TIME -- Are Voters in the Mood for an Angry Democrat?

There are other candidates and other states. Congressman Dick Gephardt has support in Iowa and could easily win the nomination, especially if Kerry and Dean murder each other over the same subset of white, well-educated voters. And so Kerry vs. Dean has become the preliminary bout before the Democrats' main event. It is a struggle that revolves around a single issue that mixes style and substance. The issue is Iraq. The style question is, How angry should Democrats be about what George W. Bush has done there?

Dean is winning on both counts. His opposition to the war is looking less radical every day. His style—his imprudence, his plain talk—just doesn't sound like the other guys. At the Dems' winter meeting in Washington, he arrived at the podium and, instead of lapsing into the usual thank-you blather, blasted off like a rocket-propelled grenade: "What I want to know is why so many Democrats in Washington aren't standing up against Bush's unilateral war in Iraq." This was followed by several more withering "What I want to knows" and then the introduction: "My name is Howard Dean, and I represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." The crowd went nuts.

There is a misapprehension that the Dean phenomenon was created by the Internet. It was created by Dean's mouth—and by the fury of many Democrats at what they perceive to be a radical Republican Administration. Several weeks ago, at a Dean speech in San Francisco, a woman approached me and said, "I've been a moderate, Clinton-Gore Democrat, but no more." I asked her why. She said, "Grover Norquist," referring to the Republican taxophobe lobbyist who helped forge the President's tax cuts. "He said, ‘Bipartisanship is date rape.' Well, I don't like being raped."

Such sentiments have been misinterpreted by assorted Beltway savants as a leftward lurch by Democratic Party activists; it seems more a reaction to the rightward lurch of the Republicans. Dean, who has been mischaracterized as the reincarnation of George McGovern, is certainly no traditional liberal or even a traditional dove. "I told the peace people not to fall in love with me," he told me over breakfast in Manchester, N.H., last week. He said he had opposed Vietnam, but he had supported the first Gulf War, the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the war in Afghanistan. In the 1980s he had "mixed feelings" about Ronald Reagan's support for the contras in Nicaragua and opposed a unilateral nuclear freeze. "I'm not a pacifist. I believe there are times when pre-emptive force is justified, but there has to be an immediate threat, and there just wasn't in this case."