Hussein remark Dean's idea

After national security specialists drafted the outlines of his first major foreign policy speech and former vice president Al Gore weighed in with his thoughts, Howard Dean decided to personally add one more line to the text in light of Sunday's big news.

"The capture of Saddam has not made America safer," the Democratic presidential contender said the following day in Los Angeles to the Pacific Council on International Policy.

The remark touched off a string of recriminations from political rivals and snickers from the White House, but in its aftermath, Dean did not back down. Instead, with a display of the stubbornness that has become his trademark, he repeated the comment and derided his critics for their "Washington politics" and "silliness."

While some political analysts believe the comment fuels perceptions that Democrats are weak on defense, Dean told reporters during a lengthy in-flight interview Tuesday night that his remark is not only justified in light of the continued terrorist threat from Al Qaeda, but is the type of straight talk the party must use if it hopes to win the White House.

Dean's comments came during a flight on his chartered Gulfstream jet from Sierra Vista, Ariz., to Las Cruces, N.M.

He also admitted that he has begun to weigh his words more carefully because, "I'm aware now that I'm speaking not only to Democrats, I'm speaking to the whole country." At the same time, he described himself early in the flight as the "front-runner" for the nomination, only to say as his plane landed, "I don't see myself as the front-runner."

Dean also tried to explain his recent recitation of a rumor that President Bush might have had advance warning, via Saudi Arabia, that Osama bin Laden was planning the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. During a news conference this week, the president shook his head in disdain and dismissed the remark as an "absurd insinuation."

Dean countered by suggesting that administration officials misled the American public in the run-up to war: "How is what I did different from what Dick Cheney or George Bush or [Donald] Rumsfeld or [Richard] Perle or [Paul] Wolfowitz did during the time of the buildup of the invasion of Iraq? There were all these theories that they mentioned, many of them turned out not to be true. The difference is that I acknowledged that I did not believe the theory that I was putting out. They professed to believe the theories they were putting out, which later turned out not to be true."

Throughout a campaign that has seen him rise from an obscure former Vermont governor to the leader in preprimary polls, Dean has displayed and reveled in his political pugnaciousness. The former doctor acknowledges a shoot-from-the-hip style, and he and his aides brush off inconsistencies in his remarks.

Stuart Rothenberg, author of "The Rothenberg Political Report" in Washington, said that while Dean's freshness, most recently displayed through his Hussein comment, is endearing to a primary audience of committed Democrats, it might rankle the broader population in a general election.

"This is classic Dean. He shoots from the hip and whatever he hits, he says that's what he was aiming at," Rothenberg said. "This is one of the reasons why [Bush political adviser Karl] Rove wants Dean. He's easy to demonize. He caricatures himself. They will use this to define his antiwar positions."

Over the course of the 40-minute interview, Dean revealed that the Hussein remark was a product of his own penmanship, as is much of a speech he is delivering today in New Hampshire on domestic policy. In a draft of that speech, Dean calls for a "New Social Contract for Working Families" that calls for a crackdown on corporate corruption and a restructuring of the federal tax code.

Dean said that while he wrote the Hussein remark, he ran it by several of the specialists who were helping him before delivering it.

In speeches across Arizona and New Mexico, Dean repeated a line from his foreign policy speech that Hussein's capture was "a good thing which I hope very much will keep our soldiers in Iraq and around the world safer." But he also said, as he did in Los Angeles, that the United States still faces risks from uninspected cargo containers, loose nuclear material in the former Soviet Union, and the potential that North Korea will soon possess nuclear weapons.

"Our real problem right now is Al Qaeda and North Korea, and we're not addressing them," Dean said.

Sitting with his sleeves rolled up during the flight, Dean said he has been most surprised in the campaign by attack ads aired by a public interest group run by people formerly associated with some of his rivals.

"I didn't expect to have all the other candidates flailing away at me, because I didn't expect to be a front-runner here, so that tells me new perspectives about human nature," he said.

According to Dean, the highest moments of his campaign to date have been massive rallies in Seattle and his hometown of New York City. The lowest, he said, came one day last summer. Dean arrived home at 2 a.m., with his wife, daughter, and son asleep. He then left to resume campaigning at 5 a.m., before they awoke.

"I thought that was the pits," he said. "I'm not doing that again."

The former governor also said he expected the campaign's mental strain, but not the challenge it presents physically.

"You do it," he said, "by putting one foot in front of the other and keeping your eye not just on the prize, but keeping your eye on what you have to do every day."

Glen Johnson can be reached at johnson@globe.com.