Nobody is going to believe Kerry, Clark and Lieberman when they say they are endorsing Dean. Just too much bad blood out there,
Democrats' Plan for Early Nominee May Be Costly
By ADAM NAGOURNEY - New York Times
DES MOINES, Dec. 30 — When Democratic Party officials devised their primary calendar for 2004, they produced a rapid-fire voting schedule intended to quickly produce a nominee who could escape the battering that has hobbled so many presidential candidates over the years.
But less than three weeks before the first vote in the nominating process, the caucuses here on Jan. 19, it appears possible that the party has achieved just half of its goal. The Democrats may get their early nominee, party officials say, but it now appears likely to be someone bruised by the nominating fight and confronted with the challenge of uniting a deeply divided party.
In a classic case of unintended consequences, a process intended to produce unity, a strong candidate, and a compelling platform to take against President Bush has so far produced a campaign that many Democrats describe as strikingly harsh and marked more by daily bickering than sweeping themes or compelling new ideas on where to take the country.
While it is hardly unusual for political contests to get rough, it rarely happens this early. And it almost never happens in the Iowa caucuses, a state where Democrats say, or at least used to say, that voters punish candidates who engage in negative campaigning.
At one point here this week, Howard Dean, a leader in many polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, begged the party's national chairman to step in and end the attacks against him that he said could end up serving only the White House, should he be his party's nominee. The plea earned him mocking rebukes from his opponents, including a sarcastic warning from Senator Joseph I. Lieberman that Dr. Dean would "melt" in the glare of a White House attack.
At the same time, in what Democrats described as a matter of rising concern, none of the candidates have managed in this harsh environment to become identified with the kind of sweeping election theme or signature proposal that has been central to successful presidential campaigns for the past 20 years, though Dr. Dean did rise on an antiwar stance.
Bill Clinton captured the White House in 1992 with a platform of "opportunity and responsibility" and a promise of health care for all, while George W. Bush won on a pledge of "compassionate conservatism" that included education reform.
"The nastiness of this campaign makes it difficult to go to an overarching message," said Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska senator who ran for president in 1992 on a pledge for national health care coverage.
This verdict comes after a long year of preliminary skirmishing. Now the battle among nine candidates moves into a critical phase with the start of the new year and with a rush of contests that Democrats say is likely to produce a nominee by mid-March.
By many measures, Dr. Dean, who a year ago was dismissed by his opponents as little more than a vanity candidate, enters this most visible stretch of the contest as the dominant contender. He has a significant lead in most polls in New Hampshire, which has a primary the week after the caucuses. And many Democrats say they believe he is, at least today, positioned here to defeat Representative Richard A. Gephardt, a strong contender in Iowa. Mr. Gephardt, from the neighboring state of Missouri, won in Iowa in 1988 when he made his first presidential bid.
Should Dr. Dean score successive victories here and in New Hampshire, he may prove difficult to stop.
That said, Dr. Dean has, rolling into this high-scrutiny period, made a number of statements that underscored concerns among many Democrats about how he would hold up against Mr. Bush. Most recently was a quickly retracted suggestion that he would withhold any judgment on the punishment Osama bin Laden deserved pending a determination by the judicial system.
In Iowa and New Hampshire, Mr. Gephardt and Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts are hoping that the questions about how strong a candidate Dr. Dean would be against Mr. Bush will benefit them by unsettling Democrats who have said that unseating the president is their priority.
And in the event that Dr. Dean still emerges strongly from those two states, three other Democrats are looking to become his main opponent as the race swings South: Gen. Wesley K. Clark, Mr. Lieberman and Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.
Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic national chairman, dismissed the concerns about the tenor of the race. In an interview, Mr. McAuliffe predicted the party would rally around the winner and the candidate would wind up with the kind of big ideas needed to make a case against Mr. Bush.
"Listen, we will be unified," he said. "All the candidates are going to come together. There is a visceral dislike of George Bush and it's going to bring these guys together."
"I am telling you, with the new calendar we are going to have an early nominee," he said. "We could not have a food fight going through the spring of 2004."
Yet the evidence here to date — a typical e-mail message sent out on Tuesday was headlined, "Gephardt Responds to Dean's Latest Outlandish Assertion" — suggests that the food fight started early this year. And some Democrats expressed concern that this would undermine both the eventual nominee and the party's hopes of unity.
"Dean continues to run essentially a negative campaign, and most of the others except for Edwards are chasing him down that hole," said Bruce Reed, the president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council and a frequent critic of Dr. Dean. Mr. Edwards has methodically sought to avoid engaging the other candidates.
"Rank-and-file Democrats, whatever frustration they have with their party leadership, they don't like all this internecine warfare," Mr. Reed said. "Most of them want to see a positive vision."
Dr. Dean's complaints notwithstanding, many Democrats said it had been his campaign — the hard-hitting outsider mocking the Washington Democratic establishment candidates to approving cheers — that set the tone.
Those attacks have rankled his opponents, and raised, or lowered, the bar on campaign discourse, several Democrats said. At the same time, this fast-moving calendar has turned up the pressure on Democrats to move earlier rather than later to discredit him.
And many Democrats warned that the combination of these early attacks, and the failure of any candidates to stake out dramatic new ground, could prove a problem to whomever the eventual nominee is.
The most dramatic policy speech of the year, several Democrats said, was Mr. Gephardt's proposal to provide health care to all Americans, a speech that took place eight months ago.
Some campaign officials argued that it remained early in the race, and that there was plenty of time for a candidate to come up with the kind of campaign appeal to take to victory this November.
"I think a lot of this has to do with the calendar," said Eli Segal, the campaign chairman for General Clark, who played a similar role for Mr. Clinton 1992.
"It's very hard to develop substantive ideas to distinguish yourself in the crowd with the rush of early primaries and all these debates," Mr. Segal said. "It's made for commonality of views."
General Clark's communications director, Matthew Bennett, called back later to say that the general would soon break the ice. "Wait one week and we'll have a big idea coming out," Mr. Bennett said. "I can't give it out yet, but it's not quite cooked."
Others suggested that the overriding concern this year with national security and the war in Iraq had forced Democrats to be responsive and made it difficult for them to break through with the kind of issues that might play to their strength.
"The nation's focus has been so much on foreign affairs that it's pretty difficult to come up with a domestic issue that is going to trump invading Iraq or finding Hussein," said Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa, a Democrat. "I think that will happen."
But others suggested that the state of the race reflected the difficult situation the Democratic Party faced being out of power in the White House and both chambers of Congress and without any clear new intellectual leaders to replace Mr. Clinton.
At the same time, the White House has made a systematic — and some Democrats said successful — effort to blunt the edge on such traditional Democratic issues as prescription drug benefits for the elderly. In that case the White House signed into law a program passed by the Republican-led Congress.
"The Democratic debate doesn't feel fresh because the terms so far have been set by Clinton and Bush," said Simon Rosenberg, a former adviser to Mr. Clinton who now heads the New Democrat Network, a group of moderate Democrats. "It has been derivative of Clinton and reactive to Bush."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |
