Howard Brush Dean III (born November 17, 1948) is an American physician and retired politician who served as the 79th governor of Vermont from 1991 to 2003 and chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) from 2005 to 2009. Dean was an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2004 presidential election. Afterward, he became a political commentator and consultant to McKenna Long & Aldridge, a law and lobbying firm.
Before entering politics, Dean earned his medical degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1978. Dean served as a member of the Vermont House of Representatives from 1983 to 1986 and as the 77th lieutenant governor of Vermont from 1987 to 1991. Both were part-time positions that enabled him to continue practicing medicine. In 1991, Dean became governor of Vermont, subsequently winning five two-year terms and serving until 2003. Dean also oversaw the expansion of the "Dr. Dynasaur" program, which ensures universal health care for children and pregnant women in the state.
Dean denounced the 2003 invasion of Iraq and called on Democrats to oppose the George W. Bush Administration. In the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries, Dean finished third in the Iowa caucus, and his campaign suffered after negative reactions in the media to a hoarse shout that he gave during a speech; Dean ended up losing the nomination to Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. He was later elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee in February 2005. As chairman of the party, Dean created and employed the fifty-state strategy that attempted to make Democrats competitive in normally conservative states often dismissed in the past as "solid red".
Dean was named chairman emeritus of the DNC upon his retirement in January 2009. Since retiring from the DNC chairman position, Dean has held neither elected office nor an official position in the Democratic Party and, , was working for global law firm Dentons as part of the firm's public policy and regulation practice. In 2013, Dean expressed interest in running for the presidency in 2016, but instead supported former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's run for president.
Early life and education Childhood Dean was born in East Hampton, New York, to Andrée Belden (née Maitland), an art appraiser, and Howard Brush Dean Jr., an executive in the financial industry. Dean is the eldest of four brothers, including Jim Dean, Chair of Democracy for America, and Charles Dean, who was captured by the Pathet Lao and executed by the North Vietnamese while traveling through Southeast Asia in 1974.
Howard's father worked at the stock brokerage firm of Dean Witter. The family was quite wealthy, Republican, and belonged to the exclusive Maidstone Golf Club and Devon Yacht Club in East Hampton. As a child, he spent much of his time growing up in East Hampton; the family built a house on Hook Pond there in the mid-1950s. While in New York, the family had a three-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side along Park Avenue.
Howard attended the Browning School in Manhattan until he was 13, and then went to St. George's School, a preparatory school in Middletown, Rhode Island. In September 1966, he attended Felsted School, UK, for one school year after winning an English Speaking Union scholarship.
UPI quoted one of Dean's friends in his youth as saying, "By Hamptons standards, the Deans were not rich. No safaris in Africa or chalets in Switzerland. Howard's father went to work every day. He didn't own a company, or have a father or grandfather who founded one, as mine did." Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal that:
he doesn't seem like a WASP. I know it's not nice to deal in stereotypes, but there seems very little Thurston Howell, III, or George Bush, the elder, for that matter, in Mr. Dean. ... He seems unpolished, doesn't hide his aggression, is proudly pugnacious. He doesn't look or act the part of the WASP ... It will be harder for Republicans to tag Mr. Dean as Son of the Maidstone Club than it was for Democrats to tag Bush One as Heir to Greenwich Country Day. He just doesn't act the part.
Yale University Dean graduated from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts in political science in 1971. As a freshman, he specifically asked to room with an African American. The university housing office complied, and Dean roomed with two Southern black students and one white student from Pennsylvania. One of Dean's roommates was Ralph Dawson, the son of a sheet metal worker in Charleston, South Carolina, and today a New York City labor lawyer. Dawson said of Dean:
Though eventually eligible to be drafted into the military, he received a medical deferment because of an unfused vertebra. In response to Tim Russert asking on Meet the Press whether Dean could have served in the military had he not mentioned his back condition during his draft physical, Dean replied "I guess that's probably true. I mean, I was in no hurry to get into the military." He briefly tried a career as a stockbroker before deciding on a career in medicine, completing pre-medicine classes at Columbia University. In 1974, Dean's younger brother Charlie, who had been traveling through southeast Asia at the time, was captured and killed by Laotian guerrillas, a tragedy widely reported to have an enormous influence in Dean's life; for many years he has worn his brother's belt nearly every day as a memento.
Vermont medical practice Dean received his Doctor of Medicine degree from the Yeshiva University Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1978 and began a medical residency at the University of Vermont.
Vermont political career In 1980, Dean spearheaded a grassroots campaign to stop a condominium development on Lake Champlain, instead favoring the construction of a bicycle trail. The effort succeeded and helped launch his political career. That same year, he was also a volunteer for Jimmy Carter's re-election campaign. In 1980, he was a Carter delegate at the Democratic National Convention. In 1981 he was elected chairman of the Chittenden County Democratic Committee. He served in this position until resigning in May 1984.
In 1982, he was elected to the Vermont House of Representatives; he was reelected in 1984 and became assistant minority leader.Robert Dreyfuss, The Darkest Horse: Vermont Governor Howard Dean is a fiscal conservative who's for gay civil unions, against the Bush tax cuts and running for president as the health-care candidate , The American Prospect (June 20, 2002). He was elected lieutenant governor in 1986 and reelected in 1988 and 1990. All were part-time positions, and Dean continued to practice medicine alongside his wife until he became governor.Emily Anthes, Presidency beckons for a Yale prankster , Yale Daily News (January 27, 2003).Susan Baer, For candidate Dean, doctor is always in , Baltimore Sun (November 17, 2003).
On August 13, 1991, Dean was examining a patient when he received word that governor Richard A. Snelling had died of sudden cardiac arrest. Dean assumed the office, which he called the "greatest job in Vermont." He was subsequently elected to five two-year terms in his own right, making him the longest-serving governor in the state's history. From 1994 to 1995, Dean was the chairman of the National Governors Association.
Dean was faced with an economic recession and a $60 million budget deficit. He bucked many in his own party to immediately push for a balanced budget, an act which marked the beginning of a record of fiscal restraint. During his tenure as governor, the state paid off much of its debt, balanced its budget eleven times, raised its bond rating, and lowered income taxes twice. Robert Dreyfuss wrote that as a fiscal conservative:
Dean also focused on health care issues, most notably through the "Dr. Dynasaur" program, which ensures near-universal health coverage for children and pregnant women in the state; the uninsured rate in Vermont fell from 10.8 percent in 1993 to 8.4 percent in 2000 under his watch. Child abuse and teen pregnancy rates were cut roughly in half.
The first decision of his career to draw significant national attention came in 2000, after the Vermont Supreme Court, in Baker v. State, ruled that the state's marriage laws unconstitutionally excluded same-sex couples and ordered that the state legislature either allow gays and lesbians to marry or create a parallel status. Facing calls to amend the state constitution to prohibit either option, Dean chose to support the latter one, and signed the nation's first civil unions legislation into law, spurring a short-lived "Take Back Vermont" movement which helped Republicans gain control of the State House.
Dean was criticized during his 2004 presidential campaign for another decision related to civil unions. Shortly before leaving office, he had some of his Vermont papers sealed for at least the next decade, a time frame longer than most outgoing governors use, stating that he was protecting the privacy of many gay supporters who sent him personal letters about the issue. On the campaign trail, he demanded that Vice President Dick Cheney release his energy committee papers. Many people, including Democratic Senator and failed 2004 presidential candidate Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who would go on to leave the party after losing his primary for re-election in 2006, accused Dean of hypocrisy. Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit to force the papers be opened before the seal expired but lost.
2004 presidential candidacy
Dean began his bid for president as a "long shot" candidate. ABC News ranked him eighth out of 12 in a list of potential presidential contenders in May 2002. In March 2003 he gave a speech strongly critical of the Democratic leadership at the California State Democratic Convention that attracted the attention of grassroots party activists and set the tone and the agenda of his candidacy. It began with the line: "What I want to know is what in the world so many Democrats are doing supporting the President's unilateral intervention in Iraq?"
That summer, his campaign was featured as the cover article in The New Republic and in the following months he received expanded media attention. His campaign slowly gained steam, and by autumn of 2003, Dean had become the apparent frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, performing strongly in most polls and outpacing his rivals in fundraising. This latter feat was attributed mainly to his innovative embrace of the Internet for campaigning, using Meetup.com to track supporters and encourage grassroots participation in the campaign. The majority of his donations came from individual Dean supporters, who came to be known as Deanites, or, more commonly, Deaniacs, a term coined to describe meetup participants, who passed out campaign materials supporting Dean and the broader movement. (Critics often labeled them "Deany Boppers", or "Deanie Babies", a reference to his support from young activists.) Following Dean's presidential campaign, some Deaniacs remained engaged in the political process through Democracy for America and similar locally oriented organizations.
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