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O'Connor says his staff was bitterly divided over the bill; there were tears and fights throughout this period. "But he was very, very steady," she says. Steinberg says, "I'm not saying it was easy for him; it was hard. But he knew that was the right thing to do." Dean won re-election by less than half a percentage point. He didn't run for a sixth term as Governor because he was planning a race for President. A good thing, since it would have been a difficult campaign. (The Democratic Lieutenant Governor, whom Dean endorsed, lost.) Civil unions hurt Democrats in the 2000 elections in Vermont, but two years later, Dean reaped the benefits: wealthy gays in the Fire Island Pines beach community off the coast of New York City were among the earliest, most generous donors to his unlikely presidential run. Dean doesn't emphasize his discomfort with gay marriage in these circles.
The gay issue will hurt Dean with conservative Democrats, especially the South, which Dean talks about as though it's another planet. He routinely offers skeptics two explanations when they ask how he can compete there. First, he says, he was campaigning in South Carolina a while ago and met an 80-year-old World War II veteran who turned out to be gay. The man thanked him for signing the civil-union bill. The point of the story seems to be that you can't assume anything about Southerners, which is true, but it's more homily than strategy.
Second, he says, he will tell Southern whites, "You have voted Republican for 30 years. Tell me what you have to show for it. In South Carolina, there are 103,000 children without health insurance. Most of those kids are white. Tell me about your public schools. Are you happy that the legislature cut $70 million or $80 million out of the public school system in South Carolina? ... Has your job moved to Indonesia? ... And the answer is, if you don't like the answers to those questions, maybe you should think about voting Democratic." A solid argument but one that failed for Al Gore, himself a nominal Southerner, four years ago. And it may come across as insulting to tell people they are poor--and then tell them their own votes are to blame.
Howard Dean may have a lot to learn, but he has some time. And he has something else: nothing to lose. He has enough cash to keep him competitive for months, enough antiwar volunteers to keep Meeting Up and enough political savvy not to get overconfident. He also has that High Yankee yearning, that great fear of the titled that, as Kesey writes in Sometimes a Great Notion, "a man might struggle and labor his livelong life and make no mark! None! No permanent mark at all!" Dean may not be a maverick, but he may be something better: a real contender. Zounds. --With reporting by Perry Bacon Jr. and Nathan Thornburgh/Burlington