NOW THAT AL GORE has finally decided to let sleeping chads lie and announced his surprise decision not to seek a presidential rematch against George Bush in 2004, the field for Democratic contenders has been left wide open. Who will get the party nomination? Gore’s 2000 running mate and political heavyweight Senator Joseph Lieberman? The veteran Massachusetts senator, multi-millionaire and decorated Vietnam War veteran John Kerry? Or an obscure governor from a tiny state with little campaign money and a virtual political unknown? You may scoff, but anonymous Democrat governors have tended to do rather well at emerging from nowhere to win the party nomination before unseating an incumbent president. Look no further than Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992.

With Gore’s departure, no candidate can claim to be a front runner and political observers from both sides of the party divide are beginning to take very seriously the chances of Howard Dean, the 54-year-old outgoing governor of Vermont and the only presidential hopeful to have officially declared his candidacy for the Democratic nomination. Dean, a physician who is currently so anonymous among the electorate that he has earned the title Dr Who? among commentators, is a social and health-care liberal with a spectacularly successful record in his home state as a fiscal conservative.

Party strategists are looking for a fresh face, untainted by the trench warfare of Capitol Hill and last month’s Democrat mid-term electoral disaster, and Dr Dean is emerging as a dark horse with real prospects of causing an upset.

So can he do it? Recent history is on his side. He is the only governor in a crowded field of senators and congressmen, and Americans like sending governors to the White House. Four of the past five presidents, including the current one, went straight to Washington from the governor’s mansion. Four leading contenders for the Democratic nomination — Kerry, Lieberman, North Carolina’s John Edwards and South Dakota’s Tom Daschle, are senators, and only two men this century have gained the White House directly from the Senate: Warren Harding and John F. Kennedy.

At the same time, Dr Dean is starting to win plaudits in the “invisible primary” — the bearpit of Washington opinion writers. While almost completely unknown outside his home state, he is running a campaign based on ideas, rather than endorsements. Political commentators love such candidates. It is making that Washington-outsider appeal last that will be one of Dr Dean’s greatest challenges.

Despite being the longest-serving Democrat governor — he is coming to the end of his fifth two-year term, and served a year before that when the previous governor died in office — Dr Dean barely registers in the polls. On Monday a survey of caucus voters in Iowa put him at one per cent, with Richard Gephardt at 26 per cent and Kerry on 16 per cent. Last month a poll in The Washington Post produced similar figures.

“I am not in the least bit worried by the polls,” Dr Dean says. “I have 13 months to fix that. I have made 16 visits to Iowa and 20 to New Hampshire, and gradually the word will spread. I suspect I have more name recognition than Bill Clinton did at the same point in his presidential campaign.”

That is certainly correct. In July Dr Dean won a coveted platform on NBC’s Meet the Press with one of Washington’s most respected commentators, Tim Russert. Russert, who grilled Dr Dean on his unequivocal criticism of the President’s foreign policy — specifically his belief that American isolationism and reluctance to nation-build may have contributed to the September 11 attacks — was impressed. To have any chance of winning the nomination, Dr Dean must emerge as a serious contender in the crucial Iowa and New Hampshire caucus votes at the beginning of 2004. “Governor Dean had been to Iowa and New Hampshire more than most of the better-known candidates,” Russert says. “He was addressing, in a serious way, very difficult issues. I called sources in Iowa and New Hampshire and said, ‘Are you treating him as a serious presidential candidate?’, and the answer came back, emphatically yes.”

David Yepsen, a political columnist for the Des Moines Register in Iowa, has been writing about obscure Democrat long-shot candidates for 30 years. “I think he’s a serious candidate and he’s been treated like that here by reporters and party activists,” Yepsen says. “I joined the Register in 1974 and I can remember being told, ‘You go cover this guy Jimmy Carter. He’s not going to go anywhere’. Dr Dean, who was in Iowa again on Monday, has “spent a hell of a lot of time here in recent months,” Yepsen says. “He knows how to work the crowd. He’s impressing some people. ”

Perhaps Dr Dean's most unequivocal policy stance is his staunch, hawkish support for Israel, which will attract the support of America's hugely influential Jewish lobby. Earlier this month Dr Dean, whose wife is Jewish, travelled to Jerusalem for a meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, declaring afterwards: “I do not think that as long as Yassir Arafat is president there will be peace.”

That Sharon agreed to meet him at all shows how seriously the Israeli leader takes Dr Dean as a political force. Just as significant is that Sharon asked him to support the Israeli request for new loan guarantees from Washington, “and I promised him I would”. Israel is asking the Bush administration for up to $10 billion in loan guarantees to shore up its economy.

What sets Dr Dean apart from the other hopefuls is that his agenda is clear, unequivocal and backed by an enviable economic record during his 11 years in charge of Vermont’s budget, achieved with policies so fiscally prudent as to make Gordon Brown liverish with envy. Senators and congressmen cannot point to concrete political achievements in the same way.

When Dr Dean became Governor in 1991, Vermont was mired in the deep recession of the early 1990s, which had produced some particularly bitter battles in the state legislature. His predecessor had approved a temporary income tax increase designed to expire in 1993. Democrats wanted to extend the tax increase to finance additional social spending. Republicans were vehemently opposed, saying that a higher tax burden would stunt economic growth.