Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean has heard all the talk about Democrats hemorrhaging voters because of unaddressed economic fears. But the onetime physician, presidential candidate and national party chair has a different diagnosis.
“It’s true the Democrats forgot the working class, but we are not appealing to the next generation,” he began a recent interview. “Younger people don’t like longwinded mealy-mouthing, which is a problem in our party. Washington has never had a clue, but it’s particularly out of touch with a bunch of old folks running everything.”
Dean was 22 when he earned a political science degree, 29 when he graduated from medical school, 33 when he won election as a state representative and 37 when he became lieutenant governor — only to turn 40 and skyrocket into the political stratosphere.
As governor from 1991 to 2003, Dean pushed to expand health care, starting with Dr. Dynasaur coverage for children and teenagers. As a presidential contender in 2004, he plugged into student support by pioneering online organizing, spurring Politico to deem him “the father of all web campaigns.” As head of the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2011, he popularized a “50-state strategy” in hopes of growing the grassroots.
Then hitting 75 last year, Dean toyed with another run for governor, only to ultimately stay on the sidelines.
“I didn’t talk to anybody who I trusted who thought it was a good idea, and I don’t really know how to negotiate this world anymore,” he recalled. “I do my banking at the counter, where they say, ‘You could save yourself a lot of trouble if you just go online.’ I won’t because of the security problems. And I’ve never used Amazon. I want to keep my money in Vermont.”
And so the grandfather of three is aiming to embolden a new generation.
“People in their 70s and 80s need to understand our place and get the hell out of the way,” Dean said. “I’m not saying we ought to kick old people to the side or turn everything over to 20-year-olds, although we need a society where they feel they fit in. But I think leadership has to be between 35 and 50.”
Dean admits that can be a challenge in the Green Mountain State, where the median age is the third highest in the nation, the U.S. census reports. The number of older Vermonters has risen by 80% since 2000 — about one in every three residents is now over 60 — while figures for youth under age 20 have dropped by almost 20%.
Dean adds it’s not always easy to hand over the remote when you’ve long held the control.
“As a parent, there’s a role for you as your kids get older, but it’s not what it was.”
That said, Dean isn’t ready to go quietly.
‘The nurse knocks’
Two decades ago, most 20-year-olds knew everything about Dean, the original Vermont youth magnet before U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016 and 2020. But today’s students either weren’t born or in school when the doctor unintentionally made history on Jan. 19, 2004, with his TikTok-enduring “Dean Scream.”
Born in New York City in 1948, the son of a stockbroker graduated from Yale University in 1971, then tried his hand pouring concrete, washing dishes and finally attending the Bronx’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Meeting and marrying fellow student Judith Steinberg, he was rejected by his top three hospital choices before winning acceptance at his fourth — the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington.
Juggling jobs as a physician and part-time lieutenant governor, Dean chose not to run for the state’s top spot when it came open in 1990. Then Gov. Richard Snelling died of a heart attack a year later.
“I was seeing a patient and the nurse knocks,” recalled Dean, who finished the checkup (“I knew the patient wouldn’t be able to get another appointment for quite some time”) before his emergency swearing-in on Aug. 14, 1991.
Serving as governor through 2002, Dean proved hard to pigeonhole. On one hand, he was a fiscal conservative who cut income taxes while balancing the state budget 11 years in a row — all while receiving an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association. Then again, he signed a landmark 2000 law creating same-sex civil unions after the Vermont Supreme Court ruled that all couples have the right to marriage benefits.
The separate-but-equal compromise forged by the Legislature angered both voters wanting no distinction (same-sex marriage wouldn’t come until 2009) and those who opposed any deal. Dean faced so many threats, he had to wear a bulletproof vest when he ran for his fifth and final term.
Amid it all, Dean helped lead the National Governors Association and hinted at higher aspirations by hosting his 49 peers and then-President Bill Clinton at the group’s 1995 conference in Burlington. But everyone was still surprised when he entered the 2004 race for the White House.
‘The Darkest Horse’
The press soon introduced Dean to the nation, but not necessarily in the way he had hoped.
The cover of The New Republic of July 1, 2002, carried the headline, “Invisible Man: The most intriguing presidential candidate you’ve never seen.” The American Prospect of July 15, 2002, presented a profile titled “The Darkest Horse.” The New York Times of Dec. 18, 2002, summed up its story: “The governor of Vermont will battle the ‘Who’s he?’ factor.”
Dean told the Times he wanted to follow in the footsteps of President Jimmy Carter, a onetime little-known governor who the Vermonter supported as a 1980 delegate to the Democratic National Convention. But Dean was polling far behind a slew of his party’s members of Congress, all of whom supported then Republican President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
That’s when Dean spoke out.
“’What I want to know is why in the world the Democratic Party leadership is supporting the president’s unilateral attack on Iraq?” he was quoted at the national committee’s 2003 winter meeting. “I’m Howard Dean, and I’m here to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.”
By summer, Dean was deemed a “maverick” by USA Today, an “insurgent” by the Los Angeles Times and worthy of a cover story by Time magazine.
“Today he has a shot at winning his party’s nomination,” Time wrote in its Aug. 11, 2003 issue. “What’s unclear is whether he has surged because contributors and poll respondents think he is a new kind of Old Democrat — a candidate who will finally revive the left — or because those contributors and respondents know the truth — he is a rock-ribbed budget hawk, a moderate on gays and guns, and a true lefty on only a few issues, primarily the use of U.S. military power, which Dean seems to regard with a mixture of contempt and suspicion.”
Whatever Dean was, “he’s all that and a stick of gum,” political strategist Donna Brazile told the magazine. “He’s that hot. The flavor has not left him.”
‘Nothing to do with it’
By the beginning of 2004, more than 500,000 supporters had signed up on deanforamerica.com, each contributing an average of $77 for a collective total of $50 million, according to finance records.
“I get all this credit for the campaign,” Dean recently recalled. “I had absolutely nothing to do with it.”
The candidate instead points to tech-savvy youth who, in a first, harnessed the web for organizing and fundraising. But they knew more about programming a computer than working the political machine. Dean placed third in Iowa on Jan. 19 (the scream wasn’t the cause, but instead came in response), second in New Hampshire on Jan. 27 and third in Wisconsin on Feb. 17 before withdrawing from the race.
“Dean looked for a moment as if he might shake the political universe with a blunt-spoken, nontraditional style,” the Washington Post reported in a postmortem. “He found the same freewheeling approach that drew such fanfare was an engine of his demise.”
“His vaunted decentralized movement of political newcomers lacked experience and agility,” the Times added, “failing to quickly make or clearly communicate critical decisions.”
Dean went on to head the Democratic National Committee, offer commentary on MSNBC and teach as a senior fellow at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs. Since retiring from those posts, he’s now chair of the Democratic Data Exchange, which collects and shares voter contact information.
“Really smart young people are running it — all I do is keep order,” he said. “The only reason I’m chair is because somebody decided I was the only one who could get along with all the people in the Democratic Party who hated each other.”
When Dean ran to lead the Democratic National Committee in 2005, Republicans held the presidency and both chambers of Congress. Two decades later, the Vermonter says the situation is similar “but the generation gap is bigger than it’s ever been.”
Dean recalls when Americans received their news from the same national television networks, state newspapers and local radio stations.
“Today you have 10 different versions of everything,” he said. “It’s going to be a big problem for this new generation, which is going to be separated from each other by which TikTok influencers they watch, and for the world in terms of how you establish any kind of notion of what’s true and what’s not.”
‘What’s new about that?’
Dean is a strong proponent of shared context. When his children were in elementary school, he read them an unusual bedtime story: David McCullough’s 1,120-page biography of President Harry Truman.
“They still laugh about it,” he said. “They didn’t feel like it was being abusive.”
For adults, Dean suggests two books: “Thomas Chittenden: Vermont’s First Statesman,” a 1997 history by Frank Smallwood about the state’s founding governor; and “Philip Hoff: How Red Turned Blue in the Green Mountain State,” a 2011 account by Samuel Hand, Anthony Marro and Stephen Terry of the 20th-century leader who ushered in a shift from Republican to Democratic rule.
“All this shapes who we are and why we’re different,” he said.
For Dean, the books also shed light on the present disconnect between state and national politics — and why he sees hope.
“Yeah, you’ve got a neofascist government, but I’m an optimist, and I’ll tell you why,” he said. “When I went to college, I had two Black roommates. They had never been to school with a white person and I had never been to school with a Black person. My junior year was the first time women were permitted to enroll in the Ivy League. And I don’t know a single person in my class who dared to say they were gay.”
That was then.
“The amount of change that’s happened over my generation has just been staggering, and I have hope the new generation isn’t going to like authoritarian rule,” he said. “I see my role is to coach young people — and offer an occasional intervention when Democrats in Washington get particularly stupid.”
Dean is repeating his longtime calls for the national party to seed and feed the grassroots by coordinating and contributing to local and state organizing. He’s also offering his support to self-described democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani in his current bid for New York City mayor.
“Republicans are playing by a new set of rules now, and I think Democrats have got to toughen up,” Dean said. “We don’t have to give up our ideals, but we do have to talk differently.”
More plain spoken, he explained, and less politically correct.
“I just say what I want,” Dean concluded. “What’s new about that?”
