Howard Dean - Pincushion Time

The Ex-extemporaneous Howard Dean

Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, laughed off criticism by his competitors for the Democratic presidential nomination this week by saying that he felt like a pincushion. Then he quietly began making tiny alterations to his standard stump speech, measuring facts and assertions twice before speaking.

President Bush's tax cuts, denounced by Dr. Dean for months as "$3 trillion" or, sometimes, "$3 trillion, including interest," became a $2.4 trillion cut, plus $600 billion in interest, during a rally on Friday in Plymouth, N.H. The 91 percent of new mothers in Vermont who used to get home visits within two or three weeks now get visits "mostly in their homes, some in doctors' offices," within three or four. And when Dr. Dean told supporters at the Bektash Temple in Concord, N.H., on Friday that his campaign had 150,000 donors and the next-best number was 20,000, he slipped in a "that I know of," just in case.

The changes, perceptible perhaps only to the aides and reporters who trail him, show a subtle but significant shift for a candidate who sells himself as unscripted. After a week of accusations that he chooses terms carelessly or says different things at different times, Dr. Dean is now balancing his shoot-from-the-hip instinct with his place in a national spotlight where enemies and observers, armed with Internet research tools and digital video recorders, parse every word.

The attacks this week came from his rivals Senator Joseph I. Lieberman (who said Dr. Dean's comments on the Middle East abandoned 50 years of American foreign policy traditions toward Israel); Senator John Edwards of North Carolina (who took issue with his claim to be the only white politician talking to white audiences about race); and the Rev. Al Sharpton (who called on him to oppose Internet voting in Michigan because many African-Americans are on the short end of the digital divide). Even the Republican governor of New Hampshire chimed in, saying a Dean presidency would be bad for the local economy.