Damn the polls, and damn conventional wisdom.

Here's a guy waging a straight-talkin' populist campaign when the theme of "the People vs. the Powerful" has supposedly gone the way of parachute pants. He promises balanced budgets at the same time he opposed war in Iraq. He cites a record that protects gun rights and gay rights.

So far, this unlikely mix has made Dean the buzz-worthy candidate among the nine Democratic hopefuls looking to dethrone George Bush.

Dean rode opposition to the president's war to the top of New Hampshire primary polls where he remains tied with front-running Massachusetts U.S. Sen. John Kerry. Kerry, like the rest of the top-tier candidates, finds himself in the awkward position of having given Bush a blank check for action against Saddam Hussein last fall when about half his party's faithful opposed the war.

But Dean's ascendancy means more than just Iraq. He has tapped into a vein of frustration many Democrats feel toward a party seemingly scared of the president's popularity, preoccupied with middle-class tax cuts and terminally afraid of being cast as liberals or class warriors -- call it Lieberman Syndrome.

Ask a Georgia Dem about this approach and he might say, "Damn right, we're scared." After all, they watched their triple-amputee Vietnam veteran U.S. senator do everything but claim he was the Lewis to George Bush's Martin last November, and he still got clobbered. And yet Dean thinks he's going to take Southern states talking about universal health care, the environment and why America was wrong to pre-emptively invade Iraq?

Such is the confidence -- bordering on hubris -- of a candidate who has never lost an election. In Max Cleland's failure, Dean sees the way to success: Be aggressive, offer a plainspoken vision and the public will come with you. That's one of the reasons this little-known governor from a state of only 600,000 or so people has turned a series of typically uneventful Democratic cattle calls into Church of Dean revivals and why he's the most intriguing candidate Democrats have fielded in two decades.

But with his platform, it will take more than shooting from the hip in the South. Dean must find new voters and non-voters, groups heavy with the young and minorities while holding some piece of the largely white center. And he'll have to do it on a scale that Bill Clinton never did.

Of course, one might think the American people are ready to listen to Dean's pitch. Since Bush came to power, more than 2 million Americans have lost their jobs. The government faces the largest budget deficit in its history, and real wages are down for average workers, according to a study recently published by the Economic Policy Institute. Meanwhile, more than 40 million Americans lack health insurance.

The problem for Dean is that the very stand that brought him to prominence nationally may torpedo him in the South, where you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a military base. Ultimately, it may be a question of whether his hard-nosed style can overcome a dove-ish turn of substance on Iraq. Party pragmatists already suspect Dean's outspokenness on the war will make any Southern primary a referendum on national security instead of his domestic strengths.

Dean, a doctor by trade, insists that he wants to compete below the Mason-Dixon line. And, so far, he's putting his money where his mouth is. Dean injected more than $32,000 into his campaign in the crucial primary state of South Carolina -- more than he spent in any other state, according to his most recent campaign finance report.

"There are a lot of people in Georgia who will tend to be conservative on social issues but whose kids don't have health insurance," Dean says. "I can do something about that." The key is constructing a white-black coalition that votes on its economic self-interest, he says.

To make that appeal, Dean, who notes he served as Vermont's top politician long enough to govern through two Bush recessions -- 12 years -- relies on tough-guy rhetoric, a style one probably associates more with Republicans than Democrats.

"It was always talk to you straight," says Peter Freyne, a journalist with Burlington, Vt., alternative weekly newspaper Seven Days, who covered Dean for more than 20 years. "He's not going to be a wimp. He's not going to coddle you. He's not afraid to offend you because he wants you to like him."

The question is whether a campaign that emphasizes the necessity of affirmative action and the right to bear arms can capture both whites and blacks in the Bible belt. Southern political scientists familiar say fat chance.

First, notes Georgia College and State University political scientist Chris Grant, there's Dean's decision to approve Vermont's civil unions law. That legislation gave the same legal benefits to Vermont's gay couples that married couples enjoy, and the issue figures to be exploited (probably subtly). Two of Dean's primary opponents, Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, both voted for the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act.

Then, there is the bigger problem of forging a new-fangled populist coalition of middle- and under-class voters. Emory University political scientist Merle Black ain't buying it. "Usually in the South, less than half of the citizens vote, and that non-voting is concentrated among lower income and less-educated citizens, so the groups that would be most receptive to a populist appeal are often not voting," Black says. "For a modern populist strategy to work, a really increased turnout among lower-income or lower middle-class voters who might benefit from [federal entitlement] programs, you first have to mobilize individuals who don't take part in politics. Then you have to make your appeal. [Populist campaigns] can't win with the given political universe."

Dean's appeal must cross racial lines -- to low-income whites as well as to blacks. There's a "huge potential for racial cleavage," Black says. "It's just very hard to put together that racial coalition today."

Frances Fox Piven, a political science professor at the City University of New York and author of Why Americans Still Don't Vote, says Black is right to suggest it will be difficult for Dean to motivate non-voters.

"We have a lot of data showing increased skepticism, cynicism about the political system, especially among poor people," Piven says.

Some of that skepticism, she says, stems from both parties' failure to address the issues faced by people who aren't in the boarding school set. The parties seem to primarily concern themselves with the question of who should get the lion's share of tax cuts. When Democrats play that game, they distance themselves from the very values that separate them from Republicans, values that stress the connectedness of the classes -- for example, the effect a cancer-suffering waitress without health insurance has on the HMO rates that a teacher pays, or how the demise of a jobs program increases the likelihood that Banker Bob gets mugged on his way home from work.

Combine that failure to communicate with the campaign tactics debacles Florida 2000 exposed, meaning that "political parties really campaign as much by preventing people from voting as by ... drawing them to the polls," Piven says, and it's no real surprise that many lower-income people don't get involved.

Still, she cautions, that doesn't mean the voting base can't be expanded if campaigns concentrate on grassroots organizing.

"If we had some insurgent candidates who were willing to buck the tide," it could succeed, Piven says, citing the success of the late Minnesota U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone. "Hard to say whether that could be replicated, but it certainly would be worth trying."

Dean seems game. For starters, 23,000 of his supporters -- up from 13,000 just one month ago -- independently organize gatherings through Internet matchmaker Meetup.com.

Two weeks ago at Manuel's Tavern in Atlanta, 75 people showed up for a Dean Meetup confab, and many gave testimonials about how they "came" to Dean. (It wasn't quite Billy Graham, but it wasn't Amway either.) The crowd was peppered with self-described independents and young people like Clay Johnson. Johnson is why Dean could prove formidable at enlarging the electorate.

At 26 years old, the Atlanta born-and-bred software engineer has never voted. But his mother, who had paid about $200 per month in health insurance throughout her life, recently discovered she has breast cancer. Her insurance spiked to $3,000 per month, and Johnson's dad, who was 70 at the time, had to return to work to cover the insurance costs.

"To me ... that's not health insurance," Johnson says. "That's a joke."

So he started looking for a candidate, and liked what Dean had to say about health care.

"[My dad is] still working to this day -- even though all he wants to do is retire -- just so he can have health insurance for my mom," Johnson says. "That's why I'm supporting Howard Dean, because I hope to God my dad can retire. It's personal."

And that's why Johnson, a non-voter, came to help build Dean's Georgia website.

In addition to the Meetup phenomenon, the former governor raised more than $750,000 in Internet contributions during the first quarter. And the campaign is also encouraging supporters to sign up for a cell-phone program that sends text messages and voicemail about news or time-sensitive events.

"Thus far, he has picked up more support, I believe, on the ground, than the polls will ever indicate, meaning that I think he is picking up activists," said Donna Brazile in a mid-March interview. Brazile was Al Gore's campaign manager in 2000. "He's picking up a lot of young people. He's attracting a lot of new supporters."

Brazile, who hasn't yet signed on with a 2004 candidate, first met Dean during Gephardt's 1988 presidential campaign.

"At the [February Democratic National Committee] meeting, again, Dean connected with several activists, including me, because he said essentially, 'This campaign was not about just winning an election. It was about changing America,'" Brazile recalled. "He spoke as an organizer and as a revolutionary, someone who understood that the party had lost control in 2002, and therefore had to develop a new strategy to win elections, as well as recapture the American people.

"Democrats are hungry now for a leader who will stand up for what he or she believes, and Dean fits that equation. Secondly, because of his experience as a governor and also the fact that he is not a congressperson or a senator, he doesn't speak in Washington tongue, meaning he doesn't speak out of both sides of his mouth."

Clearly, this style explains the "shiny new toy" phenomenon responsible for much of the glowingly positive press coverage Dean has received thus far, press coverage that belies his sometimes contentious relationship with the media. At one point during the governor's reign, Freyne's paper joined a number of other Vermont publications in suing an imperious Dean to get him to release the details of his primary state-hopping schedule.

Nonetheless, Dean counts on his personal style to meld his coalition. Maybe more than any other issue, civil unions show his ability to go on the offensive with an apparent weakness.

In 1997, Vermont's courts took up the issue of whether gay couples should enjoy the same legal rights as straights. Freyne, the Seven Days reporter, says Dean ducked the issue as it wound through the courts.

The day the Vermont Supreme Court handed down the decision in December 1999, he looked shaken, Freyne recalls. "My feeling was that he just saw his dreams of the White House break like a pane of glass." Dean wasn't sure how to respond, but reporters put it to him: How did Howard Dean feel? "He swallowed. He took a breath and said, 'I feel uncomfortable about it just like anybody else.'"

But Dean wound up signing civil-union legislation into law when that position was at 35 percent in the polls. And he was just six months away from an election that would see him don a bulletproof vest at campaign stops because of threats from conservatives. Meanwhile, some gay activists were convinced he didn't go far enough.

Unlike his initial unsteadiness with the idea, when the 54-year-old describes his decision today, it can be a showstopper. In an interview with Creative Loafing editors and writers, Dean halted conversation in the room when he explained how he came to his decision.

He made similar remarks in a March address to California Democrats: "I knew if I was willing to sell out the hopes and dreams of a significant portion of our people, then I had wasted my life in public service.

"Vermont is truly a place where every American is equal in the eyes of the law," he continued. "I want the president to explain why he believes every American should not be equal in the eyes of the law!"

Dean takes a similar tack on foreign policy and makes a common sense appeal that asks if America is truly a safer place if it uses its power for unending belligerence around the world.

The mere fact that he possesses a vision at all is completely out of step with his party, as George Packer notes in January's Mother Jones magazine: "The Democratic Party has no foreign policy. It hasn't since Vietnam." Instead, it's largely been reduced to maintaining a status quo or criticizing whatever Republican is in office.

The doctor's prescription is what he calls a Marshall Plan for the Third World. It would, he says, mean ramping up our foreign aid -- and not just for blowing up the capitals of other countries or catching terrorists. Instead, the money would be used to promote stability and democratic institutions in the developing world.

"There are two components of defense: One is to have a strong military, which I support," Dean says. "The other is to develop countries into middle-class democracies where women fully participate in the economic and social and political decision-making of that country. Those countries do not harbor groups like al-Qaeda and they don't go to war with each other."

It's time to have a foreign policy, Dean says, so that "when we walk down the streets of the capitals of our friends, we don't have to worry about watching our backs."

But it is with health care, the issue that the former governor says will define his campaign, that the most curious element of Dean's candidacy comes to the fore. For all his anti-war rhetoric and the newspaper stories that have labeled him a New England leftist, on issue after issue, Dean doesn't make a particularly good liberal.

And Dean's health care package is a piecemeal system rather than the Canadian-style single-payer approach favored by the left. He'd extend Medicaid coverage for people under 25 and families who earn up to 185 percent of the poverty level -- similar to what he did as governor in Vermont. The rest of the folks between 25 and 65, as well as small businesses, could buy into a plan like the one available to government employees and would receive tax credits to help them afford it.

"Now, that health insurance is not going to be as good as what you'd get if you worked for IBM, but it'll be good enough so that nobody will ever go broke if they get a serious illness," Dean says of his $88.3 billion plan.

The final piece of his proposal would punish large companies that do not offer health insurance by limiting tax deductions and government contracts available to them.

The plan, much like Dean's fixation on balanced budgets, would get the doctor tossed out of your average People for the American Way meeting. It just isn't liberal enough. And Seven Days' Freyne notes that as governor, all of Dean's "political battles were with the liberal Democrats in the legislature."

And yet the supporters, who came to Dean because of his opposition to the Iraq war, seem to be sticking around instead of deserting for more reliable leftist candidates, such as U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio. If Meetup attendee Nancy Curran is a barometer, the glue is Dean's blunt and sometimes combative style, a trait that sets him apart from a party filled with candidates seemingly unable to answer a question without first finding out how its polling.

Curran, 57, says she began looking around for a candidate willing to oppose Bush's pre-emptive military policy.

"We've got to come up with a Democrat, who is willing to speak up against Bush," says Curran, who has never before worked in a political campaign but helps organize the Meetup events. "Then I heard [Dean], and I found him to be dynamic. I don't agree with everything he says, but ... he seems forthright and willing to say the things he believes whether it'll do him good in the polls or not."

Somehow, it's not surprising that Dean cites Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion as his favorite novel.

For anyone who has ever read the book, four words probably come to mind: "Never give an inch." The patriarch in Kesey's 1964 epic scrawls this admonishment on a painting and hangs it near his newborn son's bed. It's a commandment of intransigence, a screw you, to nature, convention and history.

Dean runs on this sort of gumption.

It also accounts for statements like this one explaining his desire to roll back the budget-busting Bush tax cuts: "Look, we can't afford tax cuts right now," he says. "You can't balance the budget by continuing to reduce your revenues. Now, look, I'm not going to be elected president by saying we ought to get rid of the tax cut. What I think I can do is get elected president by telling the people the truth, which is: 'You have a choice. You can have the tax cut or you can have the prescription benefit for Medicare. You can have the tax cut or you can fully fund special education so your local school board can reduce your property taxes. You can have the tax cut or you can have your road budget restored.'

"I think most Americans are going to pick roads, health care and education before they pick the tax cut, because they didn't get much of the tax cut."

Recent history says the people who have been doing the voting in America wouldn't agree. But the people who haven't been voting might be attracted to Dean's message, which is what makes his candidacy promising.

"The rugged individuals might have been great 50 years ago," Dean says. "But even then it didn't exist, because when something terrible happened in your community, everybody pulled together, and I think that under this president, we have all forgotten that we are all pulling together."

For a Yankee from a tiny, conspicuously vanilla state, Dean's done a decent job of lining up crucial black support in the South. Dean has courted Mayor Shirley Franklin and Atlanta's political kingmaker and former Mayor Maynard Jackson. DeKalb County CEO Vernon Jones already is on board. In South Carolina, David Mack III, the head of the state's Legislative Black Caucus, chairs Dean's campaign, though, it should be noted that support from actual black voters may be slower in coming if the recent, overwhelmingly white Atlanta Meetup was any indication.

Surprisingly, downstate Georgia Rep. DuBose Porter says Dean might do better than conventional wisdom suggests with rural whites, because he's from a rural state and is talking about the issues -- access to health care, for example -- about which folks outside the urban centers care.

Still, the conventional wisdom says Dean's opposition to the war in Iraq will make his candidacy a difficult one for the average pickup truck driver to buy. The giant question for the Dean campaign is whether its candidate's unpolished, blunt-as-Bronson rhetoric will convince Southern Democrats he can be tough in a dangerous world, whether his style will connect in a personal way that overcomes reservations about his reluctance to back Bush's war. So far, it's worked with liberals, who could find another candidate closer to the textbook model. Moderate whites may prove a tougher sell. u

kevin.griffis@creativeloafing.com