The View From Vermont: Dean Is No Liberal

[VermontDem2004]

The tone of the current race for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination was set 12 years ago last week when a little-known Republican governor of a state with fewer people than Baltimore dropped dead of a heart attack while cleaning the filter on his swimming pool.

The death of Richard Snelling - then in the first year of his fifth two-year term - would have remained merely a big story in the annals of Vermont politics with little national significance but for the family doctor and part-time lieutenant governor who replaced him: Howard B. Dean III.

Not that Dean, who went on to serve five full terms in office, had any designs on the presidency on Aug. 14, 1991. Far from it. On that morning, the doctor planned on a full day of seeing patients and was presumably still content in his decision a year earlier to forgo a bid for the full-time governorship.

Nor did this scion of a family that made a fortune on Wall Street have any aspirations to become the liberal maverick who has re-energized many hard-core Democrats around the country, scared much of the party's establishment and even captured the attention of Republicans.
http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vpall203420399aug20,0,3080100.story?coll=ny-viewpoints-headlines
---------------
My comment-Dean calls himself a centrist, he also said 'I don't care if you call me a liberal, a conservative, a moderate, as long as you call me Mr. President in January 2005.'