Quotes of the Day

Life is so simple when you are at the back of the pack. No one picks on you, and no one picks up on your gaffes. When the Democratic presidential race started to take shape a year ago, few bothered to attack the quirky doctor who was an ex-Governor of a small New England state. He barked and blustered, but the Democratic establishment and the media saw in him little more than entertainment value. He stood on the wrong side of a popular President's war and outside the party establishment, within which the winner would be anointed in due course.

It is more complicated at the top of the heap. Now former Vermont Governor Howard Dean leads the eight other Democrats by every measure that matters (at least until people start voting): in polls, money, organization and enthusiasm. As the Democratic front runner, with only two weeks to go before the presidential race begins in Iowa, Dean is being pummeled from every angle, and his every assertion is being examined under a microscope. In the past few weeks, he has declared that the U.S. is no safer with Saddam Hussein in captivity, mused about an "interesting theory" that President George W. Bush was tipped off about 9/11 by the Saudis, whined that Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe should stop the other candidates from assailing him and hinted that if he does not win the nomination, his legions of followers might not show up to vote in November. A lot of people have been wondering, What is he thinking?

So we asked him. Dr. Dean does not get many opportunities to make a diagnosis these days. Maybe that is why he responded so readily last week to an invitation to deliver one for himself. There was no examination table in the cramped six-seater jet that was taking him home to Vermont for a New Year's break. Instead Dean stretched his stocking feet into the seat across from him for a two-hour discussion of who he is and how he thinks, dissecting the instincts that have made him the one to beat for the Democratic nomination and the reasons those instincts might make it harder for him to make it all the way to the White House.

If you want to understand how Howard Dean thinks, he says, it helps to look at the way he and his doctor-wife Judith Steinberg treated patients in their family practice back in Vermont. "She's very methodical. She'll exhaust all the possibilities until she gets to the one that's the most likely," he explains. "I'm intuitive, and I jump steps ahead. Part of what gets me in trouble on the stump is that I shorthand things. I know what I'm thinking, but I don't say every word of it. I was that way as a doctor. I eliminate possibilities unconsciously, before they get to my consciousness. It's also part of my political judgment. I often know I want to do things before I know why, although the thinking goes on all the time. The way I think is, if you give me information, I tuck it back somewhere and work on it and work on it and work on it without being aware of it. All of a sudden, 10 months later, something will pop out, based on a whole series of things that I've learned in the last 10 months. And finally, all of a sudden, it falls into place."

The doctor might not like to hear this, but the confidence in his gut, his disdain for process and his tendency to get right to solutions brings to mind someone else: George W. Bush. Like Bush, Dean can no longer make a friend of low expectations. The question is whether he can repeat Bush's feat of convincing enough Americans that what his critics think they know about him isn't actually true. Consider the case against Dean.

The Charge: He is an Accident Waiting to Happen Lately, as his poll numbers have taken off, Dean is spending nearly as much time clarifying and apologizing as he is spreading his message. Depending on who is doing the spinning, Dean has been refreshingly candid or recklessly outspoken. But even he concedes that he has a tendency to "mouth off."

With Dean, impulsiveness and stubbornness seem to go hand in hand. When he shoots from the hip, it takes him a while to undo the damage. Yes, he apologized for his now famous stereotyping of Southerners as guys who have Confederate flags on their pickups, but it took him five days to do so. Six days passed from the time he mentioned that "interesting theory" on National Public Radio about Bush being tipped off about 9/11 until he told Fox News that he did not actually believe it. He was quicker to counter an assertion the day after Christmas that he would not want "to prejudge" Osama bin Laden if he were on trial; Dean said later that day "this is exactly the kind of case the death penalty is meant for."

Dean cannot resist a good sound bite—even if it bites him back. His Dec. 15 foreign-policy address was supposed to reassure voters that the candidate who won the hearts of the left by opposing the war in Iraq has a far more centrist view of the world and is not allergic to the use of military force. But Saddam got caught two days before, so instead Dean made front-page headlines and brought about a torrent of criticism with his last-minute insertion into his speech that Saddam's capture "has not made America safer." Joe Lieberman said it proved Dean had "climbed into a spider hole of denial." With characteristic tenacity, Dean not only stands by his assertion—and points to continuing casualties in Iraq and an orange alert at home to back him up—but also insists that the larger point he was trying to get across was not lost on "smart, thoughtful people."

Dean does acknowledge that there are times when he just gets it wrong. He considers his biggest mistake during the campaign to be his accusation that John Edwards waffled on his support for the war; he wrote the North Carolina Senator a handwritten apology and "was happy to do it," Dean says. As for the rest of his slips and stumbles: "It's not calculated, obviously. All I know is that most of this stuff that gets written about is not interesting to most people, except for reporters and other candidates," he says. "It doesn't affect what happens in my campaign." But he knows it could. "What these guys do is, they take a quote and they twist it and they recharacterize it, and some reporter writes it. And once you get into (the news database) LexisNexis, you're done."

As much as party leaders cringe at how Dean's words might come back to haunt him in a general election, his slipups do not seem to have hurt him yet with registered Democratic voters. In the latest TIME/CNN poll, Dean has widened his lead over the field, with 22% support, up from 14 points in mid-November and a remarkable rise from a year ago, when only 3% supported him. His total is more than double that of any other contender. As for his mouthing off, only 18% of Democrats think he is too outspoken to be President. Only 24% think he has too quick a temper.

Despite efforts by the White House—and some Democrats—to depict Dean as a weasel for his opposition to the war, 8 out of 10 Democrats consider him patriotic. But voters are still coloring in their feelings about Dean—69% of adult Americans in the TIME/CNN poll say they do not know much about him, and more than three-quarters of Dean supporters say they could still change their minds.

The Charge: He is Just Not Likable As much as anything else, a presidential election can hinge on how Americans feel about the prospect of having the winner appear regularly in their living rooms for the next four to eight years. From the beginning of his campaign, Dean has often been portrayed in the media as angry and dark, even surly, but Democratic voters see a different Dean: more than three-quarters of Democrats find him likable. But that does not stop Bush-Cheney campaign strategists from saying his personality presents the most favorable contrast imaginable with the President. A Midwestern G.O.P.organizer says of Dean, "He is like a gift from heaven."

So what is the right bedside manner for a deeply divided electorate? Lately Dean has been intrigued by the writings of University of California, Berkeley, cognitive linguist George Lakoff, the author of Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Lakoff argues that liberals, with their "nurturing parent" view of the world, have lost ground in the values debate to "strict father" conservatives. In the middle, Lakoff writes, are "bi-conceptuals," who have internalized both parents. The question for Dean in reaching that small slice of swing voters is, Can he win over their inner mom without seeming like a too permissive dad?

But if nurturing is part of his strategy, it it not part of his natural style. Dean is no Bill Clinton. He does not pretend to spend any time feeling anyone's pain, nor does he have Bush's folksy, quick-to-mist-up touch. "There's a different way I do empathy," Dean says. "I kind of lean into them, and I look at them, and I'll let them know I'm really paying careful attention to what they say. But I don't put my arm around them and all that stuff. Because it's true: when you present me with a problem, I want to solve the problem." Dean maintains a certain detachment, he says, because he remembers how his emotions made him incapable of assisting a critically wounded 9-year-old drive-by-shooting victim when he was a medical student. He recalls, "What I learned from that is, if you get sucked in and you get overwhelmed, you can't do a thing for the patient."

The Charge: He is too Liberal When people get to know him, Dean says, they will discover how hard it is to put a label on him. "Being a doctor has to do with who I am. First, facts matter, and ideology doesn't," Dean says. "I do not like ideologues. I never trusted ideologues. That's why I don't trust this Administration. When I was in the '60s, I didn't trust the left either. I was never part of any of those lefty organizations. Ideologues always sacrifice people before their supposed principles, so they never deliver for human beings what they claim their credo advises them to deliver." Indeed, only 31% of Americans in the TIME/CNN poll consider Dean to be a liberal, and among registered Democrats, just 18% say he is too liberal to be President.

Dean says his record in Vermont will be his armor against the Bush campaign's plans to paint him as some kind of fuzzy-headed radical (though his decision to seal some of his records is the subject of a court fight). But one question is whether voters will care more about what he did in Montpelier than what he says he will do in the White House. Dean's proudest boast is that he balanced 11 budgets in a row, and he promises to bring that same tightfistedness to Washington. But take a hard look at what he is proposing, and it is uncertain how he would get that done.

In Vermont, Dean had a reputation for having a physician's willingness to deliver bad news without varnish or hesitation. But it is difficult to find much hard talk in his program now, apart from his plan to repeal the Bush tax cuts, which in any case pleases his Democratic-primary audience. Back in the mid-1990s, he advocated curbing the growth of Medicare and putting "Social Security back on the table." Now he says he would use the bulk of the savings from repealing the tax cuts for a huge new expansion of health care, that he could balance the budget by curbing spending, that his only Medicare fix would be in how it is administered and that "Social Security doesn't have an insolvency crisis." "If you turn the economy around," he says, "the additional payroll taxes will help enormously."

And so the self-styled, straight-talking outsider, the flinty fiscal disciplinarian is falling back on one of the oldest Washington tropes: Economic growth is the answer. Realistic people, however, tend to disagree with that. "A strong economy is not going to solve the long-run challenge facing Medicare and Social Security," says Robert Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute. A budget expert who has advised Dean and other Democratic candidates is even more blunt. "I don't know whether he knows better or he just doesn't get it," the adviser says. "I liked the old Howard Dean much better."

Dean promises he will make the numbers add up, but he probably will not get around to that anytime soon. "The thing is, the President's not going to have any credible numbers on that either, because they'll cook the books like they always do on the budget," he says.

While the White House wants to paint him as too liberal, in the Democratic primary race, the shots are coming from the other direction. Dean talks a lot about Bush's chumminess with "Ken Lay and the boys" and tax-dodging "corporations who move their headquarters to Bermuda and their jobs to China."

But the Boston Globe reported last month that as Governor, Dean expanded a complicated tax shelter for captive insurance—in which companies set up specialized subsidiaries that provide them with below-market insurance coverage. Enron was among 500 companies to take advantage of it, and though the Clinton Administration tried to eliminate the break, Dean publicly declared his intention to "overtake Bermuda" as the world's biggest center for captive-insurance subsidiaries.

The Charge: He is Just Not Electable Here is a question: Is the country willing to elect a Brahmin who grew up in East Hampton, N.Y., and on Park Avenue, who brings virtually no national-security experience to a post-9/11 nation and who governed a state that gives homosexuals all the rights that go with marriage? How much appeal will Dean have beyond Internet-cafe society and the liberal salons of the two coasts? As he stumped in South Carolina last week, Dean rarely missed an opportunity to introduce himself archly as a "guy from the North," "a Vermont Yankee" or "this environmentalist, Birkenstock-wearing guy from Vermont." The joke on himself is evidence of self-confidence, but he has yet to show how mass-market he can go. In a state where as much as half the Democratic electorate is likely to be African American, the crowds that showed up to hear Dean last week were almost entirely white. And if you talked to those who had come to hear him, you discovered that a good number were not native Southerners but transplants from places like New York and New Hampshire. As retired educator Rebecca Smith, who is a South Carolina native, surveyed the crowd at a Democratic breakfast at Horne's Country Buffet in Florence, it occurred to her that "there are a lot of people here I've never seen before."

Then again, as his supporters will tell you, that is precisely what Dean brings to the party: new voters. Moreover, Dean seems to have surprising staying power. In the TIME/CNN poll, Dean has edged forward in a head-to-head match with Bush, despite a month of good news for the President that has included both a rebounding economy and the capture of Saddam. Though Dean still loses to Bush 51% to 46% among likely voters, he is just within the margin of error.

So what is Dean's road map? The way it usually works is that once a candidate gets his party's nomination, he makes a play for the center. Democrats always need to run left in the primaries and then move to the center; Republicans start on the right but try to end up in the middle. If Dean wins, the Republicans will spend millions of dollars painting him into a liberal corner, but if he has proved nothing else so far, he has shown that he is a nimble and resilient politician who can dodge labels.

As Dean talked last week on the flight home, he gamely held a pair of cheap tape recorders under his chin so they could catch his words over the roar of the engines. "This is a bare-bones operation, low-tech," laughed the man who has raised $40 million and launched an entire political movement on the Internet. It is no-frills too: Dean was in the same charcoal pinstripe suit that he had worn for the past four days, which had taken him through an eight-county swing in Iowa; a forum in Green Bay, Wis.; a policy speech in Detroit; a Democratic breakfast and a ribbon cutting at his new campaign headquarters in Florence, S.C.; and finally, on the way to the Charleston, S.C., airport, some networking with the elite at Clinton's old haunt, Renaissance Weekend. "The rule is, if you travel with me, you're not allowed to take baggage you have to check," he says. "The one-suit theory is, nobody's going to know the difference because I'm in so many places."

Dean will be in even more places in the weeks to come—he may need to pack a few more suits. As Iowa and then New Hampshire approach, the spotlight will be more intense. There will be less margin for error and less time to recover. Nothing in his experience has prepared him for this, he says ruefully, although "this campaign's been very helpful over the last few weeks." But he notes, "That's the kind of stuff they are going to do, and I know they are going to do it, and we're going to hammer them right back." And if he cannot handle what goes on during a campaign, Dean adds, he will never be able to take what comes with being Commander in Chief. Hard medicine could be just what the doctor needs—and will surely get.

—With reporting by Perry Bacon Jr./ with Dean, John F. Dickerson/ Washington and Nathan Thornburgh/ Portsmouth

• Karen Tumulty I Charleston