Meet The Dean Team

The Dean campaign's HQ used to be in an office above the Vermont Pub and Brewery in Burlington, Vt. On February 21, 2003, a staff of about a dozen saw their candidate take off and realized they were along for the ride.

Sarah Buxton, 25, is a scheduler with the Dean campaign. She started working for Dean when he was still governor of Vermont. "My family's pretty much Republican," she says. "They've come around quite a bit."

Nicco Melo, 26, a Webmaster for the Dean campaign, joined the team on May 3, 2003 after working for the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative. "There's more people from Washington [now]. That's for sure," he says.

Michael Silberman, Dean's national Meetup director, started with the campaign in February 2003 out of Middlebury College in Vermont. "Physically we're in a place that can hold us," he says. "In our last place, literally we had meetings in the hall."

Deputy national finance director Larry Biddle joined the Dean campaign on February 1, 2003. "My family is based in Delaware," he says. "I will not be able to see them again until after the mud season, as we say up here."

Joe Drymala, 26, is a New York City playwright who joined the Dean cammpaign as a speechwriter on February 1, 2003. "In the beginning there was the sense of nobody notices us," he says. "We had a lot more liberty to try different things. And now we're much more under the microscope."

Courtney O'Donnell, 28, is the Dean campaign's deputy communications director. She signed on in January 2003 after working as a consultant in the private sector. "It literally went from, 'Do you think you might consider covering us?' to having a traveling press corps."

Andrea Minkow, 25, is a domestic policy analyst for Dean. She joined up in March 2003 after working as a public policy analyst in New Jersey. "As far as people around me at the time, I was making a very career-limiting move," she says. "How could I put my life and career on hold to go work for this guy in Vermont?"