For his soon-to-be-published campaign manifesto, "Winning Back America," Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean takes a confessional approach. He describes his privileged preppie upbringing, his youthful drunken behavior and his occasional adventures in petty theft. "Although I was born in New York and went to school in the city until I was 13," writes the former Vermont governor, who recently claimed to be a farmer, "I really grew up in East Hampton. ... Once in a while, we'd sneak a potato or two out of a farmer's field, just to say we'd done it." Dean notes that he attended the posh St. George's School in Newport, R.I., "an incredibly beautiful setting, up on a hill overlooking the Atlantic Ocean." Dean also reminisces about his fraught relationship with alcohol - a narrative that parallels the experience of fellow Eastern Establishment scion George W. Bush, a graduate of Phillips Andover Academy. "Once we were 18, we could indulge in lazy days of 'Baseball and Ballantine,'" Dean writes. "We'd buy some beer and put it in a garbage can of ice and play softball all day long. If you hit somebody's beer with a batted ball, it was an automatic out." After he got married, "I quit drinking," he writes. "When I drank, I would drink a lot and do outrageous things, and then I wouldn't drink again for a while. I realized that what was very funny when you're 18 is not very funny when you're 30. I had a terrible hangover after my bachelor party, which didn't help. So I quit. Drinking served no useful purpose in my life, and I just got tired of it. I haven't had a drink in over 22 years." Dean spokesman Jay Carson said that while his candidate violently disagrees with Bush on most things, "He agrees with him that his younger days were his younger days - and he's going to leave it at that." I guess those prep-school guys stick together.