Dean Affirms His Ties to Clinton, Prompted by Lieberman Swipe

A week that began with the Democratic presidential candidates reeling from the potential political impact of Saddam Hussein’s capture is ending with a squabble between two of them over the place of Bill Clinton in the pantheon of party heroes.

On Thursday, Howard Dean called attention to Clinton’s declaration in 1996 of the end of “big government.” Dean said his election would “represent the era of fairer government.” On Friday, Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut pounced on Dean’s remarks as an attack on Clinton’s centrist policies.

By the end of the day, Dean and Clinton had spoken, as they have throughout the campaign -- but this time amid swirling debate.

It was a “very friendly conversation,” Dean spokesman Jay Carson said. He provided no details but said Dean and Clinton spoke for 10 to 15 minutes.

In remarks in Newark, Del., as he toured a technology plant, Lieberman, who was Al Gore’s vice presidential running mate in 2000, warned against creating divisions within the Democratic Party. Taking aim equally at President Bush and Dean, Lieberman said: “I don’t want to replace one divisive leader with another divisive leader.”

With his attack, Lieberman continued his effort to depict himself as the voice of the party’s mainstream, and to portray Dean as too far to the left.

The former Vermont governor issued a sharply worded response.

The campaign accused Dean’s critics of engaging “in desperate distortions and negative attacks” while trying to create a division between Dean and Clinton. And in a subtle nod to his critics, Dean modified one of his standard campaign lines Friday to include an admiring reference of the former president.

Dean told a crowd in Burlington, Iowa, “We’re going to take back the party of F.D.R., Harry Truman and,” he added, “Bill Clinton.”

If nothing else, the back-and-forth showed an energized Lieberman somehow taking strength from the adversity of Gore’s surprise endorsement of Dean and the prospect that Hussein’s capture was suddenly turning Dean’s opposition to the Iraq war into a political liability.

“He’s got nothing to lose. He’s going nowhere in the polls,” Philip Klinkner, a professor of government at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., said this week.

Clinton, who has endorsed none of the candidates, has avoided any public suggestion of favoring or disfavoring anyone.

“Ignore their spin,” the Dean campaign said, adding that the candidate “has great respect and admiration for President Clinton and what he accomplished as president, and any suggestion to the contrary is nonsense.”

The campaign also said Dean had supported Clinton’s presidential agenda, fought for the Clinton health-care program that was soundly defeated, and that Dean had already declared that if elected, he would ask Clinton to be his Middle East envoy. The campaign distributed on-the-record statements Dean had made lauding Clinton, reaching back to 1998 and also offered three more recent examples, and three recent statements Clinton made speaking well of Dean.

In his speech Thursday in Manchester, N. H., Dean had sought to marry the various elements of his domestic policies into what he called a “new social contract for working families.”

The four principal elements were guaranteed access to quality health care, affordable child-care, affordable college tuition and pension protection.

Dean’s policy director, Jeremy Ben-Ami, former domestic policy advisor to Clinton, said in a telephone interview Friday evening that “in no way were we trying to pick any sort of fight with Bill Clinton or the Clinton record.”

Dean, meanwhile, won the endorsement of New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey. His was Dean’s first gubernatorial endorsement.

Times staff writer Mark Z. Barabak in Iowa contributed to this report.