In the era of calm, passive, out-of-power Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., one just doesn't hear many Democratic elected officials saying the things Dean does. "This is probably the most dangerous presidency to the country since Herbert Hoover," he says to me. His take on Bush's State of the Union embrace of hydrogen-powered vehicles and an AIDS policy for Africa is even harsher; he attributes the decisions to "cynical politics" and says they "disgusted" him for that reason.

He does credit Bush for being "popular because he knows who he is, and he speaks unambiguously about his message." Dean is clearly trying to do the same. "As governor of Vermont I've stood up for a lot of things I believed in that people didn't think were a good idear," he tells the Manchester throng, wielding a Vermont twang that the Easthampton/Park Avenue-bred transplant has picked up since moving to Burlington in 1978. "We did 'em anyway and I always got reelected." Voters, he says, respect someone who has fought for what he believes in "even if it didn't have support in the polls."

Such positioning may allow Dean to point to the numerous enemies he made in his 12 years in the Statehouse -- mostly on the left, despite the "ultraliberal" tag some in the national media have slapped on him. His primary opponents' staffers are ramping up a nice "Dean is an arrogant jerk" narrative for reporters, which has made every one of his impolitic comments subject to particular scrutiny.

Hence, today's phone calls. It's Thursday, Feb. 6, the day after Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations of evidence of Iraq's noncompliance with Resolution 1441. Edwards calls it "a powerful case." Kerry says it's "compelling." Lieberman, of course, is already in his fatigues.

Dean isn't sold. It doesn't indicate that Iraq is an imminent threat, he says.

From Washington come the barbs -- The New Republic calls it proof he's "not serious." ABC News' "The Note" wonders if he's backed himself into a corner. Dean has opposed the pending war because he didn't think President Bush had made his case. If he doesn't support military action now, the thinking goes, then he's just contradicting himself. Or, at the very least, he's been put in an untenable and -- for the moment, at least inside war-ready Washington, unpopular -- position.

He gets a deluge of phone calls from reporters asking him to clarify his position. Which is -- "as I've said about eight times today," he says, annoyed -- that Saddam must be disarmed, but with a multilateral force under the auspices of the United Nations. If the U.N. in the end chooses not to enforce its own resolutions, then the U.S. should give Saddam 30 to 60 days to disarm, and if he doesn't, unilateral action is a regrettable, but unavoidable, choice.

"Dean is stirring up antiwar people," a senior advisor to one of his Democratic opponents says. "They are against all war, not just against war without U.N. support. When we do go to war, and Dean says he's with our troops and president in time of national crisis, the antiwar activists he's cultivated will turn on him quickly."

Dean says that's fine, and denies that there's any inconsistency. "I think people are madly trying to find one," he says. "It's part of the game."

And his opponents have an interest in pointing out where he's vulnerable -- he's a threat. At the first two multi-candidate events of the campaign season, he's received stellar reviews. The Linn County (Iowa) Democratic Party held its Sustaining Club Banquet on Jan. 18, with Gephardt, Kerry and Dean, and Joel Miller, the Linn County party chairman, reports that "if I had to rate them, I think Dean probably came out the best." At the Jan. 21 NARAL Pro-Choice America dinner -- the first event featuring all six of the Democratic candidates, including the Rev. Al Sharpton -- also brought kudos for Dean, pro-choice and, as a doctor, a particularly effective critic of the antiabortion lobby's attempt to make an issue of "partial-birth" abortion. "He impressed a lot of people that night," says a NARAL official.

Many attendees would later say they were moved by his story illustrating why he opposed parental notification laws. A 12-year-old patient became pregnant, Dean said, but didn't want to notify her father since it seemed he had been the one who got her pregnant. "You explain that to the American people who think that parental notification is a good idea," Dean said.

After an advisor to a rival Democrat suggests to me that the story was perhaps apocryphal, I ask Dean for more details. He allows that in the end it turned out that the father hadn't impregnated the girl. But he insists that doesn't negate the point he was trying to make, since the girl's family situation was still a mess. "All I'm going to tell you is that her father was not the father of her child, it was more complicated than that," he says, adding vaguely: "But it was adjudicated and someone was severely punished."

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