(7 of 8)
Still, Dean's health-care plan remains modest by Democratic standards. Where Dean is truly to the left of his party is on just one issue, Iraq. Instead of war, he favored "containing" Saddam's regime the way the West contained the Soviet Union for 50 years. (He doesn't explain why a cold war with an unstable tyrant would have made sense.) Dean sounds hawkish on other issues; he would spend more than Bush to fight al-Qaeda, he says. But his foreign policy proposals often seem either hesitant (we should be "vigilant" with Iran) or shrill: "Because the President has dawdled and been unwilling to engage in serious negotiations, he's the President who has allowed North Korea to become a nuclear power," says Dean. (Didn't the communist regime have something to do with it?)
Dean has tried to seem more conservative than he really is on guns and more liberal than he really is on gays. Though Dean constantly brags about his 2000 "A" rating from the National Rifle Association, N.R.A. executive director Wayne LaPierre says Dean today is "totally trying to have it both ways." Yes, Vermont has some of the least restrictive gun laws in the nation. But Dean opposes a federal bill that would grant gunmakers immunity from lawsuits and supports background checks for buyers at gun shows--two positions that put him at odds with the N.R.A.
Many Vermonters agree that Dean arrived at a political crossroads--a point when his luck seemed sure to run out--in 2000, on the issue of gay marriage. A year before, the state supreme court had ruled that gay couples have a right to the same benefits the state provides straight couples--inheritance, hospital visitation and so on. The court told the legislature to decide how best to extend those perks to gays. Dean expressed discomfort with the idea of gay marriage, and he eventually signed a bill establishing a separate-but-equal arrangement: straight couples get marriage licenses; gay couples get civil-union licenses.
It was a moderate compromise attacked from left and right. Instead of staging a public ceremony, Dean signed the bill with only about 15 staff members present. The left didn't like that. And the right didn't like the bill. Thousands of calls poured in every day, according to longtime aide Kate O'Connor. "If you have a couple hundred a day normally, it's a big deal," she says. Dean was running for a fifth term, and he had signed the civil-union bill six months before Election Day. It didn't look good. "We were campaigning, and people would be wearing gas masks, like we were poison," says O'Connor. Protesters screamed that Dean was a "faggot"; so many threats were made that he had to wear a bulletproof vest. (A detail that, to his credit, Dean never offers on the campaign trail, even to gay audiences.)