Once Front-Runner Dean Falls Behind
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By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 19, 2004; 11:39 PM
washingtonpost.com
DES MOINES, Jan. 19 - Iowa Democrats dealt a serious blow to the once front-running campaign of Howard Dean here Monday night, and to predictions that the Democratic presidential race might end as quickly as it began. With Sen. John F. Kerry's (D-Mass.) big victory, the party faces an open and potentially protracted contest to find a nominee to challenge President Bush in the fall.
Dean's vaunted grassroots movement, which fueled the former Vermont governor's rise to the top of the Democratic field with money and energy in 2003, failed its first test at old-fashioned politics, falling far short of the bold claims of its architects.
Dean now has eight days to regroup for what will be a critical test in next Tuesday's primary in New Hampshire, where retired Gen. Wesley Clark has been gaining ground on him and where Kerry will now be a major factor in the outcome.
Organizational prowess, considered the hallmark of the caucus process here, proved no match for the messages and momentum that built behind the candidacies of Kerry and surprise second-place finisher Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) as voters began to take a more serious look at all the candidates in the last two weeks.
Not only did Dean's army fall short. Organized labor, the backbone of the Democratic Party's get-out-the-vote machinery, did not come close to delivering here for its most loyal warrior, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.). Gephardt won the caucuses here in 1988 and his hopes for the nomination almost certainly ended here Monday night.
"The Iowa results mean it's a wide-open race," said New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D), who is neutral in the Democratic contest. "I believe we're now looking at a four-person race at least. We're looking at probably the nominee not selected and not known until probably early March. This could be a long drawn-out campaign."
At least four candidates now will claim a shot at the nomination-- the top three finishers here and Clark, who did not compete in Iowa. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), who also skipped Iowa, has pinned his hopes on a strong finish in New Hampshire but may find it difficult to reach that goal in the scrambled and enlarged competition in the Granite State.
Iowa voters not only turned Dean's campaign and the Democratic race upside down, but they also signaled that they did not believe Dean's message of anger was sufficient to take against Bush in the general election.
"It is a strong statement that Democrats are interested in the vision, they are interested in what you are going to do and also they are very interested in who is electable," said Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack (D). "They want to field the first team when we go against President Bush because we're going to need the first team."
An obviously disappointed Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, said Dean will regroup in New Hampshire. "There are three tickets out of here and we got one of them -- it's not the one we wanted," he said.
Trippi blamed Monday's defeat on the weeks of pounding that his candidate took from the other candidates. "We got in a fight with Gephardt and these other two guys flew up the chute," he said.
Trippi said Kerry and Edwards co-opted Dean's message that he will change the culture of special interest power in Washington but said the former Vermont governor is determined to reclaim it. "We're going to get our message back and fight for real change," he said.
Democratic strategists said Dean still has considerable assets to bring to the race, starting with what is regarded as a solid organization in New Hampshire, a growing list of elected officials who have endorsed him nationally and most of all his Internet-based, money-raising operation, which took in nearly $40 million in 2003. That will give him the resources to fight in more states than many of his rivals.
But the battering he took -- and the self-inflicted wounds he delivered -- have left him a far more attractive candidate to many Democratic voters than he was just a few months ago. In Iowa, Dean had the highest negatives of any of the major candidates competing here, and rival strategists said the same has begun to happen to him in New Hampshire. It is questionable whether Dean can survive a loss in New Hampshire next week.
Kerry's challenge is to take the energy of his victory here and transfer it to his neighboring state of New Hampshire, where he began the campaign as the front-runner and lost that advantage to Dean. "Obviously we're still behind in NH and we're going to keep working," said former New Hampshire governor Jeanne Shaheen (D), national co-chair of the Kerry campaign. She added, "There's still a lot of candidates in the race and John Kerry is going to have a tough fight. And as we saw in Iowa, he's up for tough fights."
Shaheen recalled that in 1984, when she was leading Colorado Sen. Gary Hart's underdog campaign against former vice president Walter F. Mondale, Hart was able to catapult a surprising second-place finish in Iowa into an upset win in New Hampshire. While some Dean strategists here suggest that the "bounce" will be smaller for Kerry, because he is so well-known in New Hampshire, Shaheen said, "I question that. There is a lot about John Kerry that people here are just learning."
Clark may have plenty of resources to compete against Dean in the coming weeks. Edwards will need to raise money quickly and Kerry, who bet everything on Iowa and took out a $6 million loan to help finance his campaign here, will either have to raise a lot or tap his own resources again.
The contests come quickly after New Hampshire. On Feb. 3, seven states hold contests, the biggest being in South Carolina. Edwards has said he must win South Carolina and the Iowa showing gives him a significant boost toward that goal. But Clark also has set his sights there, as has Dean. Kerry's campaign has yet to make decisions about where to commit their resources after New Hampshire.
Then comes Michigan, where Dean's labor support could be important, and Wisconsin after that, with a potentially climactic series of primaries in California, New York and Ohio on March 2.
"The challenge after New Hampshire is who has the wherewithal to become a truly national candidate," a Clark adviser said. "You can see campaigns picking out states as targets of opportunity, but all that does is lead you to a much more protracted battle. . . . I just think the road to the final two has gotten more complicated."
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Staff writer David S. Broder contributed to this report from New Hampshire.
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