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Politics : HOWARD DEAN -THE NEXT PRESIDENT? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (393)	11/13/2003 1:40:16 AM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 3079

Page 3 A Gephardt ally said Rivera's support forced an endorsement of Dean, noting that Stern preferred to keep the union neutral. "Dennis was the one driving this," the Gephardt ally said. "I think Stern was in the back seat." Stern, he added, preferred to remain neutral. "They are right in saying I was one of the later, rather than sooner, to the endorsement -- not necessarily to Dean but whether we should endorse anybody," Stern said. But he said the longer the process went on and the more he heard from local leaders, the more comfortable he was endorsing Dean. "Anybody who sat in that board meeting [last week] would have known endorsing Dean was the right decision," Stern said. Dean's AFSCME endorsement was even more unlikely. More than anything, McEntee was looking for a candidate with electability, a plan for winning and the financial resources to get there. "We started out, and we thought Kerry had all the bona fides," he said. As the Kerry campaign failed to live up to its early-year billing, eclipsed in part by Dean, McEntee's interest cooled. "The traction just wasn't able to hit," he said of Kerry. Clark then caught his eye. "We saw Clark as a distinct possibility in terms of competing directly with Bush, particularly on the terrorism issue," he said. "We had many meetings with him. We had him go over to the AFL-CIO and meet with the political committee. But then we got, I guess you would say, somewhat disturbed by his organizational infrastructure." The fatal blow for Clark came when his campaign team decided last month to pull out of Iowa. The night the news was breaking, Clark called McEntee to tell him. McEntee told him he was making a terrible "strategic mistake." Last week, a Clark campaign official told another labor official that no one on the campaign had known how important Iowa was to AFSCME and McEntee -- further proof to AFSCME leaders of the weaknesses inside Clark's operation. Clark campaign spokesman Matt Bennett said that by the time the Iowa decision was made, campaign officials were well aware of the importance of Iowa to McEntee. But campaign officials decided that the costs of competing in Iowa and possibly finishing badly outweighed the costs of not getting AFSCME's endorsement.