With roles reversed, Kerry and Dean keep up sniping
By Glen Johnson
and Patrick Healy, Globe Staff, 2/9/2004
SEATTLE -- Last March, after falsely accusing rivals John F. Kerry and John Edwards of sidestepping their support for the Iraq war before a largely antiwar audience of California Democrats, presidential candidate Howard Dean decided to make amends.
He sent a handwritten letter of apology to Edwards. Only.
The mutual contempt between Dean and Kerry has only worsened since.
As Dean rose in the polls last fall and became regarded as the party's front-runner, Kerry griped about what he considered soft media coverage and accused the former Vermont governor of double talk on the war, Medicare cuts, and raising the Social Security retirement age. While publicly more cautious and circumspect than Dean, privately the Massachusetts senator was known among aides and fund-raisers to deride not only Dean's political views, but also aspects of his appearance. Within the campaign, Kerry aides came up with a less-than-affectionate nickname for Dean: "Ho-Ho."
Today, their roles reversed since Kerry wrested the front-runner mantle, Dean is struggling to stay in the primary race but is also relishing the renewed media scrutiny of Kerry -- which Dean's staff is actively promoting. Dean also is accusing Kerry of double talk on the war, and questioning his opposition to special interests in Washington. In the aftermath of a New York Times story describing Kerry as the Senate's largest beneficiary of lobbyist donations during the past 15 years, Dean aides have come up with their own label: "Cash-and-Kerry." They also ridicule the wealth of Kerry's wife. Dean himself joked publicly about rumors that the senator had Botox injections to remove wrinkles from his face, an accusation Kerry has denied.
Kerry, 60, and Dean, 55, share little personal history, other than the commonality of their backgrounds (wealthy families, Yale degrees) and their New England home states. They have operated on different planes throughout their careers, Dean as a chief executive in a small, rural state, Kerry in the more rarefied air of Washington. Their mutual ambition to be president, though, has brought them into direct conflict.
In recent weeks, as he has beaten Dean in state after state, Kerry has delighted in Dean's failures nearly as much as he has celebrated his own success. While Kerry has long respected, and to some extent envied, Dean's popularity with grass-roots voters and citizens of the Internet, he has also seen him at times as a pretender to the throne of the Democratic Party.
"John's patience with Howard Dean ran out a while ago, when Dean kept saying last year that he was the only candidate against the war, the only candidate who represented the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," said one senior Kerry adviser. "Dean would say things about the other Democrats that John knew were just not true, and acted like he was the only Democrat who could be trusted." Dean's principal criticism of Kerry is that he did not use his special stature as a Vietnam veteran and war protester to lead the opposition to the invasion of Iraq. One high-level Dean aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said it was an example of Kerry's "finger-in-the-wind" politics.
"On paper they have a lot of similarities, but in fact, I don't think you could find two people who are more different. That's why we like the idea of a head-to-head matchup," the aide said of his boss and Kerry.
"I think the way he behaves towards the other guys is telling about the way he feels towards Kerry," the aide continued. "When Edwards went after him about the Confederate flag and even used a George Wallace line against him, Dean may have been mad, but he said later, `John had to do that.' When Dick Gephardt ran those negative ads against him in Iowa, it hurt him because he thought they were friends, but he still has a lot of respect [for] him. With Kerry, it's not a personal thing. He honestly believes he's the worst candidate in the field to go against George Bush."
Kerry has declined several times to speak on the record about Dean personally. Dean has gone so far as to say he would vote for Kerry should he win the nomination, but that has not stopped Dean from using increasingly harsh terms to describe him. Last week they included "a special-interest clone," "the handmaiden of special interests," and perhaps most gravely, "a Republican."
Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the Kerry and Dean opposition research and communications staffs have been engaged in a fierce battle for the most negative coverage of each other's candidate.
From mid-December until Kerry began to surge in Iowa in mid-January, the Kerry campaign sent reporters a "Daily Straight Talk" e-mail that catalogued Dean's "flip-flops" and offered euphemistic headlines like "Corporate-Powered Howard," "Chateau Hoho: Vintage Vermont Whine," and "Dean is more country club than Sierra Club."
A Kerry adviser said, "Ho-Ho is falling apart, but there's much more that we can use against him if he keeps throwing mud at us."
The Dean campaign, reflecting their leader's pugnaciousness, has proved game for the challenge. Last Thursday, after vowing repeatedly not to criticize other candidates for voting in favor of the Patriot Act, an antiterrorism measure that Dean himself conceded he might have supported in the emotional aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the former governor reversed course. He criticized Kerry and Edwards for not having what he said was the "courage" to oppose the legislation. |
