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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (366)	1/30/2004 11:51:26 PM
From: ChinuSFO	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 81568

Dean Vows to Be Kerry's Chief Rival By NEDRA PICKLER ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Howard Dean's goal is to keep his battered presidential bid alive until the Wisconsin primary on Feb. 17, where he plans to stand as John Kerry's chief rival for the nomination, his new campaign chief said Friday. "Let the conventional wisdom and the media declare this race over," Roy Neel, chief executive officer of the Dean campaign, wrote in a memo. "We're going to let the people decide." Dean, already a loser in New Hampshire and Iowa, has said he does not need to win any of the seven states who vote in the next round on Tuesday. He said his goal is to stay in the race by winning as many delegates as possible in those states _ South Carolina, Missouri, Arizona, Delaware, New Mexico, North Dakota and Oklahoma. Neel's memo outlines a risky and untested strategy. He predicted at least one of Dean's opponents will be eliminated from the race next week, while the media and party insiders will declare Kerry the winner. But he said the Massachusetts senator will probably have less than one-third of the delegates he needs to win the nomination. "We may not win any February 3 state, but even third place finishes will allow us to move forward, continue to amass delegates in Virginia and Tennessee on February 10, and then strongly challenge Kerry in Wisconsin," Neel wrote. "Regardless of who takes first place in these states, we think that after Wisconsin we'll get Kerry in the open field." Neel said Wisconsin is the right place for Dean to turn the campaign around because he has strong support there, and it kicks off a two-week campaign for more than 1,100 delegates on March 2, also known as Super Tuesday. The presidential nominee will be selected this summer with 2,162 delegates at the Democratic National Convention. Democratic delegates are awarded proportionately based on the popular vote cast within individual congressional districts as well as a state as a whole. Dean hopes to gain delegates with at least 15 percent of the popular vote in most or all the congressional districts in the states voting Tuesday. Dean raised more than $40 million last year, the most of any Democrat in the race, but he spent most of it on his losses in Iowa and New Hampshire. Neel said the campaign has raised about $2.6 million since the Iowa loss. That isn't enough for Dean to compete with advertising in all the states next Tuesday. So he is skipping ad buys to instead focus his resources on Feb. 7 caucuses in Michigan and Washington state and Maine's contest Feb. 8. Paid advertising will be less of a factor in March, Neel predicted, because candidates won't be able to afford to buy ads in all the states that fall on Super Tuesday and beyond. Such a strategy has never been tried, Neel wrote. Neel said Dean will continue to try to distinguish himself as the outsider in the race and Kerry as a Washington insider with few accomplishments during a 20-year Senate career. On Friday, Dean criticized Kerry for only having sponsored only nine bills that were signed into law. "I think we need a doer, not a talker as the nominee of this party," Dean said, campaigning in Columbia, S.C. He said 102,000 children in South Carolina don't have health insurance, compared to 5,000 in Vermont, where he served as governor for nearly 12 years. "If Senator Kerry had accomplished anything in health care, he ought to be able to explain to the people of South Carolina how come there are so many uninsured kids here and there aren't in my state," Dean said. At a later meeting in St. Louis, Dean criticized his Washington rivals for voting for President Bush's education plan. Dean said Bush based the plan on the Houston school system, which was later found to have falsified rates for school violence, dropouts and college aspiration. "The president's plan for education is a lot like his plan for the economy," Dean said. "His plan for the economy is based on a venerable institution in Houston, the Enron corporation, and his plan for education is based on the crooked Houston school district." maconch.com