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Nor does he smolder. Sure, there is a much-remarked-upon bloom of anger in his speeches, but it's petaled with irony. An example: the only person the pro-Dean left seems to hate more than President George W. Bush is Karl Rove, Bush's top handler. Dean knows this, so he mentions Rove in his standard stump speech, delivered dozens of times a week. But he uses Rove not just to inflame the activists but also to poke fun at himself. "The Danes," he says in a part of the speech on energy, "get 20% of all their electricity from the wind." The little-boy smile unfurls. "I can hear Karl Rove right now cackling in the White House, 'Oh, this Birkenstock Governor from Vermont.'" Pause for laughs, then: "The truth is, we've fallen behind technologically."
Dean sometimes seems not so much the angriest man in politics but the most bemused. At a July 15 forum sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign, a gay political group, moderator Sam Donaldson of ABC grilled Senator John Kerry, who is favored over Dean by many in the Democratic Party establishment, on why he supports allowing gay couples all the rights that married straight couples enjoy except the right to be called married. Kerry waded in, invoking history and religion to argue that marriage is viewed by "the body of America ... as a contract between a man and a woman." Boos and hisses. Dean, who shares the exact same position, avoided the question by joking with Donaldson about the newsman's pointed interrogation. The crowd giggled, a disarmed Donaldson apologized, and Dean moved on to his support for gays in the military. Cheers. Dean had done something preternaturally political--avoided a question, changed the subject--and got away with it.
There is a model for this kind of intentionally unpolished candidacy, and his name is John McCain. Like McCain's, Dean's "straight" talk can lurch from anger to humor, from conviction to waffle, in quick succession. Consider this flitter and flutter from Meet the Press in June: "I really don't like the idea of a federal balanced-budget amendment, but I am very tempted ... You might just have to do it. [But] I hate to do it because we didn't have to do it in Vermont ..." So which is it? But also consider this rocket he hurled on New Hampshire Public Radio when a caller suggested Dean had initially downplayed his support for gay unions: "With all due respect, what you just said is the silliest thing I've ever heard."
While many other prominent Democrats are angular and reserved in their posture and their positions--Senator Kerry, he of the long, elegant suits and well-modulated speech, comes to mind--Dean cannot be anything but the exuberant, stocky ex--high school wrestling captain, a guy whose neck--what there is of it--strains over his collar. But the portrait of Dean as scrappy outsider is incomplete. Rather, he combines the sense of entitlement afforded by a childhood of extreme wealth with the moral certitude gained by his decision not to merely live off--or, for that matter, maximize--that wealth. Instead, Dean got a medical degree, which gave him confidence, a comfort in his own skin. In that sense--and in some others--Dean, who has been compared so often to George McGovern and Ralph Nader, is far more like ... George W. Bush.