For all his scripted dumbness, George Bush is the voice of America. He manages to be loud and anxious at the same time. When he speaks his own words they often sound evasive and uncomprehending. But his is the only voice there seems to be. He is, after all, the president. Through him and the handful of his ministers regularly heard from - which means, in effect, the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and almost no one else - we get a monochrome picture of the US: an America defiant, haughty and contemptuous towards both dissenters at home and, mitigated by the softenings of the secretary of state, Colin Powell, other governments that do not agree with the Bush line abroad. The dominance of this tone is surprising. Had it not been for the 9/11 crime against America last year, Bush would surely not get away with it. That remembered horror shelters him from the truth that an election he did not win fair and square should have induced a subtler humility. What is even more striking than the president's strident emptiness, however, is the absence of competing voices with a different philosophy.  The American system does not provide for a leader of the opposition. But it is still eerie to watch most aspirant leaders of the Democrats, preparing for an election contest with Bush in 2004, taking their tone from him rather than posing a frontal challenge to it. They gripe about the huge Republican tax cut for the rich and middle rich, and rail against corporate corruption. But they throttle back. They have to be careful. Many Democrats as well as Republicans took poisoned money from Enron and WorldCom.  Al Gore jockeys for position. Amazingly, he is the frontrunner, despite the fiasco of a campaign he ran in 2000 that let Bush in. He is hardly ever heard from, sidling away from confrontation and weighing up whether the polls will let him run. A handful of senatorial possibles - John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, John Edwards - circle around, daring to say almost nothing, propelled, it seems, by terror of the Bush hard right more than the fury these incumbents deserve from any Democrat.  To find a fiercer rigour, one needs to travel north. Vermont is a small state, and its governor, Howard Dean, not yet a national figure. But he is the one declared candidate for the presidency, and is now embarked on the long haul to 2004, with a package of positions that define him as a realist but, more important, a style with the declaratory conviction that separates him from all those guarded poll-watchers. He sounds like a Clinton third wayer without the torment. Could this be the voice that, if heard often enough, will at least remind Americans that Bush's incoherent nationalism and vested interest economics are not the only message they need put up with?  "I'm much more conservative than President Bush on money," Mr Dean told me. Bush's failure to balance the budget, "with $200bn deficits as far as the eye can see", was the mistake of a profligate Reaganite believer in "voodoo supply-side economics". No Republican had balanced the budget since Richard Nixon. Dean, governor for 11 years, has balanced the Vermont budget with the messianic rigour of a Gordon Brown. Bush's failure to do the same puts America, he says, in the same category as an IMF defaulter. "This federal government is no more responsible than Argentina," he declared.  Vermont is the most liberal state in the union, but this does not sound like a knee-jerk Vermonter. There was more in conservative vein. Dean gets an A rating from the National Rifle Association because he says gun law is a local not a federal matter, and naturally does not oppose hunting in his rural state. A liberal would also find him unsound on the death penalty, which he once opposed but now favours for child murderers and killers of on-duty policemen. Nobody, I guess, can win the presidency as an open opponent of capital punishment. Dean's shift, he says, was a tough call, "but I've made my call and that's what I'm going to stick with". It was the one moment in our conversation when I sensed an uneasy political calculator at work.  But now comes the liberal realism. Against the evidence of polls, Dean signed the first American state law allowing gay civil unions. At the crest of his record is health insurance, the domestic issue that worries Americans more than any other. More than 90% of Vermonters, including virtually all children, are covered, something the governor, who happens to be a qualified doctor, believes he knows how to bring to the country as a whole. He is convinced that health insurance with a balanced budget could be a winning ticket among middle Americans, who "want to hear from someone who's not timid about the direction the country should take, and is not about nuances and shades of difference".  His fiercest dissent from Bush is on foreign affairs. Where Bush had famously seldom been abroad before entering the White House, Dean has visited 60 countries. He has an entirely different vision of America's role in the world. "Bush has said we shouldn't be engaged in nation building," he said. "I think we must." America had the duty to be a good world citizen, which it was not being. Here I heard a defence of cultural imperialism that would make this governor a more natural soulmate of our interventionist Mr Blair than Bush could ever be. He sees America's role as being a long-haul presence in Middle East societies, which need to become "middle-class democracies". He thinks Bush should invade Iraq only if he can show, as Kennedy did in Cuba, irrefutable evidence of the enemy's nuclear and/or biological weaponry, and if he explains to America that this will be a 10-year, nation-building commitment.  As for the allies, he seems to regard the EU as a wonder of the modern world, to be cherished not abused. "In a short period of time, the most dangerous continent on earth has been made into the most stable," he said.  "This president has the capacity to do more harm to America than any other individual," Dean said. "For the first time we have a man in the White House who can neither manage economic affairs prudently nor foreign affairs wisely." The governor will struggle to make himself heard.  He does not yet have big money. He comes from the wrong kind of state - though both Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter made it from small constituencies, and four of the past five presidents have been governors not senators. Possibly Howard Dean's greatest virtue is that he can speak. He has a voice. It is orderly, clear and unagonised. It says if you want an alternative that is truer than Bush to the great American dream of standing for a better world, here he is. There are worse beginnings for a candidacy.