nytimes.com
August 31, 2003
Worried Democrats See Daunting '04 Hurdles
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
ALPOLE, N.H., Aug. 30 — The race for the Democratic presidential nomination shifts into a more intense phase this Labor Day weekend, with some party leaders worried about the crowded field of candidates and fearful of what they view as President Bush's huge advantage going into next year's election.
Many prominent Democrats said that Mr. Bush might be vulnerable, given problems with the economy, and continued American fatalities in Iraq. But they said he could be unseated only by an aggressive, partisan challenge that builds on Democratic anger lingering from the 2000 election, and by a nominee who somehow managed to survive a complicated nominating fight that was pulling their party to the left.
"It's going to be tough," said Walter F. Mondale, the former vice president who lost his challenge to Ronald Reagan in 1984. "You're trying to beat an incumbent who has all this money, and who has got the field all to himself, while all this infighting is going on in the Democratic Party."
Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, said: "It's going to very, very difficult to defeat Bush next year. He will have more money than any candidate in history."
Even at a packed rally for Howard Dean this morning in this community just across the border from Vermont, some Democrats were expressing concern that none of their candidates appeared to have what it would take to defeat Mr. Bush.
"I think it is a weak field," said John Meyer, 41, an architect from Henniker. "A lot of them are lackluster candidates."
Against this daunting general election backdrop, the nominating contest is as unsettled as any Democratic presidential competition in 20 years, with candidates who have struggled for months to win attention from a nation that seems to have things on its mind other than an election that is 15 months away.
For now, Mr. Dean is widely viewed by Democrats as the leading contender in the nine-person field, followed by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.
Their two-way contest within-a contest follows a remarkable surge this summer by Dr. Dean, a physician and former Vermont governor who was once viewed as little more than a one-issue maverick.It also speaks of a shortfall in Mr. Kerry's strategy of clearing the field by presenting himself as the inevitable choice of his party.
But many Democrats express reservations about both these New Englanders, and that is reflected in the failure of either to draw the institutional party support that typically rallies around a perceived winner. Some Democrats worry that Dr. Dean would prove an easy mark for Mr. Bush, given his liberal views and his lack of any experience in foreign affairs; others warn that Mr. Kerry is an awkward public figure who has run a timorous campaign
At least three other Democratic candidates — Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri and Senator John Edwards of North Carolina — have turned their attention on what has become a fight for third place. Their calculation is that Mr. Kerry or Dr. Dean will founder in the opening Democratic contests next January.
"I think it's a three-person race: It's us, Dean and Kerry," said Steve Elemendorf, a senior adviser to Mr. Gephardt, in a formulation that was echoed with only slight variations by advisers to Mr. Lieberman and Mr. Edwards.
The remaining candidates are Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who has yet to show signs of gaining strong support; the Rev. Al Sharpton of New York; Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio; and Carol Moseley Braun, the former senator from Illinois.
Associates of Gen. Wesley K. Clark have said he has told them that he will probably join the race. But aides to most of the other candidates say he is too late to have a good shot at the nomination, and they view him more as competing for a second spot on the ticket.
The candidates are girding for an unusually frantic nomination schedule that starts with the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 19, and could effectively be over by March 2, if not sooner, when 11 states hold contests. Some candidates see opportunity in this confusion: Mr. Lieberman and Mr. Edwards have made the risky decision to endure losses in Iowa and New Hampshire — states where they are weak and that normally help winnow the field — and hold on for later primaries in states more hospitable to them.
Though the Labor Day weekend is a traditional demarcation point in American campaigns, the Democrats have spent much of the past eight months campaigning. They have been making policy speeches, raising money, nailing down supporters and traveling to states like New Hampshire, Iowa, South Carolina, Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma. But they are now preparing to move into a significantly more intense and higher profile part of the race.
The first of six officially sanctioned Democratic debates takes place on Thursday in Albuquerque, N.M. Mr. Gephardt and Mr. Kerry are about to go on the air with television advertisements in early primary states, following Mr. Edwards and Dr. Dean; Mr. Gephardt's advertisements begin on Tuesday in Iowa and New Hampshire.
And over the next two weeks, the last two major Democratic candidates will go through the formality of announcing their candidacy. Mr. Kerry is to make his on Tuesday in South Carolina while Mr. Edwards has scheduled his for Sept. 16 in North Carolina. Mr. Edwards, who was struggling with choosing between running for a second term for Senate or proceeding with a presidential campaign that so far has not taken off, is almost certain to bow out of the Senate race and run for the White House, his aides said. After the 2000 election, Mr. Edwards was viewed by many Democrats as one of the most exciting new faces in the field, but he has since been eclipsed by Mr. Dean and Mr. Kerry.
The fluidity of the contest was underscored this week with a poll in New Hampshire that showed Dr. Dean pulling ahead of Mr. Kerry in a state that Mr. Kerry had all but taken for granted. The results, several Democrats said, were at least partly driven by the fact that Dr. Dean alone has been advertising heavily in New Hampshire over the past month and has been riding a positive wave of national publicity, including cover stories in Time and Newsweek.
Still, it had the effect of gutting Mr. Kerry's pretense of inevitability while thrusting Dr. Dean in the role that Mr. Kerry held last summer: The man most Democrats view as the candidate to beat.
Aides to Dr. Dean's rivals said there was no shortage of issues with which to try to discredit Dr. Dean. They pointed to what they said would be his poor chance of beating Mr. Bush, given his lack of foreign policy experience, stands that could hurt him in Democratic primaries, like his opposition to gun control, and shifts in positions on major issues that his opponents said would undercut his effort to present himself as the straight-talking outsider.
But the unorthodox character of Dr. Dean's candidacy — and the nature of his support from men and women who have been drawn into politics for the first time by his candidacy — has turned Dr. Dean into a difficult target for conventional political attacks.
Aides to his rivals said they had drawn a lesson from Dr. Dean's unsteady appearance on "Meet the Press" in June, which was mocked as near disastrous among party leaders, but now appears to have served to rally his base around him. As a result, Dr. Dean's rivals are all stepping gingerly, waiting for someone else to risk the first shot.
"No one wants to be the person to take on Dean," said Ron Klain, a Democratic consultant who was a senior adviser to Al Gore in 2000.
Dr. Dean's success poses a potentially big problem for Mr. Kerry, and his advisers spent much of the weekend debating how to handle him in the weeks ahead. Many Democrats say it is hard to see how Mr. Kerry could survive losing to Dr. Dean in New Hampshire.
"There's at least a 90 percent likelihood right now that either Dean or Kerry will be the nominee," said Mr. Kerry's campaign manager, Jim Jordan. "And the race is as even as it can be. His advantages are purely stylistic. Kerry's are substantive and experiential."
Dr. Dean's success poses a problem for Mr. Gephardt, underlining what have been the central problems for the candidate that some White House officials once viewed as the probable winner of the nominating contest: Mr. Gephardt is a familiar character at a time when his party is looking for new faces, and he helped Mr. Bush devise the resolution that led to the invasion of Iraq.
"Gephardt has a tired Democratic message," Jane Byle, a retired school librarian, said the other day, after turning out to see Mr. Edwards in Waterloo, Iowa. "We need a more current message."
Mr. Gephardt's advisers say he would almost certainly fold his second bid for the White House should he fail to win Iowa, his neighboring state, which he won when he ran for president in 1988. And many Democrats in Iowa say Dr. Dean would probably defeat Mr. Gephardt if the vote was today.
What is increasingly clear, several Democrats said, is that primary voters are not likely to chose someone who is promising to run a nuanced campaign against Mr. Bush. Dr. Dean has set the tone on that, and the pitch of attacks on Mr. Bush by other Democrats has increased with each new sign of Dr. Dean's success.
"The public is saying they want to hear strong arguments," Mr. Mondale said. "There's an anger I hear among Democrats: They want a fight. They want to see Bush and his policies challenged in a direct, vigorous way. I think Dean has gotten strength by his willingness to do so.
"My impression is that Dean has been very good for Kerry — but I'm sure Kerry doesn't feel that way," Mr. Mondale said. "Kerry got into the race and he was very correct and almost cautious, feeling his way, and not coming across very strongly. In the last two or three weeks, you've seen a new kind of Kerry developing. I suspect that Dean's challenge had something to do with that."
In Iowa, Gov. Tom Vilsack said in an interview that Democrats in his state were increasingly heartened about the political landscape next year. He chastised Democrats who bemoaned the health of their party and its candidates.
"Democrats in Iowa and across the country recognize that this is a vulnerable president," Mr. Vilsack said. "The president is going to have to defend his policies. He isn't going to be able to get by with platitudes like compassionate conservatism."
One prominent Democratic elected official said that while Mr. Bush was "eminently beatable," the Democratic nominating process seemed nowhere near producing someone who could do the job. "The trouble in 2004 is not that Bush is going to be strong, but rather than we are going to be weak," this official said. |
