Howard "the Matchmaker" Dean

If you've been wondering where the now-silent scream machine Howard Dean has been, we found him. Seems the not-so-visible Democratic National Committee chairman has been busying himself with logic and matchmaking while employing that 50-state strategy of his.

Dean was spotted in a United Airlines terminal of the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport Tuesday night before boarding a red-eye flight back to Washington, D.C. playing the puzzle game Sudoku and contemplating potential suitors for a donor's single 34-year-old daughter.

The former Vermont governor, physician and one-time presidential candidate - until he screamed his way out of the primary - wiled away an hour delay at the boarding gate by alternately playing Sudoku, which we hear is his new favorite game, and chatting with an aide who was traveling with him.

The aide got up at one point to take a call on his cell phone and returned to say it was [name inaudible] - an apparent donor - looking to see if he could help fix her daughter up on a date.

"How old is she," Dean was overheard asking in reference to the donor's daughter.

"Thirty-four," the aide replied. "She looks good," said the Democratic party chairman, who was wearing a blue suit, blue socks and black shoes and carrying a large box from Seattle's premier woolen shop, Pendleton.

Agreed, said the aide, who was wearing a wedding band.

Dean and the DNC aide sat there for a while contemplating eligible bachelors. "It was like watching two guys sitting outside the 7-Eleven," our source, a former Democratic activist, said.

Dean, who has been playing a conspicuously diminished role in the 2008 presidential campaign, apparently relishes moonlighting as a matchmaker. In fact, a couple of marriages came out of his 2004 presidential campaign, including that of Tom McMahon, the executive director of the DNC who met his fiancée on the campaign and is getting married in August, and Andrew Wright, a finance staffer who is married to someone he met on the Dean campaign.

"In the tradition of bringing Democrats together everywhere, Governor Dean is the ultimate multi-tasker, raising money for the DNC, traveling to all 50 states and a little match making on the side," DNC spokeswoman Karen Finney tells the Sleuth.

Still, we wondered: What was in the box? Finney didn't cough it up. We imagined it was a wool scarf, and further imagined Dean, playing Yente, dancing around the airport terminal with the scarf around his head performing the "matchmaker, matchmaker" scene from "Fiddler on the Roof."

But our hopes of a Fiddler on the Roof remake starring Howard Dean were dashed when a source told us that before going to Seattle, Dean had been in Tacoma and met with members of the Puyallup Tribe, who gave him a blanket, "and the blanket was in the box."