Nothing like good newspaper coverage just before the election. Yes, the story has the obligatory one critical line, but on the whole it is positive.
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Judy Dean arrives, not a moment too soon
He says she's no prop; pundits say she's great
By LISA WANGSNESS
Monitor staff
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Manchester
MANCHESTER - Dr. Judith Steinberg Dean gave an awkward from-the-shoulder wave to a packed ballroom at Southern New Hampshire University. Beaming, she sipped water from a bottle and splashed some on her pants. For a second she looked alarmed, there in the harsh television lights, but then she was clapping and smiling and waving again.
Judy Dean, as she prefers to be called outside her medical practice, is unschooled in the art of mass media image-making. A busy doctor and mother of two teenagers, she shunned the spotlight when her husband governed Vermont for 11 years - and for most of the two years her husband has been campaigning for president.
But as Howard Dean tried to resurrect his campaign here two days before the primary election, it was Judy Dean - not Al Gore, not Bill Bradley - he called upon to be hisstar character witness. Though the candidate insists he is not using his wife as a "prop," she materialized in New Hampshire after a week where the media has dined richly upon Dean's rowdy post-caucus speech in Iowa. Her long absence from her husband's side made her late arrival newsworthy - a welcome change of subject for the campaign.
"Whether it is our careers, raising our children or being there for the ones we love, we all struggle and juggle to do it all," she told an adoring audience, reading her brief remarks from a podium. "And I'm here to tell you that Howard gets it."
She gave her husband a kiss on the cheek and received a standing ovation.
Among those in the crowd was David Krempels, an undecided independent voter who is in his early 50s and manages a small nonprofit. "I loved seeing his wife," he said. "Not because she was doing the routine supporting-her-husband thing - I just felt such genuineness between her and him, a respectful relationship. He seems honest and sincere, but when I see him interact with his wife, I feel that even more."
Judy Dean was also warmly received at a forum at Plymouth State University last night that attracted about 1,200 people. But not everybody in the audience was impressed by her decision to show up. "It annoys me that she has to go out and do that," said Jackie Wilson, an undecided voter who said she was leaning toward Dean. "I don't see why she has to go out there."
Judy Dean has done a smattering of interviews from home, and she flew out to Iowa last Sunday for two rallies. But her real coming-out party was last Thursday, when she and her husband sat holding hands on a couch in a Vermont inn, and answered questions from ABC's Diane Sawyer. She shylyinsisted that, contrary to the media's portrayal of Dean as an angry candidate, she couldn't remember the last time he got mad.
Howard Dean declined invitations to appear on the Sunday morning political television shows. He spent most of yesterday speaking about women's issues; after his events, his aides handed out free videotapes of the Sawyer interview. The couple also gave a short-stack of interviews to several news organizations, including the Monitor.
On his campaign bus, Howard and Judy Dean sat close together at a table and spoke about their lives together - and apart. She seemed far more relaxed than she had on television the other night. She laughed easily and spoke quickly, in paragraphs rather than short sentences.
She said she hadn't been absent from the campaign trail because she disliked politics or campaigning. "It's just that I have another life that I really love and that's important," she said. "It's not so much that I don't want to be here, it's that I want to be there, you know?"
Dean said he'd always promised himself that he'd never use his wife or his children as political props and insisted he was not doing so now. (Anne is a sophomore at Yale, and Paul is a senior in high school; both have opted not to campaign with their father.) He said he'd long thought he could get through the whole campaign without his wife by his side, but just before the Iowa caucuses, Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin told Dean he thought it was important for voters to "get to know Judy more as a person because that was kind of telling people something about me." Dean said he thought hard before he asked her to fly to Iowa because he respects her commitment to her job as doctor and mother.
"I thought, 'Do I really want to do this?' " he said. "Is this something that fits into our marriage?"
The Deans don't have cable TV. While the other candidates' wives can surely recite their husbands' stump speeches by heart, some of what Dean said yesterday was new to his wife. She has never even seen the campaign's blog. ("I know how to use e-mail, but I'm not a Web person," she said.)
They talk every night, but Judy Dean said she has realized that she has missed some momentous moments in his life.
"He's had amazing ups and downs, and when I talk to him on the phone, you do want to be there for some of that," she said. "For the big highs and the big lows, absolutely you want to be there. So some of that was hard, and that's part of the reason why I'm out here, why I was more amenable to coming out here."
"The other thing is, she's pretty good at it," her husband said with a grin. "That was the big surprise for me, was how much she actually liked Iowa. I couldn't believe it. I saw that little smile, that little glow."
She laughed. "I mean, people think I haven't gone out because I didn't want to go out, and I really didn't even get that far," she said. "I love my practice, I'm very good at it. I feel an obligation to my patients, and I want to be with my son, certainly. So you've got to balance it."
How has their marriage changed over the past two years? "I think it's actually gotten stronger," Judy Dean said. "I've been really impressed with Howard. I've been really impressed with, you know, what he's been saying, and what he's been doing. He's even better than I thought."
She added: "I just think that he's really stuck to what he wants to say, and I think what he's saying is really important," she said. "I think he connects well with people. . . . and I guess he's a better speaker than I thought."
One thing her husband is not good at, she noted, is plumbing. She told of how he once tried to fix the kitchen sink and wound up flooding the place.
"He fixes most things, too, because he's very frugal and so he tries to fix it first," she said. "And most often, it stays fixed for a while. Sometimes there's a lot of duct tape involved."
Judy Dean said she hadn't given a great deal of thought to what kind of life she would have as a first lady. "I think right now if Howard were to be president, I'd move to Washington," she said. "I'd try to do medicine in some way. Whether it would be in a more broad sense, in terms of health care policy, I don't know. That's not where I am right now."
Howard Dean said he would not ask his wife to accompany him to the seven states that vote on Feb. 3. Her life in politics after that is as uncertain as his is.
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(Monitor staff reporter Ed Pilolla contributed to this report.)
Monday, January 26, 2004