While Dean was a leftist, antiwar presidential candidate, he was also, as he never tired of reminding people, a defiantly centrist governor of Vermont.

For Vermonters, the portrayal of their centrist former governor as the left-winger in the Democratic presidential race was the second biggest surprise of Howard Dean's brief span of political glory.

Vice President Al Gore surrounded himself with centrist Democratic governors from Southern states today and delivered a stem-winding populist speech in an effort to demonstrate that the South was still in play in this year's election.

In his book Independent Nation (2004), political analyst John Avlon describes Weicker as a radical centrist governor and thinker.

"The moderates are the new game in town," said Sarah Chamberlain Resnick, executive director of the Republican Main Street Partnership, an organization of about 65 centrist governors and members of Congress.

All four are centrist northern governors.

Mr. Davis's proposals are bolder than many political experts had anticipated from a centrist governor who critics say did not move quickly or decisively enough even when California's energy problems first surfaced last summer.

They were both smiling, centrist Democratic governors who appeared suddenly out of the South, smart as whips, playing the outsider card.

They portrayed the Christian Coalition as conservatism's standard-bearer, declared the coalition's candidates losers, and contrasted this with the success of "the centrist, pragmatic Republican governors."

Again and again, one reads that it's about the left wing of the Democratic Party versus the centrists; but Mr. Dean was a very centrist governor, and his policy proposals are not obviously more liberal than those of his rivals.