As Iowa Caucuses Near Crystal Ball Gets Cloudy
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
ES MOINES, Jan. 17 — Democratic presidential candidates campaigned furiously across Iowa on Saturday as they approached the conclusion of a competitive and complicated fight that party officials said would set the tone for the rest of the nomination battle.
What until just last week had seemed like a two-way contest for first place between Howard Dean and Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri has turned into what Democrats described as a four-way free-for-all with two days remaining before Monday's caucuses. In campaign headquarters across this unseasonably warm capital, senior advisers struggled to figure who was up and who was down, prompting an ever-changing and dizzying volley of strategic attacks.
At the center of those campaign-closing calculations was Dr. Dean, the former governor of Vermont, who in recent days suffered an erosion in his position here and across the nation, according to Democratic officials and Dr. Dean's own advisers.
Several Democrats said that the very thing Dr. Dean had long offered as his greatest strength as a candidate — his ability to confront President Bush with a strong ideological challenge, fueled by huge numbers of new voters and millions in campaign contributions — had been undercut by persistent attacks from his opponents, as well as a series of missteps by Dr. Dean.
Together, those combined to raise questions about his electability and his credentials to be president in a year when polls and interviews show that Democratic primary voters are hungry to oust Mr. Bush, and when his rivals have been seeking to present the nomination of Dr. Dean as a recipe for disaster this fall.
"It's gotten tighter; it's gotten a lot tighter," said Joe Trippi, Dr. Dean's campaign manager, as he tried to manage his campaign through its first actual electoral test. "The hammering that we've been taking has taken a toll."
In a sign of this, a New York Times/CBS News poll taken last week noted a jump, to 20 percent from 12 percent, in the number of Democratic primary voters who said they held an unfavorable view of Dr. Dean. More ominous for Democrats who are assessing which candidate might be the strongest to unseat Mr. Bush, the poll, reflecting the finding of other surveys in recent weeks, found that 29 percent of registered voters held an unfavorable view of Dr. Dean — a notably high number for this early in a campaign.
In Council Bluffs, on the western edge of Iowa, Kathleen Sailors, a retiree, said she was reconsidering her support of Dr. Dean as she watched him in these final days of the contest. Mrs. Sailors said electability would be her No. 1 criterion in choosing a challenger for Mr. Bush when she attends her first caucus on Monday night, and she said she was no longer sure that Dr. Dean was the strongest candidate her party had to put up against Mr. Bush.
"I thought he was going to be the only chance we had to get one of our guys in there," she said. But now, she said, "I'm just not sure anymore that he's the best one to beat Bush."
Here in Des Moines, Don Strub, 71, a retired teacher, described himself as another one of what Democratic leaders say is an unusually large reservoir of Democrats who have not figured out whom to support. He said he was torn between Dr. Dean and Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, adding, "Whether either can beat Bush is the 64-dollar question."
Mr. Edwards began his day Saturday with a rally at his headquarters here, while the rest of the four leading contenders — Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts is the fourth — spread out to town halls, coffee shops and village squares across the state.
"Work, work — organize, organize," Mr. Edwards shouted to his supporters, succinctly summing up what every campaign now sees as the key to victory over the next 48 hours.
In Clinton, Mr. Kerry fired back at Dr. Dean and Mr. Gephardt for challenging his support for farmers by noting that he had once called for cutbacks in the size of the Agriculture Department. "It's obvious that my campaign is moving, because two of the major candidates have chosen in the last two days to engage in a smear effort on my farm policy here in America," he said.
Mr. Kerry was unapologetic. "I'm going to fight to change the whole relationship, the relationship between the bureaucrats in Washington," he said. "If the other candidates want to defend U.S.D.A. and its representation of the small farmers, let them go ahead and do that.`
Polls in Iowa — which are famously imprecise, given the difficulty of determining who actually attends caucuses and what they might do in the course of what is supposed to be two hours of deliberation — continued to show the race to be a muddle among the four main candidates. The only other candidate is Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio.
Given the peculiar nature of the caucuses, a campaign organization can, by recruiting supporters and getting them to the meetings on Monday, overcome any qualms about a candidate — and that clearly was how Dr. Dean's aides were hoping to carry him out of this valley.
Many Democrats not affiliated with the campaign said that based on that organization, and on the enthusiastic way his supporters have embraced his candidacy, they continued to believe Dr. Dean was in a strong position.
The streets here were teeming with youths and not-so-youths in orange caps and knapsacks, who had come in from out of state to try to muscle Dr. Dean to victory. Dr. Dean, racing across the state in a bus as he urged supporters to turn out on Monday, said on Friday that 3,500 volunteers were already here and 2,000 more would arrive by the end of the weekend.
His aides suggested that this out-of-state brigade was a powerful counter to the labor support assembling behind Mr. Gephardt and the Iowa Democratic machine support that Mr. Kerry has put together. If that proves the case, this last-minute story line of a tight race, if heart-stopping for Dr. Dean and his aides, may prove to be a hidden blessing for the Dean campaign, because of the peculiar customs that have come to influence the ways Iowa caucuses are portrayed. That is because Dr. Dean now, as opposed to as recently as four days ago, is in a position where he will be able to portray even a narrow victory as a ratification of his candidacy and a sign from voters that his troubles are behind him.
One way or another, the results here seem certain to provide the framework for the rest of the campaign. And the final results will go a long way toward determining how long it will be before the Democratic Party knows who its nominee will be.
Dr. Dean's advisers said they were still hopeful that he would win convincingly here, and follow with a solid victory in New Hampshire, allowing him to try to coalesce the party around him and head off a growing challenge from Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who is skipping the Iowa caucuses.
The other possible outcomes suggested a more extended struggle.
The challenge to Dr. Dean has come at the same time that General Clark, in New Hampshire, has shown signs of undercutting what had once been Dr. Dean's dominance there. That has forced Dr. Dean to divide much of his time over the past week between Iowa and New Hampshire. He has also increased spending on television advertisements in New Hampshire, where he is now heavily outspending General Clark, according to Democratic officials.
Iowa's first-in-the-nation vote will be the first milestone in a campaign that has been shaped from the start by an overriding dynamic among Democratic voters: a search for a candidate who, more than almost anything else, can defeat Mr. Bush.
"This is one of the most unusual electoral years that I have ever experienced," said Chris Lehane, a senior adviser to General Clark, who earlier in the campaign was a senior adviser to Mr. Kerry. "We have never seen polling and anecdotal evidence that suggests that electability is one of the primary considerations influencing voters."
That dynamic shaped the candidates' appeals right through the final hours of the Iowa campaign, with many Democrats using it both to boost their own candidacy and to attack Dr. Dean's credentials.
Both General Clark and Mr. Kerry, citing their résumés and war records, have made their own electability a central part of their overall appeal to voters. Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, who is also bypassing Iowa, argued that his own moderate views on issues like taxes and trade would made him a stronger challenger to Mr. Bush.
In an appearance Friday afternoon in Newton, about 30 miles east of here, Dr. Dean once again countered claims by his opponents that he would be a weak candidate in the general election, offering the argument he has been patiently making for nearly a year.
"The way to beat George Bush is to stand up for what you believe," he said. " We can do this, but the way to do this is to reach out to the 50 percent of Americans who quit voting because they can't tell the difference between Republicans and Democrats, and give them a reason to vote. And when we do, we're going to have three or four million people who come out to vote."
Some Democrats said Dr. Dean might be paying a price for being viewed as the front-runner too early in the process, allowing time for his opponents to attack him and for, at least to some extent, a premature display of the kind of "buyer's remorse" that presidential candidates often have to grapple with when a perception takes hold that they have won the nomination. And some Democratic voters who are making up their mind now may be less likely to support Dr. Dean than the hard-line partisan Democrats who rallied around his tough message from the start.
The uncertainty here has been fostered by the difficulties Dr. Dean has encountered over the last few few weeks, such as when he asserted that the nation was no safer after the capture of Saddam Hussein, a statement for which Democrats as well as Republicans attacked him. One result of , these difficulties Mr. Trippi noted, is that there has been more attention paid to Dr. Dean's scrapping with his rivals over what he has said than to his original appeal, which was based on his aggressive attack on Mr. Bush and his claim that he was changing the way politics is conducted.
"They want someone who they believe can take on Bush," said Mark Penn, Mr. Lieberman's pollster. "And they thought initially that his strength and his argument on the war meant that he can take on Bush. But I think he's fallen short on some of the other areas about whether he can really take on Bush, or whether Bush would slice him and dice him."
Mr. Trippi, Dr. Dean's campaign manager, said he thought that Dr. Dean had regained his footing in the race by returning to the themes that worked so well for him until now: a broad denunciation of the war in Iraq and an aggressive presentation of himself as the only major Democrat who can take on Mr. Bush.
"We feel we've got through the worst of it," Mr. Trippi said. "I really think the governor turned the corner two or three days ago, when he came in and said to us, `I'm going to let it rip.' " |
