According to Wikipedia, Dean claims to be "Catholic" (psst.. Bishop of Nashville... I found a good candidate for excommunication!) but he was raised in Massachuttes so that explains it. I'm guessing he's to the left of the likes of Mayor Bloomberg and Mayor Daley.
Now, if the mayor of Provo, Utah starts pimping gay marriage, then we're REALLY doomed.
When he ran in 2007 when it was an open seat (fortunately, we have a two-term limit), he was the candidate of the leftist rich elites in the city (ironically carrying the more Republican & White areas) while ex-Congressman Bob Clement was the more Conservative-Populist (who carried the bulk of Nashville and non-White areas).
It really threw our local rag, the Tennessean, which always enjoys playing up class & racial divisions (blaming Republicans), but they backed Dean to the hilt. When it came time to do the post-vote analysis, they largely ignored or played down that the “multicultural” parts of Nashville they pander to went overwhelmingly against Dean. Dean is the “rich Republican country-clubber” stereotype of the leftist media, but it’s all good when he’s a Democrat.
The 3rd place finisher (now in Nashville, we actually have a runoff for Mayor) was the Black centrist Vice-Mayor Howard Gentry. In fact, we were potentially set to elect two Blacks to the top jobs in Nashville, with Gentry and a Social Conservative Carolyn Baldwin Tucker, a Councilwoman. The Tennessean would’ve had orgasms at such a spectacle, but they wanted two White moonbats, Dean (who was then the Public Defender, which is usually occupied by a left-winger soft on crime) and Diane Neighbors, a Council kook. To them, Negroes are only entitled to be Marxists, but veer from that as Gentry & Tucker did, and they get ignored.
The worry for next year is that we may get an even more left-wing Mayor (the last non-leftist was Beverly Briley, who was our first consolidated Metro Mayor from 1963-75, whom I was born under, but he left office when I was all of 1). All of them have been lousy since, from Richard Fulton (1975-87) (who was formerly one of the most left-wing members of Congress from the South during his 12-year stint coinciding with Briley (and practiced his own cronyism stuff too parochial to describe)...
Bill Boner, a Clintonesque clone (clown) served a sex-drenched single term (1987-91) after an undistinguished 8 years in Congress (where he quit just ahead of an investigation into his lack of ethics). He was replaced by Pharoah Phil Bredesen (1991-99), our first carpetbagger Mayor from the Northeast (who actually had run for the Massachusetts Legislature in the ‘70s). He embarked on a spending spree (along with an explosion in the crime rate) and after failing to win Governor in 1994, flagrantly violated campaign spending laws to buy the office in 2002 by a narrow margin.
He was followed by a second carpetbagger Northerner, Bill Purcell (1999-2007), who had been a state legislator and Democrat hatchet-man (helping disenfranchise the GOP-voting majority in the state with the redistricting). I have nothing positive to say about him. Fortunately, TN’s hard swing to the GOP by the end of his tenure all but killed his chances at the Governorship. I believe he has since left the state.
Dean (2007-2015) now seems to be suffering from some sort of grandiose cognitive dissonance, thinking his moonbat views will play statewide by 2018. His money (or rather, his dead father-in-law’s) does make him semi-formidable. The upside for the GOP is that he has some of Bill Boner’s personal appearance traits, such as rather unkempt, always sweaty and dirty looking (even when he’s dressed well). However, Boner was somewhat charming (much in the style of Bubba Clinton), a loveable cad. Dean doesn’t have any charm.
As for his alleged Catholicism, it’s obviously more of the Cafeteria sort, de rigeur with Democrats for the better part of 4 decades now.