Smash hit

Most people assumed that Dr Dean would side with his party. He didn’t. He let the tax increase lapse. He insisted on a balanced budget, producing a surplus every year since. “I know how to balance a budget,” he says. “We have not had a Republican president who has balanced a budget in 30 years. My record in Vermont is particularly strong in that area.”

That brings Dr Dean on to the issue of tax, which is inextricably linked to his proudest political legacy in Vermont, and one that he wants to replicate in America as a whole: access to health care. In Vermont he has obsessively directed any surplus money to expanding access to quality health care, particularly for children. He has enacted two initiatives that represent his chief legacy: first, offering the mother of every newborn child an at-home visit two weeks after the birth; and second, greatly expanding the state’s Medicaid programme for children whose families slip through the insurance safety net.

His ambitions for America are grander. “We have something approaching universal health care in Vermont. My goal is universal health care for all Americans.” Dr Dean seems undaunted by the political disaster of Bill Clinton’s universal health insurance plan, savaged by Congress in 1993 — a fate that befell a similar plan in Vermont the same year. This time, he says, he knows exactly how to pay for it: by scrapping the portion of President Bush’s $1.35 trillion tax cut which affects people earning more than $300,000 a year. “That would give me more than enough money,” he says.

The one issue that would perhaps threaten a Dean campaign more than any other is an episode that has given him the most national media coverage, although it is a controversy he never sought: Vermont’s legalisation of “gay marriages”. In 1999 the Vermont Supreme Court ruled that gay couples deserved the same legal rights as heterosexual couples. Dean engineered a political compromise, allowing gays to enter into “civil unions” with all the rights of marriage, but not the name.

Surely all of this will open him up to criticism that he is trying to model America in the image of Vermont, one of the most socially liberal and progressive states in America? “They might want to do that. But let’s see if President Bush advocates equal rights for all. And on gun control, for example, I do not believe in gun control. It is an issue for individual states.”

Vermont also has one of the most progressive environmental programmes in America, anathema to a White House administration dominated by former oil executives. “The President has no energy policy, so he is beholden to the Saudis and cannot stop Saudi money being channelled to Hamas,” Dr Dean says. “This lack of an energy policy is leading to Israelis being blown up. I advocate much more reliance on solar and wind energy, and improved fuel efficiency in cars. I am not anti-car. I have two SUVs (the gas-guzzling Sports Utility Vehicles) myself.”

So what about Iraq? “I would have gone straight to the United Nations on Saddam, and not as a last resort. That was an incredibly destructive approach.”

For now, Dr Dean’s message falls on largely deaf ears, but his appeal will undoubtedly grow. Every four years, as the columnist Howard Kurtz notes, “the press swoons, at least briefly, over a presidential candidate like Dean. A lonely figure who takes controversial stands, who isn’t afraid to tell it like it is. Bruce Babbit in 1988. Paul Tsongas in 1992. Someone who, almost by definition, cannot win.”

Dr Dean prefers to compare himself to Senator John McCain, who ran George Bush so close in the 2000 Republican presidential primary race. “There was a time when McCain was at 3 per cent in the polls,” Kurtz says. “He let reporters travel around with him on a bus. He benefited from great media attention. That catapulted him into being a serious candidate against George Bush. So, yes, it could happen.”

Others are more sceptical. “There is one significant difference between Dean, and Carter and Clinton,” says Scott Keeler, of the Brookings Institution, the Washington policy think-tank. “He is from the northeast. They came from the South. Dean’s state is small and rural, but it doesn’t have nearly the same cachet for Democrats as the South. That was a significant factor in the Carter and Clinton victories.”

Carroll Doherty, a political analyst, says: “Currently, he’s an asterisk point. Outside Vermont he is invisible. It’s not insurmountable, but he’s got a very long way to go.”