SEABROOK, N.H. — The woman waiting to talk to Howard Dean had a story to share.
"I'm one of those unemployed, uninsured people you're talking about," Bridget Brown, 40, told the former Vermont governor as he met supporters at a local car plastics factory in this coastal New Hampshire town.
"Yup," Dean responded impassively, shaking her hand.
"I actually have a medical condition now, and I can't afford to see a doctor," Brown continued. "So please do what you can to get in office, because we really need your help."
"We will," he said simply. "That's going to be priority No. 1. Thank you."
The Democratic presidential front-runner is no Bill Clinton, who was "the definition of charisma," Brown noted as Dean walked on. "But that's OK. You can't ask somebody to be something other than who they are."
Who Dean is may come as a surprise to those who've only seen televised images of him red-faced, excoriating the Bush administration as his arms chop at the air.
He's the son of a wealthy New York family who balks at spending more than $100 for a hotel room, often has holes in his socks and wears the same gray suit on the campaign trail every day; an unassuming 5-foot-8-inch man with closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair who insists on carrying his own luggage and often gets lost in the crowds that throng around him.
Up close, Dean's persona belies the passionate, full-throated nature of his grass-roots campaign. He speaks in functional rhetoric, glad-hands efficiently and maintains a detachment that keeps some of his most fervent fans at arm's length.
"I tend to know that I can be most useful for somebody when I'm trying to sort through their problems, and that empathizing is really important, but that solving their problem is more important," he said in a recent interview between campaign stops in Iowa, his shoeless feet propped up against the door of his minivan. "So I tend to do less 'I feel your pain' than 'What can I do about your pain?' "
In many ways, Dean is the anti-Clinton on the campaign trail -- the antithesis of a politician who uses charm and a powerful personality to woo voters.
During a tour of the factory in Seabrook shortly before Christmas, a union leader escorting Dean around the floor of the nearly deserted plant desperately searched for some workers the candidate could talk to.
"There may be some more people in the back," he said, hurrying along Dean and the dozen reporters tagging after him through the cavernous factory.
