QUESTION: More broadly, in terms of leadership style and capability, would he make a good president. Can you envisage him in the Oval Office?
POLLINA: I could envisage him there, I want to say because, I say this slightly tongue in cheek--he has an imperial attitude. I mean he has not always been the easiest person for regular folks to work with. I think that he is a good manager in the sense that he's willing to make tough decisions and stand by them. I think unfortunately is he's not always open, or he's often not open to input from the public and other ways of looking at problems.
So I think that he has some strengths that would suit the Oval Office, but I think he has sometimes an unwillingness or unability to listen to people, which I find to be a negative. I think that citizens should have a strong voice in policy making. I'm not so sure that he's the best example of that kind of leader...
http://www.gwu.edu/~action/2004/dean/dean0702/pollinaint.html
Dean did find some coalitions more natural than others:
(When Dean became governor) they (liberal Democrats) were all thinking, oh we got a Democrat back in the governor's office. And all of the sudden they find Howard Dean's worse on spending (than Snelling). The state was headed into a recession at the time. And Snelling before he died, he and Ralph Wright cut a deal on raising the income taxes and (inaud.) the deficit--a few years of austerity. Howard stuck with the plan. And as Dick McCormack (Democratic Senator from Windsor) will tell you of the meeting where he (Dean) met with the Democratic Caucus and told them then, and this might have been before, when he was still lieutenant governor, and told the Democratic Senators, you're never going to win because people don't trust you with their money. None of your great and lofty goals and plans and aspirations will ever be achieved because people don't trust Democrats with their money. We got to prove it to 'em. And that was key. I mean his political enemies for the first three terms were Democrats at the State House, not Republicans. Republicans loved his budgets.
--Peter Freyne http://www.gwu.edu/~action/2004/dean/dean0702/freyneint.html
"He's an adulation junkie who has always wanted to be famous, the most self-consumed man I've ever met," said Garrison Nelson, a local academic who met Dean more than 20 years ago, when the doctor was new in town, a brash native New Yorker with lots of chutzpah and lots of family money that he never talked about.
...
he would often rant at his detractors, calling them "lunatics," or confronting them with "the finger in the face," as Nelson calls it. At times he would get so mad that the skin on his thick wrestler's neck would redden to the color of raw meat. No wonder some folks used to call him "Little Napoleon."
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1109-08.htm