Kerry poised for big weekend;
Dean says Feb. 17 is a ‘must win’ Democratic front-runner
gets nod from Gephardt
MSNBC staff and news service reports
Updated: 8:25 p.m. ET Feb. 05, 2004 With new polls showing Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts poised to win big in weekend voting in Michigan, Washington state and Maine, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean set his sights on Feb. 17, saying he would abandon his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination if he failed to win the Wisconsin primary that day.
In e-mail distributed Thursday morning, Dean, who was considered the front-runner just a month ago, wrote: “The entire race has come down to this: We must win Wisconsin. ... We will get a boost this weekend in Washington, Michigan, and Maine, but our true test will be the Wisconsin primary. A win there will carry us to the big states of March 2 and narrow the field to two candidates. Anything less will put us out of this race.”
Meanwhile, there was more good news for Kerry. Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, who dropped out of the race after a distant fourth-place finish in January's Iowa caucuses, planned to endorse the front-runner, sources told The Associated Press.
The developments came as the latest MSNBC polling from Michigan showed Kerry with an overwhelming lead. He was poised to capture 47 percent of the vote in caucuses Saturday and most, if not all, of Michigan’s 128 delegates to the Democratic National Convention, according to data from an MSNBC/Zogby/Reuters poll released Thursday. His closest competitor was Dean, who garnered only 10 percent of likely caucus-goers, according to the poll, followed by Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina with 8 percent.
“I suppose anything can happen between tonight and Saturday, but it will be hard to stall this Kerry engine in the Motor City state,” pollster John Zogby said. “He has wide support from every sub-group.
“While the top issue is clearly the economy, electability is the major factor driving Kerry’s lead,” Zogby added. “He by far and away trumps the other candidates in this category.”
In Washington, where 76 delegates are up for grabs in caucuses Saturday, independent Seattle pollster Stuart Elway’s latest figures showed that 40 percent of Democrats supported Kerry, while 13 percent backed Dean.
There are no public polls in Maine, where voting takes place Sunday for 24 more delegates, but strategists for all four campaigns said Kerry should win easily.
If the polls prove true and Kerry is able to win most of the weekend’s delegates, he would push far ahead in the race to the 2,162 needed to win the nomination at the national convention in July. He now leads with 262, to 121 for Dean and 97 for Edwards.
Dean tries to rally backers
Dean was trying to rally his supporters and raise money by casting Wisconsin as a last stand against the establishment candidates. His e-mail message, which included a plea for a $100 contribution, resulted in $26,000 in online contributions between 8 and 9 a.m. Thursday, aides said.
Dean, who once boasted $41 million in campaign funds, has failed to win a single delegate contest since voting began with the Iowa caucuses Jan. 19. He finished a distant third in Iowa, behind Kerry and Edwards, and was runner-up to Kerry in the New Hampshire primary Jan. 27. He did not win any of the seven states that had caucuses or primaries Tuesday.
Dean had vowed to remain in the race through March 2, the “Super Tuesday” election day featuring 10 contests for delegates. But he has been forced to adopt a Wisconsin-or-nothing approach to slow Kerry’s march.
Dean planned to campaign in Michigan, but he has acknowledged that he probably cannot win there.
Dean’s and Kerry’s major rivals for the nomination, Edwards and retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, were fanning across the country Thursday in search of support in coming contests that could keep them competitive.
Clark and Edwards skipped campaigning for the weekend contests in Michigan, Maine and Washington, sticking instead to their Southern roots with plans to travel Thursday to states that vote Tuesday. Clark was taking a bus tour of Tennessee, where 69 delegates will be chosen Tuesday, while Edwards was traveling from Memphis to Virginia, where 82 more are up for grabs on the same day.
Make-or-break state for Clark
While Chris Lehane of the Clark campaign has said Tennessee is a make-or-break state, all the candidates were pointing to the showdown in Wisconsin. But the odds were with Kerry, who has the most money and allies.
“Without money, you can’t have the troops. Without troops, you can’t compete. How can you compete with a guy who can write himself a check for ads in California?” said Ed Sarpolus, a prominent pollster in Michigan.
Two officials close to Clark said on condition of anonymity that he considered dropping out of the race Tuesday night after scoring a single victory, a nail-biter in Oklahoma. They said his wife, Gert, helped talk him into staying in the race against the advice of some backers.
In another sign of trouble, Clark’s staff agreed to a pay freeze to pay for television ads.
The special interest angle
The hopes of Edwards, Clark and Dean hinged on two matters that were out of their control — Kerry’s future performance on the campaign trail and his past.
While hoping he would slip up, foes were also pushing media reports about Kerry’s ties to special interests and lobbyists.
“If we’re going to have a president who’s not a Washington insider, who knows the changes that need to take place in Washington to change America, I need to be the president,” Edwards said on CNN on Wednesday, the day after he won the South Carolina primary to keep his candidacy alive.
Kerry won five states and the lion’s share of the delegates Tuesday, taking command of the race. Of the 269 delegates up for grabs, Kerry won 144, Edwards won 66, Clark won 50, Dean won seven and the Rev. Al Sharpton won two. Kerry’s earlier wins in Iowa and New Hampshire gave him seven victories in the nine contests so far.
Dean suggested that “it’ll be more of the same” if Kerry replaced President Bush in the White House. Clark faulted Kerry and Edwards for complaining about White House policies that they had backed in the Senate.
Bush fires back
For the first time, the Bush campaign began firing back at the Democrats, targeting Kerry by reproducing a newspaper article that recalled Kerry’s defense of Bill Clinton in 1992 against allegations that he ducked service in the military.
The campaign’s release of the article, which was published Wednesday in the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, appeared to suggest that Kerry was being hypocritical because some of his supporters have raised questions about Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard.
The article was reproduced in an e-mail message to reporters headlined “IN CASE YOU MISSED IT... .” Previously, such messages had come from the Republican National Committee, not the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign.
The president, who is scheduled to answer questions Saturday in an interview to air Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” also vigorously defended his decision to go to war in Iraq in an address Thursday to members of the military in Charleston, S.C.
Although he did explicitly acknowledge that the United States had not found the banned weapons that his administration believed were in Iraq, Bush also blasted critics of the war, saying, “If some politicians in Washington had their way, Saddam Hussein would still be in power.”
The South Carolina stop, which came two days after Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina won the state’s Democratic presidential primary, was similar to one that Bush made in New Hampshire two days after that state’s primary last month. |
