2 Dean Rivals Unite Against Mutual Threat
"It's the Beltway boys hanging out together," said Joe Trippi,
Dr. Dean's campaign manager. "This is the kind of inside
Washington politics that people are sick of."
October 12, 2003
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
MANCHESTER, N.H., Oct. 11 - Perhaps it was not so surprising
to see Representative Richard A. Gephardt and Senator John Kerry arm in
arm, all smiles, whispering in each other's ears on stage at the
Democratic debate Thursday night in Phoenix.
These two presidential contenders, who for months have been
eclipsed by the surging campaign of Howard Dean, have been
fairly chummy of late -at Dr. Dean's expense.
At a debate two weeks ago in New York, for example, when Mr. Gephardt
questioned Dr. Dean's support for Medicare, it was Mr. Kerry who came to
Mr. Gephardt's side, saying his tactic was fair.
Aides to both men say there is no overt conspiracy, but they acknowledge
that at least at a staff level, the Gephardt and Kerry campaigns are more
than friendly: they are sharing information about Dr. Dean that helps
fuel each another's attacks.
On Sept. 30, for instance, both campaigns fired off press releases
within 18 minutes of each other touting a column in The Boston
Globe critical of Dr. Dean.
Shortly before, according to Steve Elmendorf, Mr. Gephardt's
chief of staff, he and Jim Jordan, Mr. Kerry's campaign manager, told each other of
the column by e-mail. "Either I sent it to Jim, or Jim sent it to me,
I can't remember," Mr. Elmendorf said. Mr. Jordan did not return e-mail
messages on Friday.
Campaign aides say their back-channel communications do not
exactly constitute an unholy alliance. Such contacts are to be expected, after all, in
an insular political world where nearly everyone has worked with
everyone else at one time or another.
Part of what is going on, campaign workers say, is the normal result
of an information age in which staff members are in constant communication
by personal e-mail devices and cellphones about everything from agreeing
to joint appearances by their candidates to reacting to news coverage.
Clearly though, for the time being at least, Mr. Gephardt and Mr. Kerry
can each benefit from each other's attacks on Dr. Dean: Mr. Gephardt in
Iowa above all and Mr. Kerry in New Hampshire.
For the two candidates, attacking Dr. Dean may be a matter of survival,
said Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute in Washington.
"There is a great danger that Dean could neutralize Gephardt in Iowa,
and then neutralize Kerry in New Hampshire, and then even if Dean
stumbles later on, they can't recover from that," he said.
"So it is manifestly in their interest to make sure that the stumble
occurs before Iowa and New Hampshire."
Mr. Gephardt and Dr. Dean have aligned in favoring a complete
repeal of the Bush tax cuts. Mr. Kerry and Senators John Edwards and Joseph I.
Lieberman call for repealing the tax cuts only for the wealthiest Americans.
And, just as Mr. Kerry came to Mr. Gephardt's aid in attacking Dr.
Dean last month in New York, on Thursday night he sided with
Mr. Lieberman in challenging General Clark's Democratic Party bona fides.
The danger for anyone engaging in a marriage of convenience is
that it can last only as long as it is convenient. Mr. Elmendorf said he believed
that each campaign was basically out to attack everyone else.
Another danger is that the informal information swapping can be
made to look sinister, or at least unsportsmanlike.
"It's the Beltway boys hanging out together," said Joe Trippi,
Dr. Dean's campaign manager. "This is the kind of inside Washington politics that
people are sick of."
But Steve Murphy, the Gephardt campaign manager, said Mr. Trippi
was being "totally hypocritical," adding: "Two weeks ago he ran into me and
some of my staffers at Dulles airport and suggested that instead
of attacking Howard Dean on Medicare, we should help him and Howard Dean
attack Wesley Clark. This was a lengthy conversation."
Another example of the Kerry-Gephardt collaboration came on
Sept. 29, when Dr. Dean was to introduce a long-term care proposal in Dubuque,
Iowa. Mr. Kerry's campaign learned of the event and tipped off
Mr. Gephardt's aides, who kicked into gear, one Kerry aide said. The Des Moines
Register buried barely a mention of Dr. Dean's proposal at the end
of an article about a back-and-forth between Mr. Gephardt and Dr. Dean over
Medicare.
"You regularly make sure other campaigns know the schedule of
opponents when they're clearly trying to get out of a very uncomfortable position
on cutting Medicare," the Kerry aide said. "It's just sort of, the more the merrier."
For all their whispering at Thursday's debate, Mr. Gephardt and Mr. Kerry
are not particularly close, their aides say, though they have known each
other for decades. Mr. Elmendorf said the two commiserated recently
about the frustration of a rigorous schedule of candidate forums and debates
where, with so many candidates competing for scarce time, "you
basically have four minutes to either do or not do what you need to do."
But much of their mutual exasperation has been directed not at
the political calendar but at Dr. Dean, who has dominated the spotlight for months
despite what Mr. Gephardt and Mr. Kerry assert are his contradictions on major issues.
Several important officials of the two campaigns have close ties.
Mr. Jordan, the Kerry campaign manager, worked on Mr. Gephardt's payroll as
spokesman for Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee during
the impeachment of President Clinton, when Mr. Elmendorf was Mr.
Gephardt's chief of staff.
Robert Gibbs and Erik Smith, the press secretaries for the Kerry
and Gephardt campaigns, have also kept up a back-channel correspondence. They
were in close contact when Mr. Gibbs worked at the Democratic
Senatorial Campaign Committee and Mr. Smith worked at the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee in the same Washington building,
Mr. Smith said. In addition, Mr. Smith said he got to know Mr. Jordan when
they both worked for Mr. Gephardt during the impeachment.
Mr. Smith said he found himself walking out of a television station
the other day at the same time as Mr. Gibbs, and the two compared notes about
a New Hampshire newspaper report about Dr. Dean and the Medicare issue.
"It's more like, `Hey, that was funny' or `Look at this story,' " he said.
"It's friends sharing or reflecting on what's going on. There's no joint
strategy."
But he also paid the Kerry campaign a compliment for its research,
at least as it pertained to Dr. Dean. "None of us is shedding any tears over
their ability to research someone's record and communicate a
message," Mr. Smith said.
If the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend dynamic is most visible
with Mr. Gephardt and Mr. Kerry right now, they hardly hold a patent on it.
"You have these alliances that spring up on a multitude of issues,"
one Democratic campaign official said. "It's less spoken, but kind of understood.
Look, if you get somebody in a good position, two versus one is always
better. Not least because, if viewers see more than one Democrat has this
position, maybe the likelihood is the viewer will think, `If several of these
guys have this opinion and this guy doesn't, maybe he's wrong.' "
Mr. Trippi, of the Dean campaign, said of the Gephardt and Kerry
attacks: "They have a mutual interest right now in trying to tear us down, but
that's all it's about, it's not about us. And it's the tearing down that
I think people are really sick of. People want to hear a real debate, not a
hammer job."
Those wielding the hammers note that Dr. Dean is not the only one getting
hit and that they could easily swing harder at each other should the
dynamics of the race change.
Mr. Elmendorf said that although he and Mr. Jordan have been friends
since before impeachment: "There's no conspiracy - you beat up on Dean
today, we'll beat up on him tomorrow. We certainly appreciated
Senator Kerry coming in behind Dick in New York. But there were no conversations
about doing that."
Though, he added, it worked out quite well.
nytimes.com
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |
