Dean, a family practitioner, had applied to residency programs at highly competitive hospitals in New York and Washington but was rejected by all of them. His fourth choice was the University of Vermont, in Burlington, which has just 40,000 citizens but is the state's largest city. Dean can be defensive about Vermont's tiny size. He likes to point out that Bill Clinton was Governor of Arkansas when he won the White House. But Arkansas has 2.7 million residents, making it four times the size of Vermont, which has 613,000. Think about it this way: Vermont is about the size of Austin, Texas, or Memphis, Tenn. There are plenty of county commissioners who manage budgets larger than Vermont's.

But the small size offered Dean an opportunity to follow his grandfather (a small-town mayor) and his father (a consultant to a G.O.P. Congressman) into politics. His political life sneaked up on Steinberg, who has little interest in politics (she hopes to practice medicine if she must move to Washington). "Most people assume that if you are prepared to go through four years of medical school and three years of residency, you will practice medicine forever. And that's what I thought when I married Howard. But then, when we came to Burlington, he got involved in a citizens' group to get a bike path at the lake ... But I really didn't consider that politics. It was just community involvement. Then he started helping out Jimmy Carter's campaign"—the failed re-election bid—"but that was really just a neighborhood thing, because Esther Sorrell (later known as "the mother of the Vermont Democratic Party"), who lived down the street, was just stuffing envelopes and asked him to help. "Then he went into the state legislature, and it got a little more serious, and then he ran for Lieutenant Governor—although even then those jobs were part time, and he could still practice medicine. Then of course he became Governor"—after Governor Richard Snelling died of a heart attack while cleaning his pool filter in August 1991. "The whole process was really gradual, and"—Steinberg trails off for a beat, then adds softly—"it went by me."

It didn't go by others. After living in the state only a few years, Dean started asking people whether he should move slowly or run for something big—even Governor. By 1993, just a year after being elected Governor in his own right for the first time, Dean was serving on the executive committee of the National Governors Association. William Sorrell, the current state attorney general and son of Esther, first noticed national aspirations a couple of years later. "I would go home Friday afternoon, and he would get on a plane for Tucson or something, and when he got back, he would say he had been talking to gubernatorial candidates for the (Governors Association) ... I thought to myself, 'He's gotta be getting names in his Rolodex.'"

Dean spent his last year in office initiating a presidential run. He even requested that the state keep his gubernatorial records sealed for 10 years—four years longer than standard and just enough time to cover an eight-year Oval Office stint. Even Vermont Republicans suspect nothing too scandalous lurks in the papers, but they say the move reflects his giant ambitions.

Throughout the '90s, Dean was a close Clinton watcher. Like Clinton, Dean used a political strategy of triangulation. On one hand, Dean alienated progressives by tightening spending and successfully pushing tax cuts. "Howard would start (each budget cycle) by cutting programs for the needy, things like wheelchairs and artificial limbs," says state auditor Elizabeth Ready, who has been both friend and foe to Dean. Horrified liberals would have to claw each benefit back from the tightfisted Governor. But at election time, Dean marginalized Republicans by appealing to socially liberal groups like environmentalists. "Every year, as the first thing in his budget, (Dean) put $10 million aside for conservation," says Don Hooper, a Vermont conservationist.

As President, Dean would ask Congress to repeal all the tax cuts Bush signed, which would have the effect of raising—in some cases dramatically—Americans' tax bills. Dean opposes the tax cuts because he believes they have produced deficits, but his planned tax "hike" is one of the most damning exhibits Republicans will use in making the case that he is an out-of-touch liberal.

So is he a liberal, a conservative or something in between? The answer is, all of the above. Dean is constantly attacking "ideologues in both parties," which allows him to choose what he thinks is the best of all worlds.Take health care. Again, Dean learned from Clinton. In the early '90s, Dean was arguably the Governor most involved in helping shape the huge, doomed Clinton health-care plan. During the 1994 State of the Union address, according to the Burlington Free Press, Dean was sitting just behind Hillary Rodham Clinton, the plan's major architect. Dean claims he doesn't remember the event and even at the time thought the plan was overly ambitious. Today, nine years after HillaryCare imploded, Dean is preaching the virtues of incrementalism.

"My health-care plan is not reform," he said last month in Hampton, N.H., "and if reform is all you care about, I'm not your man. My plan is designed to do two things: cover everyone and get passed." Dean would expand existing programs to make sure those under 25 are insured. He would also give tax credits to businesses that agree to insure 25-and-over workers. "It's a way to cover a lot of the uninsured, but it doesn't have the flavor of a single national plan that people would associate with most liberal Democratic candidates," says Robert Blendon, a Harvard professor of health policy.

But Dean says nothing will happen on health care (or any other issue, for that matter) until he works out a plan to balance the budget, his No. 1 priority. And some Vermonters say even if he does tackle health care, his record on that issue has plenty of shortcomings. Critic Michael Abajian, an anesthesiologist at Central Vermont Medical Center, says Dean paid to cover uninsured Vermonters mainly by underreimbursing doctors for care given to Medicaid patients. "It's so hypocritical to say he wants to provide universal coverage and turn around and not even pay the people who would provide the health care," says Abajian.

Still, Dean's health-care plan remains modest by Democratic standards. Where Dean is truly to the left of his party is on just one issue, Iraq. Instead of war, he favored "containing" Saddam's regime the way the West contained the Soviet Union for 50 years. (He doesn't explain why a cold war with an unstable tyrant would have made sense.) Dean sounds hawkish on other issues; he would spend more than Bush to fight al-Qaeda, he says. But his foreign policy proposals often seem either hesitant (we should be "vigilant" with Iran) or shrill: "Because the President has dawdled and been unwilling to engage in serious negotiations, he's the President who has allowed North Korea to become a nuclear power," says Dean. (Didn't the communist regime have something to do with it?)

Dean has tried to seem more conservative than he really is on guns and more liberal than he really is on gays. Though Dean constantly brags about his 2000 "A" rating from the National Rifle Association, N.R.A.. executive director Wayne LaPierre says Dean today is "totally trying to have it both ways." Yes, Vermont has some of the least restrictive gun laws in the nation. But Dean opposes a federal bill that would grant gunmakers immunity from lawsuits and supports background checks for buyers at gun shows—two positions that put him at odds with the N.R.A..

Many Vermonters agree that Dean arrived at a political crossroads—a point when his luck seemed sure to run out—in 2000, on the issue of gay marriage. A year before, the state supreme court had ruled that gay couples have a right to the same benefits the state provides straight couples—inheritance, hospital visitation and so on. The court told the legislature to decide how best to extend those perks to gays. Dean expressed discomfort with the idea of gay marriage, and he eventually signed a bill establishing a separate-but-equal arrangement: straight couples get marriage licenses; gay couples get civil-union licenses.

It was a moderate compromise attacked from left and right. Instead of staging a public ceremony, Dean signed the bill with only about 15 staff members present. The left didn't like that. And the right didn't like the bill. Thousands of calls poured in every day, according to longtime aide Kate O'Connor. "If you have a couple hundred a day normally, it's a big deal," she says. Dean was running for a fifth term, and he had signed the civil-union bill six months before Election Day. It didn't look good. "We were campaigning, and people would be wearing gas masks, like we were poison," says O'Connor. Protesters screamed that Dean was a "faggot"; so many threats were made that he had to wear a bulletproof vest. (A detail that, to his credit, Dean never offers on the campaign trail, even to gay audiences.)

O'Connor says his staff was bitterly divided over the bill; there were tears and fights throughout this period. "But he was very, very steady," she says. Steinberg says, "I'm not saying it was easy for him; it was hard. But he knew that was the right thing to do." Dean won re-election by less than half a percentage point. He didn't run for a sixth term as Governor because he was planning a race for President. A good thing, since it would have been a difficult campaign. (The Democratic Lieutenant Governor, whom Dean endorsed, lost.) Civil unions hurt Democrats in the 2000 elections in Vermont, but two years later, Dean reaped the benefits: wealthy gays in the Fire Island Pines beach community off the coast of New York City were among the earliest, most generous donors to his unlikely presidential run. Dean doesn't emphasize his discomfort with gay marriage in these circles.

The gay issue will hurt Dean with conservative Democrats, especially the South, which Dean talks about as though it's another planet. He routinely offers skeptics two explanations when they ask how he can compete there. First, he says, he was campaigning in South Carolina a while ago and met an 80-year-old World War II veteran who turned out to be gay. The man thanked him for signing the civil-union bill. The point of the story seems to be that you can't assume anything about Southerners, which is true, but it's more homily than strategy.

Second, he says, he will tell Southern whites, "You have voted Republican for 30 years. Tell me what you have to show for it. In South Carolina, there are 103,000 children without health insurance. Most of those kids are white. Tell me about your public schools. Are you happy that the legislature cut $70 million or $80 million out of the public school system in South Carolina? ... Has your job moved to Indonesia? ... And the answer is, if you don't like the answers to those questions, maybe you should think about voting Democratic." A solid argument but one that failed for Al Gore, himself a nominal Southerner, four years ago. And it may come across as insulting to tell people they are poor—and then tell them their own votes are to blame.

Howard Dean may have a lot to learn, but he has some time. And he has something else: nothing to lose. He has enough cash to keep him competitive for months, enough antiwar volunteers to keep Meeting Up and enough political savvy not to get overconfident. He also has that High Yankee yearning, that great fear of the titled that, as Kesey writes in Sometimes a Great Notion, "a man might struggle and labor his livelong life and make no mark! None! No permanent mark at all!" Dean may not be a maverick, but he may be something better: a real contender. Zounds.

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