Slipping in the polls, Dean tries to buff outsider image
realcities.com
By Thomas Fitzgerald
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Posted on Mon, Jan. 12, 2004
MOUNT PLEASANT, Iowa - Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean's face is plastered on the newsmagazine covers and he's been The Next Big Thing for a long time, the acknowledged front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president.
But he began his final week of campaigning before the Jan. 19 Iowa caucuses Monday portraying himself as an underdog.
"These front runners" have been ganging up on him, Dean complained to the audience at a pancake breakfast at Central College in Pella.
"What we're seeing in this campaign in the last week is a struggle for the direction of the country," he said. "And it's a struggle between us and the Washington politicians and the established press. They have attacked us for months, every time they have an opportunity, but we are stronger than they are."
The latest polls have shown Dean's healthy lead in Iowa melting, and he is locked in a statistical dead heat with the old Iowa warhorse, Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri. Not far behind are Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.
Dean also leads in the polls in New Hampshire, which holds its primary Jan. 27. But the other three are working for a strong finish in Iowa that will catapult them into New Hampshire or give them thrust in states that hold primaries a week later. As a result, Iowa is becoming its own reality TV show, with candidates bad-mouthing each other, wooing voters and hoping to survive into the next round.
Dean has had a rocky week, beginning with unearthed tapes from a Canadian TV interview four years ago in which he said that the Iowa caucuses were dominated by "special interests." He's also been under fire from his rivals for everything from his call to repeal President Bush's tax cuts - such a move would slam the middle class, they say - to his temperament.
"It's funny, two years out, time moved fast," Dean said after flipping pancakes in Waterloo on Sunday. "Now it's the slowest week of my life."
Kerry on Monday won the endorsement of Christie Vilsack, the wife of Gov. Tom Vilsack. Though the governor himself has decided to remain neutral in the contest, the first lady's support adds a well-known name to Kerry's list of state endorsements.
Gephardt, meanwhile, planned to spend the next two days outside Iowa giving speeches and attending fund-raisers and rallies in New York, Washington state, California and Michigan. Aides said the trip displayed the campaign's confidence in Gephardt's standing in Iowa and in his need to focus on a national campaign.
Some familiar with the campaign questioned the strategy, saying Gephardt should remain in the state where his candidacy would be made or broken.
After two years of effort, hundreds of speeches, dozens of trips to every wide spot in the road, success in Iowa for Dean may well come down to how well he can reposition himself in the week ahead from front-runner to outspoken outsider who provides the starkest contrast to Bush.
Advisers say the prime directive is to fire Dean's base so the ground troops of volunteers can turn them out to their neighborhood caucuses.
"He has the opportunity to remind people why they're for him, that he's different from the others," said senior Dean adviser Gina Glantz.
Edwards, a successful litigation lawyer before he ran for the Senate in 1998, is trying to buff up his outsider image, too. Unlike the other top contenders, he argued, he has not made a career of politics.
Dean, who has served in Vermont politics since 1982, mocked the assertion Monday, saying: "If you're a Washington politician you're a Washington politician, whether you've been there for four years or 27 years."
Edwards replied: "If Iowa caucus-goers want someone who's been in politics for 20 years, and is the best at political sniping, they have other choices."
Everywhere he went Monday, Dean reminded voters that his closest rivals - Kerry, Gephardt and Edwards - voted to authorize Bush to go to war with Iraq and supported the unpopular No Child Left Behind law, which toughened academic standards for schools without extra funding. He repeated the terms "Democratic establishment" and "change" like mantras.
But some of the attacks from rivals were taking root. For instance, a woman at the Sigourney Senior Center asked Dean whether he was going to cut Social Security or Medicare, as he picked at a lunch of hamburgers, tater tots, beans and canned peaches along with two dozen local residents.
"Don't believe it," Dean said. "They're filling me full of buckshot."
The question echoed an attack that Gephardt has been pressing on the stump and in mailings in recent days, referring to statements Dean made as governor that Medicare needed to be trimmed in order to balance the federal budget. Gephardt also says that Dean's so-far undefined promise of payroll tax relief would jeopardize Social Security; both are potent points in a state with the third highest percentage of senior citizens, after Florida and Pennsylvania.
Richard McGrath, who heard Dean at the Pella stop, is torn between the former governor and Sen. John Kerry. He said he loves Dean's rhetoric but worries that the angry populist approach might not play in the South and elsewhere.
"It may make you feel good hearing all that vituperative stuff - it's cathartic," said McGrath, 50, a communications teacher. "But I don't know if he can beat Bush."
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(Knight Ridder Newspapers correspondents Matt Stearns of the Kansas City Star with the Gephardt campaign, Tim Funk of the Charlotte Observer with Edwards and Dana Hull of the San Jose Mercury News with Wesley Clark in New Hampshire contributed to this report.) |
