The hot, hot, hot candidate: the anger, popularity, and prospects of Howard Dean.

Des Moines 

HOWARD DEAN is unveiling his early-childhood agenda before a dozen workers in the child-development center at the Des Moines Area Community College. The workers--mostly very sensible-looking older women--sit at tables facing Dean, sporting bright yellow "Child Advocate" stickers and earnestly taking notes. With actor/activist Rob Reiner at his side, Dean touts his "Welcome Baby" and "Dr. Dynasaur" early-childhood initiatives from Vermont, and explains his $110 billion plan for federal funding of similar programs. His audience is respectful, but not over-enthused. It's not until the question-and-answer period that Dean will close the deal, in a fashion utterly typical of his candidacy.

One of the workers raises his hand and says they've heard similar sentiments about the importance of early childhood from other politicians in the past, including Bill Clinton. What makes Dean different? Reiner begins to pipe up, but Dean slyly hushes him by patting his hand. Dean is eager to answer this question himself.

"Look what we've done in Vermont," he says. "Every time I put out the budget, I said to legislators, 'You're gonna support health insurance for kids, you're gonna support early childhood. If you touch one hair on the head of any of those programs, you'll never see another road grader in your district again.'" The audience laughs and applauds at the sheer SOB-ness of it. Dean adds, "My reputation for toughness and bluntness sometimes was justified. I was very tough with the legislature." When someone raises the prospect of Dean's having to work with a Republican Congress to pass his plans, he explains his idea of "working with": "If they don't do any of these things, then the next election in 2006 is gonna be a referendum on the behavior of Congress. It worked very well for Harry Truman."

Dean has won over this small crowd, not composed of partisan firebrands, with his promise to give 'em hell. In Primary Colors, the Bill Clinton character performs in a similar setting, wowing an adult-literacy class with a heart-wrenching, fabricated story about his illiterate uncle designed to show Clinton's deep sympathy with the struggles of his audience. Clinton bonded by emoting; Dean bonds by bristling. If Clinton pledged to feel our pain, Dean promises to inflict some--on those alleged malefactors who have seized control of the country so they can neglect children, the environment, and workers, and trample democracy.

Dean has been the Democratic candidate of the moment for some time now. It may be that rather than a flash-in-the-pan, Dean is the presidential candidate who simply best represents the contemporary Democratic party: not just its angry mood, but its principles and priorities. He famously captured the party's wholesale opposition to the Iraq war and its unyielding anti-Bushism sooner than his major rivals. But he also effectively expresses the party's hyper-multilateralist foreign policy and allergy to the use of force, its old-school big-government economics, and its liberalism on cultural issues. Clinton tried, intermittently, to mitigate all these positions and tendencies. Dean represents the return of the repressed--a repressed liberalism that is fed up and not going to take it anymore.

If Dean is the anti-Clinton, as has often been noted, he has parallels with another insurgent presidential candidate, the John McCain of 2000. Both Dean and McCain are tough, blunt-spoken, and anti-corporate, and both pioneered Internet networking and fundraising. Both suffuse their crowds with a sense that politics matters again, and champion a reformist patriotism: McCain wanted to fight special interests to make politics worthy of the country again; Dean wants to "take back the country," to restore its image abroad and vindicate small-d democratic politics. Both have been works in progress, as McCain evolved away from his former rock-ribbed conservatism and Dean has shed his relative moderation from Vermont.

There are big differences, of course. Most important, McCain ran against his party's establishment and its base. Dean is running against his party establishment, with the fervent support of its base. This is why he has an excellent chance to win the Democratic nomination, and represents a formidable political force.

A MAN AND HIS PEOPLE

It is impossible to understand Dean without realizing that his supporters sincerely think that Bush has soiled the country. Dean talks of restoring "the honor and dignity of the United States." That's an echo of Bush's right-hand-in-the-air pledge every day on the campaign trail in 2000 to clean up after Bill Clinton.

In introducing Dean at a rally at his Des Moines headquarters, Rob Reiner captures the sentiment. Reiner, of course, is the liberal actor who played Archie Bunker's son-in-law, not-so-affectionately called "Meathead" by Archie. ("Can you look at him and not think 'Meathead'?" one reporter whispers to another. "I've been thinking it all day," replies his colleague.) Balding and paunchy with a goatee, Reiner now looks like an aging-but-still-striving-to-be-with-it high-school teacher. His warm-up for Dean is an anti-Bush rant: "George Bush said he would be a uniter, not a divider. He lied. George Bush said that he would leave no child behind. He lied. George Bush said that we had to go into Iraq because it had weapons of mass destruction. He lied. I don't know about you, but I'm tired of it. I'm tired of being lied to!"

Reiner loves Dean for his supposed counter-Bush qualities. "This man looks you in the eye," Reiner tells the crowd, "talks straightforwardly, and tells you the truth and you can count on him. You can trust this man. I'm sick and tired of being lied to and I want a leader who we can trust." And who can stick it to Bush. Reiner later tells a reporter, by way of explaining his endorsement: "He is a fighter. People in this country are very angry."

At least the people at Dean rallies are. The anger comes pulsing off Dean crowds. At an afternoon rally in New York City, part of a nationwide union tour, the candidate tries to be uplifting. He launches into a riff about the progress made in the civil-rights revolution, despite awful setbacks. Dean recalls how we "lost" Martin Luther King and "lost" Robert Kennedy, but before he can finish with a burst of inspiring rhetoric, a voice rings out from the back of the hall: "Let's 'lose' George Bush!" Even when the Vermont governor tries to inspire, he provokes from his audience a call--by implication--for the assassination of the President of the United States.

The New York union rally doesn't represent a typical Dean audience, at least not up to this point. Dean's momentum has just won him the endorsements of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Heretofore, Dean rallies have had the demographic of a Phish concert: young, white liberals. The crowd in the hall of New York's SEIU Local 32BJ skews, by contrast, older, and black and Hispanic. In this crowd, a young pale white girl wearing a pink backpack with a button for the feminist antiwar group "Code Pink" looks positively out of place.

But Dean rage is an equal-opportunity phenomenon. The poster of Dean that people wave in the hall has a picture of him, not smiling like most politicians, but looking belligerent and irritated, like he's just been asked a hostile question. When he comes on stage, with the sleeves of his white dress shirt rolled up, he seems like he's spoiling for a fight. Dean is small, just 5'9", but there is something about his thick, stubby build that suggests coiled energy.

AFSCME head Gerald McEntee--chewing gum and decked out all in AFSCME green, a kind of angry union version of Will Ferrell's oversized elf--makes a hoarse denunciation of Bush as "that anti-worker, anti-family, anti-democracy president," eliciting peals of delight from the crowd. Dean takes it from there. He says Bush has given $3 trillion to Enron and Ken Lay. He compares Bush's record on jobs to Herbert Hoover's, and complains that the $87 billion in Iraq could better be spent on "investing" in roads, bridges, mass transit, renewable energy, and schools here.

It seems a standard-issue Democratic performance--until the end of his speech, when Dean tells the crowd, "Power to change the country is in your hands, not mine." Then he begins a chant: "You have the power!" He points with both hands out into the crowd each time he says it, a conductor working his orchestra into a smashing finale. "You have the power!" The crowd roars with every Dean shout, and for the moment--placards and flags waving in the noisy, packed union hall--it seems Dean is indeed the leader of a movement that is sweeping all before it.

But, for all that, there is ultimately a rent-a-crowd feel to the event (one advantage of union support, after all, is that they can rent crowds). When Dean ends his speech, he backs off from the microphones to join the New York elected officials standing behind him. Dean locks hands with them and they all raise their arms in a triumphant champion-prizefighter pose for the crowd. But most of the audience is already heading out the door, even as a union official bellows into the microphones, "We can do it! We can do it!"

Outside the hall, a member of the painters union who had announced from the stage, "The painters are behind you 100 percent" explains that he was a last-minute stand-in: "I don't know much about Dean, but the people backstage said he's pulling ahead." The painter says he used to be a Republican, "but look at this country." He waves his hand, gesturing toward what is a perfectly fine-looking section of downtown Manhattan. "There's no money to paint the Brooklyn Bridge," he complains, "because we're spending all that money over in Iraq."

The Des Moines rally headlined by Rob Reiner is a more typical Dean crowd, young white families and college kids milling about and drinking hot chocolate from large Dr Pepper cups. But what gets the Des Moines crowd going is the same thing that excited the union rally--Dean's "power to the people" finish, this time rendered in even more manic fashion: "YOU HAVE THE POWER! TO TAKE THE COUNTRY BACK! YOU-HAVE-THE-POWER-TO-TAKE-THE-COUNTRY-BACK-FROM-RUSH-LIMBAUGH -AND-JERRY-FALWELL-TO-TAKE-THE-WHITE-HOUSE-BACK-IN-2004-AND-THAT'S -EXACTLY-WHAT-WE'RE-GONNA-DO!!!"

SELLIN' ATTITUDE

These Dean riffs resonate, and have genuinely moved people. Riding in the van with reporters to a Des Moines debate is a young Dean aide. Pretty and blonde, she moved from a trendy downtown Manhattan neighborhood, giving up a job in the financial industry, to work in Dean's Iowa field operation. How many people have done that for John Kerry? She explains that she was "energized by this movement that Dean has created."

What exactly is "this movement"? It's hard to tell. Dean does not specialize in substance, and besides his health-care plan doesn't have much in the way of fleshed-out policy. Dean is mostly selling an attitude. From the bitter cocktail of the 2000 Florida fiasco, the disappointment in the 2002 mid-term elections, and the opposition to the Iraq war has emerged a Democratic mood of anger and yearning that Dean has uniquely captured. Eventually the mood will pass, and then all the "Deaniacs" might have trouble explaining what so inspired them. But the mood is here now, and in politics, as in so much of life, timing is everything.

The rest of the field is playing Dean catch-up. In the Des Moines debate, John Kerry and Dick Gephardt join forces to beat up on Dean for budget cuts during his time as Vermont governor, portraying him as practically a heartless Republican. The Kerry and Gephardt campaigns distribute a flurry of press releases. "DEAN TOOK MONEY FROM TEACHERS' FUND, PRESCRIPTION DRUGS." "DEAN BALANCED BUDGET ON BACKS OF ELDERLY AND POOR." Kerry badgers Dean about his former statements supporting Medicare savings, asking him repeatedly whether he would restrain the rate of growth of Medicare spending in an accusatory tone, as if he's asking him if he is now, or ever has been, a Communist.

Dean emerges mostly unscathed, partly because he keeps his anger down, an effort that seems almost physical, something between choking down an unpleasant drink and keeping his head from popping off. He bounces into the scrum of reporters in "spin alley" after the debate to insist immediately: "Medicare is off the table." His opponents are unlikely to convince anyone that Dean is an enemy of the poor. But there is a chance Dean can be portrayed as a phony. The fact is that Dean governed, in Vermont terms, as a budget-balancing moderate. He could easily have run for the nomination as a Joe Lieberman centrist. Instead, the running room was to the left, especially with all the credible candidates on the record in support of the Iraq war resolution.

So Dean ran left. Very little in his campaign would have seemed a natural fit two or three years ago. He spent his career fighting the angry, shaggy Left in Vermont, exactly the constituency he is attracting nationally. He was a free-trader, but now tells the labor unions, "When I am president, we won't be talking about free trade in the Americas." He was pro-business, but now rails against corporations. He drove Vermont environmentalists batty with his flexible approach to regulation, but now seeks a comprehensive "re-regulation" of American business. To top it off, he was a computer illiterate who knew nothing about the Internet that has become an indispensable organizing tool for his campaign.

But having been branded so strongly as the fiery insurgent willing to speak truth to power, Dean probably is secure in his image. And, although much can still happen, he has to be regarded as the presumptive Democratic nominee. Then what?

NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME 

The Dean camp is comforting itself with the liberal electoral myths that Bill Clinton had seemingly vanquished, relics of the wilderness years in the 1980s. That swing voters don't matter. That the Democratic party doesn't have a weak image on national security. That southern voters can be won over on economic issues. That a 100 percent high-octane liberalism will entice new voters into politics, changing all electoral equations. The last myth has been given new life by Dean's Internet fundraising, but the importance of this tactic shouldn't be overestimated. George McGovern, after all, pioneered direct-mail fundraising, then a radical new way to tap into small donations from ideologically motivated activists. It didn't make him any more electable.

Dean supporters also tell themselves that the candidate will eventually be able to reposition himself to the center, tapping back into his Vermont moderation. But Dean is a long way from Montpelier. Consider: Carol Moseley Braun, who says she couldn't reject the $87 billion in Iraq funding while the troops are still there, has a more responsible position on the issue than Dean. In the Des Moines debate, Dean won applause by praising Dennis Kucinich's position on the war. Even Kucinich, however, can't live up to Dean's standard of anti-Bush purity; Kucinich voted for Bush's education bill, the No Child Left Behind Act, which Dean routinely trashes.

The biggest wild card next year will be Iraq. The occupation could still prove a full-blown fiasco. Short of that, it's hard to see how Dean translates his Iraq-war rejectionism into a winning posture on national security. A political party can certainly neutralize one of the other party's best issues. It happens by either capitulating, as Clinton did in 1996 on welfare, or advancing a substantive alternative, as Bush did in 2000 on education. Dean so far shows no sign of doing either. Next year, he would have to clear a hurdle no candidate has faced since the end of the Cold War, and one that will be particularly daunting for a liberal candidate who governed a state of 600,000: Can you imagine him as commander in chief?

Then, there is Dean's cultural problem. With a few exceptions, Dean perfectly embodies the "blue state" half of the blue state/red state cultural split in the country. That the nation is so evenly divided culturally probably ensures that Dean won't suffer a McGovern-like blowout. But his cultural makeup will be a drag in the Midwest and eliminate any chances of competing in the South. Dean, as secular as presidential aspirants come, left the Episcopal Church in a dispute over a bike path in Burlington. He signed the first gay civil-unions law in the country, and even seems ready to re-fight some of the hoary cultural issues of 1980s, criticizing the high rates of imprisonment in the U.S. These cultural signatures will be more important to Dean's national image than how he handled the Vermont budget.

All that said, Dean's primary run has been dazzling. His current posture as a liberal firebrand, even if a product of circumstance, has enabled him to tap into the quality that people admire most in a politician: saying what he believes, and believing what he says. After the Manhattan union rally, a 71-year-old black man wearing a union jacket and with an iron-grip handshake that lasts a good minute says what he likes about the candidate: "Dean is like my handshake. It comes from the soul." That is certainly true of Dean's combative temperament, which is utterly genuine. He is no Al Gore, who had to consult his advisers on whether he would be a fighter or not and switched personas from debate to debate. Dean's rolled-up-sleeves toughness is refreshing, and suits the no-nonsense post-9/11 environment.

In this connection, it's almost painful to watch Dean do the obligatory reading-to-children routine prior to his early-childhood talk in Des Moines. He seems so out of place. The group of five-year-olds is perhaps the least pissed-off group of people Dean has addressed in a year. He perches atop a tiny one-foot-high chair and reads the story Pizza Pat to the kids. It is a performance shorn of Dean's animosities--except for anchovies. ("Have you heard of anchovies?" Dean asks. "They're very salty.") But even in this setting, Dean emphasizes his fighting spirit. He tells a few reporters that his campaign staff doesn't want him to wear "Save the Children" ties because the ties--flashy-colored, with childish depictions of kids--don't look presidential. Dean, who owns about 30 of them, says he led a "revolt" and now insists on wearing the ties. He has one on today. His aides were right.