State's Evidence
by Ryan Lizza
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 01.23.04
Goffstown, New Hampshire
Iowa, Iowa, Iowa. Its influence in selecting the Democratic nominee keeps growing. It's bad enough that the candidates spent a year wooing 120,000 residents of the state. But tonight's debate at Saint Anselm College showed that all five major candidates have become slaves to what they perceive as the lessons of Iowa.
The first lesson is that issues are out, experience and electability are in. Antiwar Iowans chose a pro-war candidate. Three-quarters of Iowa caucus-goers opposed the war. Yet John Kerry beat Dean among this group by ten points. Presto: Dean has dropped his opposition to the war as his biggest selling point. Now, when he does talk about Iraq--or any other issue--he uses it as a window into his character, not his ideology. Dean made this point early in the debate:
The things that I do are things I believe in. I think it's important that the president of the United States be willing to stand up for what's right and not stand up for what's popular. I did it with No Child Left Behind. That was a mistake a year ago, not just now that everybody's suffering with it. I did it in Iraq. And I did it when I stood up for civil unions for gay and lesbian people my home state when it wasn't popular. And I'm willing to do it again as president.
Joe Lieberman hit the electability message as soon as he had a chance to speak. "I saw a wonderful article recently," the senator explained, "that said that in a private conversation, President Bush said to someone that the Democrat he thought would give him the toughest fight for reelection was Joe Lieberman." Various campaign officials say electability is the crucial ingredient to winning over the large number of undecided voters in the primary, the sort of people who responded in droves to Kerry's closing argument in Iowa: "Don't just send them a message, send them a president." Jonathan Sallet, a top Lieberman adviser, says, "Those people [undecided voters] want to know why you are qualified to be president."
The second lesson the candidates have learned from Iowa is that if you must talk about an issue, talk about special interests. All the Democrats are Bob Shrum now. Kerry--who graduated from a Swiss boarding school and Yale before becoming a member of the United States Senate and marrying into the Heinz fortune--hits the populism harder than anyone. "This president has created an economy that feeds the special interests and the powerful and the corporate power, and he has not helped the average worker in America to advance their cause," Kerry said last night. "I will." John Edwards echoed the same message. "The lobbyists and these powerful lobbies for the drug company," he said, "they're taking the democracy away from the American people. ... We need to do a whole group of things to restore the power in this democracy to the American people so that these insiders are not continuing to run this government." Ditto for Dean. Even Joe Lieberman sounds like a populist these days. "I know who I am. I've stood up to special interests," Lieberman said. The staunchly pro-business senator has a TV ad running in New Hampshire boasting that his tax plan will be "paid for by making big companies and the wealthiest pay more." The post-2000 debate within the Democratic Party over the efficacy of Gore's populism seems to have been settled.
Finally, the biggest lesson of Iowa is that attack ads kill. Just ask Dick Gephardt. The candidates seemed neutered on stage at the debate. Unlike a thousand previous forums where Dean was a punching bag, nobody tried to tear down Kerry, the new front-runner. When Peter Jennings tried to bait Lieberman into attacking Kerry or Dean, Lieberman seemed to speak for all the candidates when he quipped, "Peter, let me put it this way: This is a time to be affirmative. I'd say, 'Nice try.'"
The only attacks of the evening came silently, by way of the paper circulated to reporters by the Lieberman and Dean campaigns. Lieberman attacked Clark, and Dean hammered away at Kerry in four richly detailed pages of opposition research chronicling the senator's record fighting special interests. But reporters on deadline rarely pay attention to these debate handouts. If Kerry's opponents remain this impotent and fearful of getting tough, he seems to be on a glide path to victory. Since his opponents can't do the dirty work themselves, expect them to bring in some surrogates to start softening up the senator.
The big winner of the New Hampshire debate? Iowa. The results there seem to have created a grand unified theory of how to win: Prove you can beat Bush, attack special interests, and stay positive.
Some additional thoughts:
John Kerry: Winning makes you look like a winner. Kerry isn't really doing that much different, but his success makes it all seem different. For example, he strolled into the building tonight to bagpipers. A week ago this would have seemed contrived and had eyes rolling. Tonight, it somehow seemed presidential.
Howard Dean: Dean has spent three days dealing with the fallout from his Iowa wail. At a certain point the damage control effort just keeps the story alive even longer. Tonight Dean reminded me of Al Gore during the debates with Bush in 2000. Gore was mocked for being too hyper in the first debate but in the second debate he overcompensated and seemed too subdued. Is Dean overcompensating?
John Edwards: His greatest skill in these forums is to talk about the forest rather than the trees. He's always saying things like, "I wonder if I could just step back for a minute" or "it's bigger than Al Qaeda, John." It makes him stand out. But sometimes he's too quick to let his audience know he's not bogged down in the small stuff. "I would never claim to be an expert on Islam," he said when asked what he knows about the religion. Fair enough. But later, when pressed on his opinion of the Defense of Marriage Act, he again retreated to this formulation. "First of all," he said, "I wasn't in the Congress; I don't claim to be an expert on this." And he was right: He claimed the act restricted the states' ability to make laws about civil unions, but it doesn't. Voters might reward a politician who admits he doesn't know everything about every subject, but if your greatest liability is lack of experience, there's a limit to how often you can claim ignorance.
Wesley Clark: Clark's problem is that he is still insecure about his Democratic bona fides. This is pushing him further to the left. The conventional wisdom among many Democrats is that the war has receded as an issue. Dean barely mentions it in the wake of his Iowa defeat. But in Clark's stump speech the war and Bush's foreign policy are central. The crowds at Clark's events also seem to skew further left than I expected. Recently he's campaigned with Michael Moore and received the endorsement of George McGovern. I think two things explain this. One, as a newcomer to the party, he overestimates how liberal Democrats really are. He still has a slightly caricatured view of his new home, and so he doesn't realize how silly he sounds when he calls Michael Moore "a great American leader," as he did in the debate. The other reason is more straightforward. He's still being attacked for voting for Republicans and praising George W. Bush, and so he's constantly having to demonstrate his liberal credentials.
Joe Lieberman: Last night was the first time in a long, long time, that I even entertained the notion that Lieberman could catch on here. The trend-lines for Clark and Dean are suddenly very bad. Kerry and Edwards seem best positioned to take advantage of their decline, but everyone has been wrong about everything in this race. Who knows, maybe a late Lieberman surge is possible. ... Nah.
Visit Ryan Lizza's new weblog, Campaign Journal, for more primary coverage.
Ryan Lizza is an associate editor at TNR. |
