerns," Reid says.

In the meantime, Democrats are left with Dean's blunt rhetoric. The prevailing view among party leaders seems to have become, Howard is Howard, and this is what he does. "The DNC chair and the RNC chair, part of their position is to stir the pot, to get party faithful running," says Reid. "I'm not going to comment on his statements. I'm going to comment on the positive agenda we're working on. We're looking at what he's accomplished, and it's significant." If Dean comes in for criticism, it's worth pointing out that McAuliffe endured similar criticism at the same point in his tenure, for being a soulless money man, or too much the attack dog.

It's all speculative. Dean's effectiveness can't really be judged until the 2006 elections and the next presidential cycle. Much of his first few months has been spent on transition. And it's important to note that Dean is not a one-man solution, or wrecking crew, either, for Democrats. Nobody is. It will take many people at all levels to make the party healthy again. Some Democrats remain lulled, or star-struck by the Clinton presidency, convinced that all they need is one strong candidate or leader. "They think there's some political Messiah who's going to come back and make everything right, and that's just fantasy," Jim Dean says. "They're hallucinating."

Dean continues to eat at his desk and ignores the Washington "whisper campaigns" about how he is doing or what he's saying. "My sense about those things is that, if you have enough staying power, those all go away," he says. If the chair makes him a target for detractors, it also is an opportunity for him to show, over time, that he can talk straight and still connect the party to the mainstream.

"I know what I want," he says. "I know what my vision of the world looks like, and I'm working to try to get it. Now, to the extent that there are a lot of externalities that you got to deal with every day, that's fine. But I have a pretty strong sense of who I am and what I think is right. And I'm not often put off."

If the presidential run did anything for Dean, it toughened his skin. "I mean, if you've been put on televisions 750 times in a single week, it kind of makes everything else pale by comparison," he says. "The interesting thing about American politics is that notoriety matters a lot, I've discovered." If even the Scream is survivable, surely a few firebrand, off-the-cuff remarks are, too.

"It's survivable -- if that's what you think is important," Dean says. "I mean, if my life was about sculpting some big image for the rest of the country, then it wouldn't be survivable. My life isn't about that. I'm very anchored in things that have nothing to do with politics, which is basically my family. And so I always have that, a set of values to go back to that is much more important than what happens in the political sphere."

Oklahoma City, May 12:

As his flight landed, Dean collected his belongings. Behind him, passengers murmured.

"That's the guy who ran for president."

"A Democrat in Oklahoma," somebody else said, "there's a tough row to hoe."

At party headquarters Dean met up with state chair Parmley and a few of his aides, most of whom wanted their pictures taken with him. The offices were typical fluorescent-lit affairs, with piles of papers and blinking computers. Against one wall was a map of Oklahoma. Dean studied it. He pointed to the panhandle. "What's that area like?" he asked.

"Pretty red," Parmley said ruefully.

From there, Dean went to a union hall, where about 250 loyals awaited him, as did the local press. Dean met in an anteroom with reporters and launched into his sales pitch. "I'm serious about a new message," he said. A reporter named Michael McNutt from the Oklahoman raised his hand. He wanted to know where Dean was taking the party on gay rights and abortion.

"These are not our issues; they're Republican issues," Dean said. "They're the ones who talk about them all the time. We believe a woman has the right to make up her own mind about what kind of health care she needs, and that ought not to be done by Tom DeLay and the boys back in Washington."

McNutt was unmoved.

"So, the Democratic Party is for abortion rights, is that what you're saying?"

You can see the problem.

Dean moved to the main hall. Among the crowd were long-suffering Democrats like Jean Morgan of Norman, Okla., who regularly attends $3.50 beans-and-cornbread fundraisers at Furr's Cafeteria. Also in attendance was Chris Metcalf, a former Republican from Jenks, Okla., who grew disaffected when his party moved too far right. "I know my Bible like other folks," he says. Metcalf is interested in working for the Democrats in Tulsa, but he is appalled by the disrepair he found the party in there. "It's really bad," he says. "In fact, I'd say bad would be good in this instance."

Parmley introduced Dean by saying, "He's a different chairman -- he's better." Dean took the podium and launched into one of his extemporaneous speeches. "I don't think this is such a Republican state. I think it's a state of common-sense values!" [Applause] "We ought never to run away from the values debate. We ought to be in the values debate!" [Applause] In closing, he tried to remind his listeners that he's not the wild liberal they think he is. After all, he said, he won eight endorsements from the NRA.

"See, I can talk about that in Oklahoma," Dean joked. "Maybe I won't talk about that so much in Massachusetts." [Laughter] Pause.

"Actually, I will," he said, grinning widely. "That's the problem."

Sally Jenkins, a Washington Post sports columnist, is a regular contributor to the Magazine. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Tuesday at 1 p.m. at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.

Ellie