Dean on Economy: Wall Street Roots; Main Street Talk (WSJ)

[Merlin]

The Journal's front page take on Howard. Seems to be a plus. (This link is supposed to be active for non-subcribers for 7 days).

...

For now, it suits Mr. Dean to be the outsider in the race, challenging "the Republican wing of the Democratic Party" -- the centrists who provided much of the intellectual capital in the Clinton years. He celebrates New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer's Wall Street-bashing crusade. He energizes Democrats who find the party's leadership too docile to grapple with Mr. Bush and his congressional allies.

...

Through early November, the most recent data publicly available, people in the securities industries have contributed just $317,000 to the Dean campaign, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts has raised more than three times that sum, and Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut twice as much. Even trial lawyer Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina has raised more on Wall Street.

Mr. Dean has turned to some of Mr. Clinton's economic advisers, including Princeton economist Alan Blinder and former Bankers Trust Chief Executive Frank Newman, to help him formulate policies on issues such as mutual-fund regulation. (Mr. Newman is a director of Dow Jones & Co., publisher of this newspaper.) Mr. Dean recently called for making clear that mutual-fund directors have a fiduciary duty to act in the interest of mutual-fund shareholders, which his advisers say isn't clear in current law, and for the fund boards to have a majority of independent directors.

http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107325869993064500-email,00.html

[priller]

1. Tells me it's only for subscribers

Can you give more of summary what they said? I can't imagine it would be a positive profile, coming from the WSJ.

[Merlin]

2. Sorry about the link. Here's some additional info

I was emailed the link and it worked for me. If you pm me with your email address, I'll send it to you also.

Meantime, here's more:

Mr. Dean's roots on Wall Street stretch back four generations to Issac Dean, a Manhattan sugar broker in the 1870s. As a child, Howard Brush Dean III took the bus from his family's Park Avenue apartment to the private Browning School, where one of his classmates was Winthrop Rockefeller, grandson of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller Jr. and now Arkansas's Republican lieutenant governor.

His childhood was dominated by his father, the back-slapping, gravel-voiced and elegantly dressed Howard Brush Dean II, widely known as "Big Howard" despite standing only 5 feet 8 inches. The elder Dean thrived on a Wall Street that valued bonhomie and connections. At age 31, he was made a partner in the brokerage firm Harris, Upham & Co. Mr. Dean followed his father's path, first to Yale, then to a summer job that his dad helped him get at DeCoppet & Doremus, a brokerage firm that specialized in trades of fewer than 100 shares. Mr. Dean says he agonized over whether to make investing a career. Says Peter Brooks, a Yale student adviser at the time, Mr. Dean headed for Wall Street "because it was the family thing to do."

In 1972, Mr. Dean started work as a "customers man" -- 1970s lingo for a broker -- at Clark, Dodge & Co.'s Park Avenue office, its most prestigious branch. Family connections helped again, says Mary Wong, who worked alongside him there. Dudley Roberts, the second husband of Mr. Dean's grandmother, was a Clark, Dodge senior executive and recommended Mr. Dean for a plum assignment working with money manager Robert Hill on two mutual funds Clark, Dodge had purchased. Within a year, it became clear to Mr. Dean that he wouldn't find Wall Street fulfilling, an assessment his boss shared. Energized by after-hours volunteer work at St. Vincent's hospital, he wanted to go back to school to take biology and chemistry courses he had skipped at Yale so he could apply to medical school.