Dean strives for a second act

BURLINGTON, Vt. -- In the office that served as the frenzied nucleus of his presidential campaign, silence reigns as Howard Dean works with a kind of kinetic intensity, as if a Sousa march were keeping his rhythm. There are e-mails to be written, phone calls to be made -- a movement to be resurrected. The man whose Internet-wired campaign rewrote political playbooks and whose bluntness of message captured hearts of angry Democrats is once again straining uphill, seeking to craft something out of the phenomenon that was Howard Dean during his months-long ride as the leading Democratic candidate.

Dean is well aware that most asterisk-cum-exclamation-point candidates who have attempted to stretch fame past candidacy have struggled. Ross Perot, Jesse Jackson, Jerry Brown -- all have tried, all have seen their stars dim.

Dean sloughs off the history. The others didn't really try to keep their loyalists united, he says. He will.

"You don't try it, you never know if you will succeed," he says.

So two months after he abandoned his pursuit of the nation's highest office, the former Vermont governor is seeking to mold his most fervent believers into new form: a web-linked group that will, with him as front man, support progressively inclined candidates across the country.

With it, Dean envisions a chance to shape the Democratic Party, to serve as a Republican needler in places where presumptive Democratic nominee Senator John F. Kerry sees few dividends, and to craft that most elusive of things, a second act in American politics.

"Someone has to go out there and raise the flag," he says.

Dean, 55, has already enlisted big-name donors for Democracy for America, as the group is called. He has hired a dozen former campaign workers. He is in demand on television news shows, though last week national anchors were as interested in his views on Iraq as they were in reports that he is in discussions with Paramount to host a television show. (There have been talks about a "nonpolitical show about ordinary people," but no contract signed, according to Dean.)

He is writing a campaign memoir, to be published in September by Simon & Schuster. He is talking up Kerry and offering campaign advice when asked. And he is traveling around the country -- he will speak at a voter registration drive yesterday in Manchester, N.H. -- all part of an effort to make himself relevant on the national political stage.

"I'm just back from a six-day road trip," he told Judy Woodruff after an interview with her Monday on CNN's "Inside Politics." "Complete with two red-eyes!"

And yet, steeped as he is in his new venture, much as he says coulda-shoulda-woulda plays no role in his thinking, when called upon to think back to Feb. 18, to the day his presidential bid turned into a confounding $50 million flameout, Dean slips out of the moment, tasks forgotten.

He leans back in a desk chair, folds his hands behind his head, and stares straight ahead. "I can't believe we didn't win," he says. "If California had been first, we would have."

Of late, there's been ample material to spark rumination for Dean. In The Atlantic Monthly this month, his former pollster, Paul Maslin, offers a lengthy critique, writing that Dean suffered "erratic judgment, loose tongue and overall stubbornness" and that he "refused to be scripted, to be disciplined or to discipline himself, in his remarks about everything from the Red Sox and the Yankees to Middle Eastern diplomacy."

In March, former campaign manager Joe Trippi, who quit after Dean's loss in the New Hampshire primary, offered a disparaging assessment of the campaign to the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, saying it was beset by infighting.

Dean dismisses the accounts. "I don't comment on kiss-and-tell stuff." But he allowed that he and Trippi don't talk much anymore. "Not since the Washington Post article," Dean said.

For his part, Trippi said, "I have a deep respect for the governor and look forward to talking to him soon."

In addition to grappling with the emotional comedown from the campaign -- which added a still-clinging 20 pounds to his frame -- Dean is patching together a new identity: that of a man without public office or candidate's cachet.

Dean has not been Joe Citizen for years, having served as governor for 11 and presidential candidate for two. So it is a new thing for him to drive himself to the Verizon Wireless store for cellphone repair, to board airplanes without an entourage, and to have a say in his schedule, which now works around things like the high school graduation of his son Paul, who will attend his father's alma mater, Yale University, in the fall.

Dean says he never considered returning post-campaign to the family medicine practice he shared with his wife, Judith Steinberg, until becoming governor in 1991. Politics, he says, remains his consuming interest. Indeed, he took just three weeks off after ending his presidential bid, tinkering around his house, clearing out papers from his governor days piled in his garage. Hobbies -- biking and hiking, old favorites -- have not reclaimed his time. "I'm out every week," he says, of his travel schedule. "I'm just not out five or six days a week."

In another shift, after months of being courted by the media, politicos, and fans, it is Dean who often must play courtier, calling in chits and acting as salesman to ramp up his organization.

"Listen, I have a request for you, which you may be too busy to do," Dean said in a phone conversation last week with Al Franken, the comedian and liberal radio talk show host. "We'd like to get you to blog on our weblog once in a while," referring to the website that serves as a kind of online diary for users.

"Would you be willing to do that?" Dean asked. "There's the potential of 500,000 people. I think they'd get really excited if you went on it. You could just blog and pump the radio show."

The pitch, that day, was a success.

Dean seems to revel in maintaining his maverick stripes, amplified at every turn during the campaign with anti-Washington rhetoric, much of it aimed at Kerry. These days Dean still trots out the anti-Beltway message. "This is an outsiders' group," he said in explaining why Democracy for America is based in Burlington, not Washington.

And yet, the office has a distinctly conventional feel. Gone are the desk clusters arranged to permit 10 workers where only three ergonomically fit. The scooters that wheeled staffers through the corridors are no more, the mattresses tucked under desks for 3 a.m. naps hauled away.

A kind of insurance-firm calm prevails: freshly painted powder blue walls and daffodils in vases, staffers hunched over computers. Amidst it all, Dean seems content and at home, an eager beaver seeking to assure the world he is still very much in the game.

"I'm busy," he says to Al Sharpton, his former adversary and debate nemesis who telephoned to ask Dean to appear on his in-the-works talk show. "Flying around, trying to get some grass-roots stuff going. Trying to make sure it's still working."

Sarah Schweitzer can be reached at schweitzer@globe.com.