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Dean, a family practitioner, had applied to residency programs at highly competitive hospitals in New York and Washington but was rejected by all of them. His fourth choice was the University of Vermont, in Burlington, which has just 40,000 citizens but is the state's largest city. Dean can be defensive about Vermont's tiny size. He likes to point out that Bill Clinton was Governor of Arkansas when he won the White House. But Arkansas has 2.7 million residents, making it four times the size of Vermont, which has 613,000. Think about it this way: Vermont is about the size of Austin, Texas, or Memphis, Tenn. There are plenty of county commissioners who manage budgets larger than Vermont's.
But the small size offered Dean an opportunity to follow his grandfather (a small-town mayor) and his father (a consultant to a G.O.P. Congressman) into politics. His political life sneaked up on Steinberg, who has little interest in politics (she hopes to practice medicine if she must move to Washington). "Most people assume that if you are prepared to go through four years of medical school and three years of residency, you will practice medicine forever. And that's what I thought when I married Howard. But then, when we came to Burlington, he got involved in a citizens' group to get a bike path at the lake... But I really didn't consider that politics. It was just community involvement. Then he started helping out Jimmy Carter's campaign"--the failed re-election bid--"but that was really just a neighborhood thing, because Esther Sorrell [later known as "the mother of the Vermont Democratic Party"], who lived down the street, was just stuffing envelopes and asked him to help.
"Then he went into the state legislature, and it got a little more serious, and then he ran for Lieutenant Governor--although even then those jobs were part time, and he could still practice medicine. Then of course he became Governor"--after Governor Richard Snelling died of a heart attack while cleaning his pool filter in August 1991. "The whole process was really gradual, and"--Steinberg trails off for a beat, then adds softly--"it went by me."
It didn't go by others. After living in the state only a few years, Dean started asking people whether he should move slowly or run for something big--even Governor. By 1993, just a year after being elected Governor in his own right for the first time, Dean was serving on the executive committee of the National Governors Association. William Sorrell, the current state attorney general and son of Esther, first noticed national aspirations a couple of years later. "I would go home Friday afternoon, and he would get on a plane for Tucson or something, and when he got back, he would say he had been talking to gubernatorial candidates for the [Governors Association] ... I thought to myself, 'He's gotta be getting names in his Rolodex.'"
Dean spent his last year in office initiating a presidential run. He even requested that the state keep his gubernatorial records sealed for 10 years--four years longer than standard and just enough time to cover an eight-year Oval Office stint. Even Vermont Republicans suspect nothing too scandalous lurks in the papers, but they say the move reflects his giant ambitions.