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Back in his front-runner days, Howard Dean dropped into Tallahassee and promptly faced a question about one of the most volatile and divisive issues in Florida. What did he think of the governor and legislature stepping into a right-to-die case to order a feeding tube reinserted into Terri Schiavo?
The doctor and former governor didn't hesitate a nanosecond.
"I'd be embarrassed. What business is it of the government to interfere with a private family matter of a right-to-die case? I am tired of people in the Legislature thinking they have an M.D. when what they really have is a B.S.," he declared to the Tallahassee Tiger Bay club, chuckling at his own visceral answer.
Back in his floundering, long-shot candidate days, John Kerry faced the same question while campaigning in Florida.
"I'm not going to trash anybody on it," the Massachusetts senator told the Miami Herald. "These are some very thorny, legitimate issues."
Whatever they think of Dean's views, his stunning demise ought to cause voters some pangs. As much as people say they want straight talk from politicians, Dean's fast fall reminds us how unscripted, blunt styles usually become political liabilities.
John McCain's "Straight Talk Express" ran off the road in 2000. Ross Perot's plainspoken attacks on the Washington establishment quickly turned him into fodder for late-night comedians.
So the Democratic nomination is now down to Kerry, a master of nuance, and North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, a polished speaker who couldn't be knocked off message by a Mack truck.
Both are strong candidates (each beating President Bush last week in a national CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll). Gut-speaking risk takers, they're not.
Still, Kerry and Edwards became sharper campaigners over the past year while trying to keep up with Dean, who disdained "Washington blather" and politicians who "talk in 350-word filibuster sentences."
Watching the former Vermont governor limp through the final day of his campaign in Wisconsin last week, one couldn't help but wonder about the caricature that had been drawn of Dean. Yes, there were legitimate temperament questions and a host of gaffes, but this was not the angry powder keg the media often portrayed.
He was a candidate who lugged campaign supplies out of a plane rather than expect his staff to do it all. Reporters who had traveled with him for months had become accustomed to playing card games with the cheerful candidate. At a Milwaukee health care forum, he waded into the minutiae of Medicare and Medicaid policy, sprinkling in self-effacing anecdotes from his own days as a practicing doctor.
That was the Dean that people knew in Vermont. Instead of fire breather, they mostly saw a pragmatic, nonideological chief executive who butted heads with Vermont liberals much more than with conservatives as he balanced the budget, increased the state's credit rating and dramatically expanded health care coverage to Vermonters.
In St. Petersburg, longtime Deaniac Lisa Fink said Friday she remains idealistic despite the demise of the most exciting political campaign she has ever experienced. She is still organizing neighborhood meetings for grass-roots Democratic causes and thinks of Dean when she walks into St. Petersburg High and sees signs for the recently formed Young Republican and Young Democrat clubs.
"That is a big part of what Dean's message was: Get involved in your country," she said.
Dean sounded upbeat in the final hours of his campaign too. The Washington Post reported his pleasure at receiving an "Establishment Media" T-shirt from the press corps following him. He even made a nod to his infamous "I have a scream" speech in Iowa.
"I'm going to enjoy this," he calmly said of the shirt, "when we go to California, and when we go to New York, and when we go to Rhode Island, and when we go to Massachusetts. Yahoo."
Adam C. Smith can be reached at 727 893-8241 or adam@sptimes.com