The Doctor is Out (Dowd criticizes Howard Dean's "unadorned, unstyled and unconcerned" wife

The first hard evidence most people had that Howard Dean was actually married came with a startling picture of his wife on the front page of Tuesday's Times, accompanying a Jodi Wilgoren profile.

In worn jeans and old sneakers, the shy and retiring Dr. Judith Steinberg Dean looked like a crunchy Vermont hippie, blithely uncoiffed, unadorned, unstyled and unconcerned about not being at her husband's side -- the anti-Laura. You could easily imagine the din of Rush Limbaugh and Co. demonizing her as a counterculture fem-lib role model for the blue states.

Physician, heal thy spouse.

Most of the time, wearing sensible slipper-flats and no makeup or earrings, Dr. Steinberg can be found in an unadorned medical office she shares with two colleagues in the suburb of Shelburne, where the snapshots under the desk's glass top have not been changed since it belonged to her husband, before he became governor in 1991.

Or she might be puttering around their five-bedroom ranch-style house near Lake Champlain, writing a list of chores — fix the toilet, change the light over the stoop — for Dr. Dean to tackle on his rare days home. Or racing through Hannaford's supermarket in sneakers at 10 p.m., her list of bananas, milk, wheat bran, low-fat fudge bars, aluminum foil, tea bags, Gatorade, lemonade and grapefruit ordered according to aisle location.

"I'm very happy doing what I do," she said. "He's happy doing what he does. I think that he's doing a great job, and I think that he thinks what I do is a great job."