HOWARD DEAN officially announced his candidacy for president this week, and while we neglected to take proper notice, our lapse was somewhat understandable given that the former governor of Vermont has been running flat out for a full year now. During that time, the acerbic 54-year-old physician has emerged as the wild card of the field. "I'm here to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" is his signature rallying cry, and Mr. Dean appears to have almost as much ability to excite the party's liberal activists as he does to needle his Democratic rivals.
That he ought to be taken seriously is clear both from the polls -- he's running second in New Hampshire, third in Iowa -- and from the reaction to him in other quarters of the party. The centrist Democratic Leadership Council inveighed last month against Mr. Dean as representing the party's "McGovern-Mondale wing, defined principally by weakness abroad and elitist, interest-group liberalism at home." Mr. Dean has tapped into the power of the Internet; he raised a credible $2.6 million in the first three months of the year, a good chunk of it online, and in MoveOn.org's virtual primary results yesterday, he led the field with 44 percent (which is still not enough to garner the group's endorsement).
It wasn't obvious that Mr. Dean would occupy the credible liberal niche in the race. During his 12 years as governor, he was seen as a rather centrist Democrat. He supported abortion rights, extended health care to all children in the state and signed legislation providing civil unions for gay couples. But he also earned an "A" rating from the National Rifle Association -- he favored residents' right to carry concealed weapons -- switched his position on capital punishment from against to for, with qualifications, and backed a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. His initial presidential pitch was based on the twin pillars of universal health care and fiscal discipline.
But Mr. Dean really caught fire when he -- unwisely in our view -- became the most visible Democratic candidate to oppose the war in Iraq. His most unfortunate statement came after the war, when he said, "We've gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, and I suppose that's a good thing." He later generated a more appropriate level of enthusiasm, but as recently as last Sunday, on NBC's "Meet the Press," he had circled back. While acknowledging that Saddam Hussein was a "mass murderer," he added, "We don't know whether in the long run the Iraqi people are better off. And the most important thing is that we don't know whether we are better off." Strikingly, Mr. Dean's announcement speech the next day featured not a single mention of Iraq; instead, he struck a Perotesque, Washington outsider tone.
Mr. Dean's "Meet the Press" performance was, to put it charitably, less than impressive. For a candidate whose appeal is based on a straight-talker image, his answers were at times waffling and evasive. "You know, I go back and forth on that," he said of his position on a balanced budget amendment. Pressed on how much taxpayers would have to pay if he were to succeed in his call to repeal President Bush's tax cuts, he tried to dodge by saying the numbers were provided by "the Republican Treasury Department, which I think has very little credibility in this matter." Mr. Dean rejected as "silly" a question about the number of troops on active duty, and he had a point, but his generally cavalier attitude -- "I will have the kinds of people around me who can tell me these things," he said -- isn't apt to inspire confidence in voters who, particularly after 9/11, want a president with national security expertise. Such events may matter little to most voters so far ahead of voting season. But they do offer an early sense of a candidate's ability to perform under sustained questioning.
And so, Mr. Dean: Welcome to the race -- we suppose.
