An old-style centrist.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: The Word Washington - Howard Dean - Brief Article

Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, is fond of saying he is running for President "from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party"--a direct quote from the late progressive Senator Paul Wellstone. Like Wellstone, Dean is critical of the Democrats for not putting up more of a fight against an aggressively rightwing Republican agenda.

"I think the country is going in the wrong direction both economically and in terms of foreign policy," he told me in a car-phone interview during a recent campaign trip, "and I don't think the Democrats are going to be able to beat the President with the equivalent of Bush Lite."

As an outspoken opponent of the war with. Iraq, Dean has been drawing cheers and lifting the spirits of Democratic activists who are spoiling for a fight. He chastises his colleagues for voting for the war, and for rolling over on the Bush tax cuts and what he calls the "Every Child Left Behind" education bill.

But while Wellstone spent his life fighting his party's creeping centrism, Dean only recently took up his position as a left fielder. He considers himself a moderate, and he has often crossed swords with Vermont progressives--including a challenger from the state's Progressive Party who won 10 percent of the vote in the last gubernatorial election.

"It's a pathetic thing that I'm the most progressive candidate" among those considered to have a serious shot at the nomination, Dean says.

Progressives in Vermont don't disagree. "Few people would have accused him of being a progressive governor in Vermont," says Paul Burns, executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group (one of the network of consumer and environmental advocacy groups founded by Ralph Nader). "It was not by accident that a strong progressive party was formed while he was governor here as an alternative to some of the positions he was taking."

Environmentalists in Vermont faulted Dean for weak enforcement and for policies that favored large factory farms, as well as for his position in favor of Yucca Mountain as the single repository for nuclear waste in the country--a position that put him at odds with then-Republican Senator Jim Jeffords. Social service advocates criticized him for being a fiscal conservative. And during the last election, the Progressive Party was outraged when Dean attempted to defund the public campaign finance system in Vermont.

Dean, who advocates federal campaign finance reform in the form of public financing of...