Between rise, plunge, he delivered a message

RACINE, Wis. -- On the final weekend before what he once termed a do-or-die election in Wisconsin, Howard Dean stood before 150 people, a mere sliver of the crowds he had drawn only months earlier. The empty seats in the Lake Civic Center were testimony to a campaign that had crashed harder than a Silicon Valley startup.

Holding one of the former Vermont governor's blue-and-white campaign signs, Bob Nemanich stood and spoke to Dean.

"I want to thank you personally for having the courage to come out early and really challenge the administration and the Republican Party," said Nemanich, an executive recruiter and school board candidate in this lakeside community. "You put issues on the table."

Yesterday, Dean called a halt to his presidential campaign, announcing he would convert it into some future movement that would push the core principles of his campaign and help elect like-minded candidates to local, state, and congressional office.

History will probably record his role in the 2004 presidential race as that of message-maker: the man who defined the Democratic agenda by establishing an aggressive tone against President Bush that is now being carried forth by the remaining contenders for the nomination, John F. Kerry and John Edwards.

"This has been a campaign that has been extraordinarily different. The new approach, planting seeds on the Internet, strengthening grass roots, face-to-face obtaining support from hundreds of thousands of small donors, all these steps can revitalize our democracy and return power to ordinary Americans. All of us have done these things together," Dean said yesterday in a Burlington, Vt., ballroom filled with supporters who both cried and cheered.

"We have demonstrated to other Democrats that it is a far better strategy to stand up against the right-wing agenda of George W. Bush than it is to cooperate with it," he added. "We have led this party back to considering what its heart and soul is, although there is a lot of work left to do."

Dean, 55, was among the first to speak out against the war in Iraq, among the first to criticize Bush's tax cuts and to rail against the power of special interests in Washington. He laid blame on the Bush administration for a spiraling federal budget deficit and on Congress for its inability to create a national health insurance program like one he enacted in his home state.

The message would take him to soaring heights. Last fall, Dean drew thousands to rallies on both coasts. He outpaced Democratic fund-raising records and won kudos for harnessing the Internet as both a money-making and outreach tool -- all the while boggling the minds of Washington insiders who did not see Dean coming and struggled to make their peace with him.

"The Democrats were dead men walking until he came on the scene," said Ann Marie Patel, a retired bank worker from South Burlington, who came to hear Dean yesterday. "Unfortunately, he doesn't have Ted Kennedy behind him. John Kerry and John Edwards are Johnnie-come-latelies."

Yet Dean failed to convince a broader array of voters that he had the judgment and temperament necessary to be president and commander-in-chief -- special concerns amid a war and widespread fears of terrorism. Dean accentuated those concerns with a raucous concession speech after he lost the Iowa caucuses last month. He never regrouped, in part because of the punishing pace of a front-loaded primary and caucus schedule that his party created to produce an early nominee.

Dean's sudden fall is a subject of immense sadness for supporters and glee for his detractors. It is a modern political drama with an unlikely hero: the governor from a small rural state, without money or Washington connections, a patrician by birth who staked his campaign on a populist, antiestablishment message, a man who touted his centrist fiscal record but was best known outside Vermont for signing the bill legalizing civil unions for gays and lesbians.

Which is not to say his ascendancy was a fluke. Dean had been grooming himself for a run at the presidency from early on in Vermont.

Ambition becomes clear A family-practice physician, Dean entered government in 1981 as a state legislator and rose quickly in the ranks. By 1986, he was Vermont's lieutenant governor, and in 1991 became the state's chief executive when Governor Richard Snelling died of a heart attack. Dean adopted his Republican predecessor's deficit-reduction program. He won the office in his own right in 1992, and then four more times.

Dean's national ambitions became clear in 1996 when he was chairman of the Democratic Governors' Association, a job that required him to recruit gubernatorial candidates around the country and one that friends say he used as a springboard to seek broader national attention. His sights were squarely on the White House by 2002, when his travels around the country became so frequent that Vermont media demanded his private schedules, a request he refused. A battle ensued, ending at the state Supreme Court, which ordered Dean to turn over some of the records.

Dean's initial visits to early-contest states were unremarkable affairs. Crowds were small, media coverage scant as Dean pieced together rallying cries in Iowa and New Hampshire for what would prove his signature issues: opposition to the war in Iraq and to Bush's tax cuts.

Dean's first burst of national attention occurred in February of 2003, when he drew a sharp contrast between himself and other Democrats at the winter meeting of the Democratic National Committee in the heart of establishment power -- Washington.

"I'm Howard Dean and I am here to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," he said in what would become a trademark line, one borrowed from the late Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota.

Dean brought the audience to their feet with a searing critique of Bush and the war, entwined with an argument that Democrats should focus on universal health care and improved education to broaden the party's appeal.

He added that Democrats had to court Southern whites who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals "because their kids don't have health insurance, either, and their kids need better schools, too." But months later, when Dean repeated the Confederate-flag line to an Iowa newspaper reporter, it created a backlash.

After his speech, visits to his website, deanforamerica.com, picked up, and so did fund-raising. At the end of the first quarter of 2003, Dean had raised just under $3 million. During the second quarter, he raised $7.5 million (by contrast, Kerry, a veteran senator from Massachusetts, had raised $5.8 million). Nearly half the contributions came in through the website, at an average amount of $77.

A sudden contender Despite the money and the buzz, Dean was still a long shot in early summer. At a Waterloo, Iowa, house party in June, Dean was the scrappy candidate in gray flannel slacks, his cheeks flushed from the heat. He was forced to yield attention when Kerry, the early favorite, entered the backyard looking collected and cool in a pressed chambray shirt.

Still, Dean excited people as the anti-Washington outsider, the straight-talking iconoclast. In August, thousands turned out to see him at rallies in New York and Seattle, many in the crowd young and seemingly devoted to Dean. Soon there was talk of a political revolution led by young people and disaffected voters -- "Deaniacs" and "Deanie Babies," they were called. Time and Newsweek splashed Dean's face across their covers on their Aug. 11 issues.

Throughout the fall, Dean went from strength to strength. On Nov. 12, he received the endorsement of the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, two formidable labor unions. The backing was a blow to rival Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri and gave Dean the imprimatur of legitimacy in the world of progressive Democratic politics.

The attention was at once heady and troubling for the Dean campaign. His leads in opinion polls meant lots of free media, but it meant scrutiny as well. His opponents looked to him as the man to beat, with 10-way candidate forums transformed into focused attacks on Dean. Gephardt pounced on Dean's critical comments about Medicare in 1995. He said they showed Dean's lack of commitment to the program, while Dean said they were intended as commentary about the management of the program.

Dean took heat for other comments, too. There were attacks on his claim of being the only candidate discussing race before white audiences, for referring to members of Hamas, a group labeled terrorists by the State Department, as "soldiers," and most famously for the Confederate-flag line.

Dean also came under mounting criticism for refusing to make public thousands of official papers -- half the total of his gubernatorial papers -- he had sealed for 10 years upon leaving office. At the time, he told reporters he wanted to avoid embarrassing disclosures as he made a bid for the White House; later he said those comments were made in jest. A conservative group, Judicial Watch, sued Dean for access to the papers.

Yet for all the hits he was taking, Dean's support among fans only grew. The campaign had long used a baseball bat logo on its website as a fund-raising thermometer, showing donations as they came in. Whenever Dean , the bat would fill. In the final quarter of 2003, Dean again beat fund-raising records, taking in more than $14 million to put his take for the year at more than $41 million.

So confident was Dean in his money machine that he took out expensive campaign ads across the nation; he even instructed his cyber-donors in December to give money to Representative Leonard Boswell of Iowa (who later endorsed Kerry).

Unsteady at the top All eyes were on Dean by December. It was a period that would prove a pivot point for the campaign, marking both his apex and the start of his descent.

On Dec. 9, former Vice President Al Gore endorsed Dean, in a move that surprised many and offered Dean the imprimatur of acceptance by a Democratic Party heavyweight. Later some would question whether the much-touted endorsement actually harmed Dean by muddying his anti-Washington message.

Days later, Saddam Hussein was arrested by US forces in Iraq. In a speech in Los Angeles and again in Manchester, N.H., Dean insisted that America was no safer following the capture, a position his rivals cast as defiant and ill-conceived. Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut issued a statement saying Dean had climbed into his own "spider hole of denial." Dean refused to retreat, instead sharpening his rhetoric. He highlighted ongoing US troop losses in Iraq and fighter escorts for commercial airliners flying over US cities as evidence of continuing threats.

From there, the slide continued. Stories critical of his record in Vermont emerged, some calling into question his relationship with industry and seeming to undercut a core plank of his campaign -- his critique of alleged coziness between the Bush administration and business. Shortly before the Iowa caucuses, old television footage surfaced of Dean criticizing the state's contest as beholden to special interests. Dean's poll numbers began to drop.

On Jan. 19, Dean went down to defeat in Iowa -- the first political loss of his career. It unraveled his campaign plan, which had been to win Iowa and use a win there to drive momentum in New Hampshire and contests beyond. Dean had spent heavily on advertising in Iowa and he was among the best organized of the candidates, yet Kerry had emerged the victor, with entrance polls showing him doing as well as Dean with young and first-time voters -- the presumed Dean constituency.

Dean offered a damning coda to the loss with his concession speech, ending it with an over-the-top shout-out of states he said he would compete in for the Democratic nomination, followed by a raucous scream that would prove fodder for late-night comics and song remixes -- just as the full breadth of Americans were tuning into the race.

Dean struggled to right his campaign in New Hampshire. He apologized for his postcaucus performance and explained that it was merely a show of exuberance for disappointed workers who had streamed into Iowa to help get the vote out. He sought to humanize his approach. He asked his campaign-shy wife, Judy, to appear with him on ABC's "Primetime Live" in her first television interview. She acquiesced, and the campaign handed out nearly 125,000 copies of the video in what they hoped was testament to Dean's softer side.

Polls showed that Dean's efforts halted his free fall, but did not boost him enough. He lost to Kerry in New Hampshire by a double-digit margin -- a loss the campaign would characterize as a recovery but in the mainstream story line would go down as simple defeat.

Trying for a turnaround The day after New Hampshire, Dean headed to Vermont to regroup. What emerged was a new plan: No longer would he wage a promised 50-state campaign; he would instead compete selectively -- in Michigan and Washington state, then in Wisconsin.

The plan was counter to what his campaign manager, Joe Trippi -- the architect of the strategy -- had touted. When Dean was on the rise, Trippi had designed a costly nationwide campaign for him, putting ads on the air far from Iowa and New Hampshire and sending Dean around the country. By contrast, Kerry, Gephardt, Edwards, and others had focused exclusively on the early voting states. As Dean trimmed his sails, Trippi's expensive plan seemed out of place. On Jan. 28, Dean brought in an old Washington hand and Gore adviser, Roy Neel, to take over the campaign, a move that caused Trippi to resign.

The tide had turned, however. AFSCME, whose million-plus ranks had pledged to help Dean win in Iowa, yanked its endorsement on Feb. 7. Last Sunday, Steve Grossman, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee who came early to the campaign and gave the insurgent some establishment credibility, announced he was gone if his candidate did not win in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin proved to be another poor performance for Dean, his 17th consecutive loss. It prompted him to reassess again, this time deciding to use the innovations his campaign had come up with -- Internet fund-raising and grass-roots outreach -- to support Democratic candidates. The only thing different will be the mission, no longer electing Howard Dean to the White House.

"What happened is the message sold, the man didn't," said William Schneider, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "As long as it was just the message, it woke Democrats up. Other candidates stole it fair and square. But once they got a look at this guy, they decided, `We're not going to win with this guy,' both because his temperament wasn't very appealing, and because he did not have the experience.

Scheider added: "The other factor is that they just don't like him. Voting for president is the most personal choice people make, and they just haven't warmed up to this personality, and that was way before `The Scream.' "

Glen Johnson can be reached at johnson@globe.com. Sarah Schweitzer can be reached at schweitzer@globe.com. Johnson reported from Racine, Wis., and Burlington, Vt. Schweitzer reported from Boston.