Profile: Howard Dean's consistent opposition to war in Iraq has given his presidential campaign an impetus that may yet lead to the White House,writes Conor O'Clery, North America Editor
The first time I saw Howard Dean was on May 3rd at a university in South Carolina, the scene of the first of 25 public debates held by the nine Democratic candidates this year. The sturdy, rather earnest, former school wrestler did not set the world alight that evening, but I wrote at the time that "on the streets the largest and most vocal group of students supported former Vermont governor Howard Dean, who opposed the war in Iraq". Dr Dean was almost the only voice that night speaking out against the war. President Bush had just declared "mission accomplished" on an aircraft-carrier two days before, and the belligerence of the administration still found widespread approval in post-9/11 America. Most Democrats trod softly on the issue of national security.
For his stand in those early days of the campaign, Dean was written up in the media as a "liberal", something he encouraged by his claim to represent the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party", but which seemed to hamper his chances of the nomination.
Instead, as time passed, as casualties mounted, as the US's isolation deepened and the mood turned against the war, Dean's opposition became mainstream among Democrats. Today the 55-year-old medical doctor, uncompromised - unlike his main rivals - by early support for war, has a commanding lead in the race for the 2004 Democratic nomination.
A couple of months after the South Carolina debate I went to Burlington, where Dean and his wife, Dr Judith Steinberg, live, to find out more about this maverick who is forging ahead despite the lack of enthusiasm from the establishment of the Democratic party.
It was July 4th in the Vermont town (population 40,000) on the shores of Lake Champlain and there were plenty of people at the waterfront fireworks display that day willing to give their opinions of the man who had been their governor for 12 years.
They spoke of an accidental politician who was not so much liberal as pragmatic, and who had come to Burlington as a family doctor and stumbled into a career in politics by campaigning for a lakeside bicycle path. Dean, I was told several times, was not a native Vermonter. He was born in Manhattan, one of four boys in a family with a very rich Republican father who made his money on Wall Street and whose personailty was so powerful that, as Dean states in his campaign biography, Winning Back America, he would suck the oxygen out of a room.
Howard Dean had an idyllic and privileged childhood in Manhattan and in the Hamptons, where the family spent their summers. After high school he went to Yale, where students were agitating against the Vietnam War. He didn't get involved because, he wrote, "I have always felt comfortable in the middle".
He also avoided the Vietnam draft because of an unfused vertebra in his back which he said caused pain when he ran. After graduating, however, he went to Colorado, where he held down a couple of labouring jobs while he indulged his passion for skiing, apparently untroubled by the offending vertebra.
Returning to the East Coast, he taught for a while, and worked briefly as a financial analyst before deciding to become a doctor, against the wishes of his father, who "thought he was nuts" but didn't stand in his way.
Like Joe Kennedy, who pushed his boys to make good by entering politics, the elder Howard Dean felt his sons should go into lucrative Wall Street jobs. And like the Kennedys, tragedy was to afflict the Dean family too.
Howard Dean's younger brother, Charlie - to whom he was very close - went with a friend to explore Laos in 1974. They were captured by the Communist Pathet Lao guerrillas and executed a couple of months later. Charlie Dean was classified as "POW - Missing In Action", leading to speculation that he was working for the CIA (his remains were found this year and brought back under military escort). This episode was the most traumatic of his life, Howard Dean has said, and helped shaped his feelings about war.
After qualifying, Dean went to work in Burlington as an intern. He married Judy Steinberg, a fellow student from medical school, who also practised in Vermont as a doctor. At the time, he used to "drink a lot and do outrageous things", but (like George W. Bush) he suddenly quit his wild ways, mainly due to a terrible hangover on his stag night. Today he does not drink or smoke.
In Burlington the young doctor got involved in starting up the Citizens' Waterfront Group, which agitated, successfully, for a nine-mile bicycle path along Lake Champlain. Pressed into politics by two elderly "old-time ethnic Democrat sisters" living near his home, Peggy and Esther Sorrell, he got himself elected in 1982 to the Vermont state legislature as a Democrat and then became lieutenant governor, both jobs he could do while continuing to treat patients.
But when the Republican governor, Dick Snelling, died, Dean was suddenly catapulted into the state's top post, which he would hold through several elections until quitting in January 2003. He always, he said, tried to follow Snelling's example of "running the state without regard to party".
It was on his record as governor that the Vermonters I talked to judged him, and the reviews were kindly but mixed. Conservatives were critical of his support for gay unions, which he legalised after a Vermont Supreme Court decision, and liberals hated his record of cutting taxes and services to balance the budget, a feat he achieved every year.
Dean, it became evident, was no Michael Moore - he was even an A-rated member of the National Rifle Association.
The common consensus was that he was a nice guy, with no hidden scandals and a reputation for dry humour and for being "cheap", a word he uses to describe himself when relating how he still has a suit he bought in J.C. Penny's in 1987.
Dean began eyeing a run for the presidency four years ago but decided not to challenge Al Gore. In 2000 he thought George Bush, whom he knew as a fellow governor, to be a smart guy and a moderate. After 9/11, when Bush adopted neo-conservative ideas on pre-emptive military strikes and tax cuts that benefitted the wealthy, Dean says he went in the opposite direction.
Travelling around the country in 2002 he found smouldering opposition to the imminent war in Iraq and to the perceived cultural arrogance and xenophobia of the administration - and this he began to articulate.
Dean claims his wife tells him that "with me, you never have to guess what I'm thinking" and, unlike the Democratic establishment, which many observers said pandered to the patriotic mood of the time, he spoke out with growing conviction against the war.
Across the US young people took note. When Dean opened a campaign office in Burlington early this year, many twenty-something volunteers, some previously apolitical, started to turn up from all across the nation. Internet groups formed to support Dean at meetup.com, a site that would eventually bring in more money to the Dean campaign, mostly in the form of small contributions, than to all the other Democrat candidates combined.
There have been mis-steps since South Carolina. Dean often talks off the cuff and contradicts himself. He stumbled by appealing to "guys in pick-up trucks with Confederate flags" to vote Democrat. He has locked his gubernatorial records away for 10 years. But despite this, and notwithstanding his embrace by the party establishment in the form of Al Gore's endorsement, and the new belief he expresses today that US troops must stay and see the thing through in Iraq, Dean has apparently held on to his core support as an outsider.
On Tuesday of this week, at a snow-covered campus in Durham, New Hampshire, where the last Democrat debate of the year was held, the largest and most vocal groups of students were those with the Dean placards. Dean still commands a popular insurgency which could take him to the Democratic Convention, and possibly all the way to the White House.