Quotes of the Day

Who knew that Howard Dean was such a sugar-tongued swain? Al Gore's televised "I do" last week (not to be confused with Trista and Ryan's more lavish and much higher-rated nuptials) was the culmination of a secret but ardent yearlong courtship by Dean. Yes, it may be a marriage of convenience, but the hushed backroom cell-phone calls, the clandestine visits, the little apercus of agreement on global warming are all part of a modern political romance novel. Apparently the doctor has a bedside manner after all. But the relationship did not really get serious until Gore decided it was time for a blunt conversation in August. The country needed to learn more about Dean than the fact that he was against everything that George Bush says and does, Gore told him. Dean needed to tell the country his own ideas, to move from combative rhetoric about the U.S. role in the world to concrete proposals on terrorism, the Middle East, national defense and intelligence. From there, the two started talking every 10 days or so. As aides to Dean tell the story, it was on Dec. 5, at the end of one of those late-night phone calls, that Gore surprised Dean with the news that he was ready to publicly declare his support for Dean and that he wanted to do it "sooner rather than later."

Dean accepted Gore's endorsement—but the question now is whether he will accept his advice. Even as Dean for the first time has begun to consistently lead the national polls—a measure both that he is getting closer to the nomination and that more people are paying attention to him—the former Vermont Governor confronts a new and substantial challenge: having got this far by telling Democrats what he is against, he must start telling them what he is for. Dean needs to step up and define himself, or the Bush campaign will spend millions of dollars doing it for him. For instance, Dean signed a bill establishing civil unions for homosexuals in Vermont, which is not the same as gay marriage. But that distinction doesn't faze one top g.o.p. activist in the Midwest, who chortles, "He'll be for gay marriage when we're through with him."

If Dean is the nominee, Republicans will inevitably portray him as a tax-raising, soft-on-terror liberal with a chip on his shoulder and no substantial alternatives to what Bush is doing. Dean intends to help remedy his where's-the-beef problem and sketch out his vision for the country with two major speeches this week. In a foreign-policy address on Monday in Los Angeles, he will call for "a new global alliance to defeat terror" and advocate a tenfold increase in funds spent on finding and eliminating unguarded nuclear, chemical and biological materials left over from the Soviet Union. And on Thursday in New Hampshire, Dean plans to flesh out his economic proposals. But these ideas still fall short of a genuine vision, or even a coherent philosophy. Dean has an unfinished quality that may attract some supporters but that worries party stalwarts. The Democratic establishment that once wrote off Dean is now increasingly resigned, if not enthusiastic, about the idea that he is the candidate around whom it will ultimately have to rally.

But many still say they don't know what to make of him. "I don't think Dean himself knows what he stands for," says a prominent official from the Clinton Administration who is not aligned with any of the Democratic candidates. "He doesn't have clearly formed views. He has attitudes and reactions—sort of like Bush four years ago."

Then again, the Bush of four years ago would be crushed by the post-9/11 Bush of today. And there are perils in getting too bogged down in the fine print: just ask Bill Bradley, whose detailed health-care plan was relentlessly savaged by Al Gore. A top Dean adviser argues that a 100-point plan is not the same as a message. "We're not running for Senate. We're running for President," he says. "It's about bigger issues and bigger themes." But somehow those bigger themes are not shining through, despite the scores of policy positions trumpeted on the campaign's website.

The unscripted candor that Dean's supporters find so refreshing has only confused the message further. He is still learning to master the code that might keep him from offending white Southerners when he refers to Confederate flags on pickup trucks or pro-Israel voters when he refers to evenhandedness in brokering peace in the Middle East. His clumsy call for "re-regulation" of business came not in his carefully orchestrated speech a mile from Enron headquarters but in an interview with reporters aboard his plane the night before.

Bill Clinton spent the fall of 1991 laying out his proposals and weaving them into a centrist vision that he called a New Covenant. It was an important test for a little-known Governor from a small state who was looking for credibility in a race against a popular President who had just won a war. But if today's Democrats were looking for policy depth and specificity, Dean would be running near the back of the pack. "If he's got a positive program, no one knows what it is," says Clinton's former chief of staff John Podesta, who has started a liberal think tank. "If you look at who's got the best stuff out there, it's (John) Edwards. But who knows, and who cares?"

Dean's message thus far begins—and ends—with his and Bush's differences. To nearly every economic question, Dean starts by saying he will repeal the Bush tax cuts. He advocates a balanced budget and never misses an opportunity to point out that he actually produced 11 in Vermont, but he doesn't say how he will make the numbers add up in Washington. And when the Wall Street Journal surveyed 53 economists last month, only one rated Dean's policies as best suited to boost employment, incomes and growth. (Joseph Lieberman got the best reviews, with top rankings from 11 of them.)

When the subject is foreign policy, Dean rails against the "petulance of the President of the United States" but has yet to say how he would improve the situation in Iraq or what he would do to get nuclear materials out of the hands of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. On education, Dean says he would dismantle Bush's No Child Left Behind program but offers few specifics about how he would replace it.

Nor is his record as Governor a reliable template for what he believes now. Back then, he was a free trader and an advocate of the North American Free Trade Agreement. He supported slowing the growth of Medicare and raising the retirement age to 70. Now he has shifted to the left, and his positions on those issues are virtually indistinguishable from most of the other Democrats.

This is not to say Dean doesn't know a lot of things about a lot of things, and particularly about the issues he dealt with as a Governor. (He's the only candidate with a dairy policy, for one.) His proposals for expanding health care and improving education both draw upon what he did in Vermont. When a doctor asked him about health insurance last month at a New Hampshire town hall, Dean launched into a detailed explanation of insurance premiums, the cost of drugs and his own medical practice, before finally apologizing: "That was probably more than you wanted to know."

Some say they are beginning to see the outlines of a vision. Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope says that while he would not himself have used the term re-regulation, it speaks to the larger idea that Dean "acknowledges the fact that government needs to play a larger role in protecting people and the environment. He acknowledges the idea that you can just turn society over to free markets has been taken too far. That is his big idea, and it's a critical difference, even from what Clinton and Gore were willing to say."

So far, Dean's lack of a broad policy vision hasn't bothered his growing army of supporters, who like to say they know everything they need to about him. "He's not a lifelong politician," says Sebastian Mianab, 31, a homebuilder who attended a Dean Meetup earlier this month in Dallas. "He's an outsider, and he speaks his mind." The problem is that more people are listening now, and they don't just want to know what he would do to Bush. They want to know what he would do for them.

—With reporting by Matthew Cooper and John F. Dickerson

• Karen Tumulty and Perry Bacon Jr.