Opponents Lob Few Shells at Dean on War

In their final arguments to voters before the Iowa and New Hampshire contests this month, the Democrats chasing Howard Dean are attacking the front-runner on virtually every aspect of his temperament and agenda.

Except one: the centerpiece issue of his presidential campaign.

While peppering Dean daily over his views on issues like Medicare, trade and taxes and questioning whether he exudes too much anger to effectively run against President Bush, the main Democratic contenders except Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut have declined to challenge him over his opposition to the war with Iraq, the cause at his candidacy’s core.

Apart from Lieberman, Dean’s principal rivals are betting they can peel enough voters away from him by pressing these other issues without provoking the antiwar activists who comprise a powerful Democratic constituency, especially in Iowa. The Democrats continued that pattern on Thursday during a debate sponsored by National Public Radio in Des Moines.

“We’re not going to win Iowa talking about Saddam Hussein,” said a top advisor to Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, Dean’s closest competitor in Iowa. “We’re going to win talking about Medicare and trade.”

Yet some analysts say Gephardt and the other major candidates who backed the war -- Sens. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina -- may be making a major error by effectively conceding the argument over the war to Dean.

“Except for Lieberman, this has been a fundamental strategic mistake by Dean’s rivals: to concede his premise by not contesting it, that somehow he was right on the war and they were wrong,” said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank.

“Substantively and politically, they ought to challenge that proposition because it is the underpinning of his political strength.”

The question for Dean’s rivals is whether they can overcome his lead by raising doubts on other fronts if they fail to dent his insistence that he was right, and they were wrong, on the most emotional issue in the Democratic race.

“They are scared because of their belief that since the most vocal activists are supremely hostile to the war, they can’t win the nomination if they alienate them too much,” said a Democratic strategist supporting one of Dean’s rivals.

Recent national Gallup polls have found that about 35% of Democrats think the United States was right to go to war with Iraq, while just under 60% think it was wrong.

But Marshall argued that despite such attitudes among party members, Dean’s rivals could sell their backing of the war by portraying the mission to overthrow President Saddam Hussein as a crucial part of a broader strategy to protect Americans against terrorism.

It is a difficult but necessary position for these other Democratic candidates to take, Marshall said, because if they don’t, they allow Dean to control the debate.

“What they should be saying [to Dean] is, ‘You thought Saddem was a sufficient threat in 1991 to go to war. What’s changed?’ ”

Marshall was referring to the support Dean expressed for the Persian Gulf War.

For Dean, the war has been both sword and shield in the race. He regularly uses it to accuse his rivals of lacking the judgment and backbone to confront Bush. And he has cited the war to rebut charges that he lacks the foreign policy experience to serve as commander-in-chief.

As he told Florida Democrats last month: “If all these folks came up with the conclusion we ought to go to war in Iraq and support President Bush ... I don’t think that’s the kind of foreign policy experience we want in the White House.”

When asked, Gephardt, Edwards and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Kerry have defended their votes in 2002 authorizing the invasion. Retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, though he earlier sent some mixed signals, now joins Dean in insisting the war was a mistake.

And the leading Democrats universally criticized Dean for his recent assertion that Hussein’s capture had not made America safer.

But among the Democrats, only Lieberman has consistently taken the next step and argued that Dean was misguided to oppose the war.

If anything, the other candidates have blurred their differences with Dean over the war. While playing down (or completely ignoring) their vote for the invasion in their stump speeches, all have moved closer to Dean by denouncing Bush for his handling of the reconstruction in Iraq.

Gephardt has tried the hardest to change the subject, questioning Dean’s support for Medicare, his budget priorities and his views on trade. Edwards has emphasized his contention that Democrats need more than the “anger” he says Dean represents to win in November.

Kerry, who has appeared the most tortured over the war itself, has also been the most ambivalent dealing with Dean on the issue. At times Kerry has tried to narrow his difference with him on Iraq, at others to widen it.

Kerry has said Dean was as willing as the Democrats he criticizes to “give authority to the president to go to war,” because the former Vermont governor endorsed a legislative alternative that, like the congressional resolution that passed, could have provided the legal basis for invasion. At other points, Kerry has edged to Dean’s right by arguing he would cede too much control over U.S. foreign policy to the United Nations.

Yet Kerry has not tried to make the case that Dean was wrong to oppose the war -- except for an oblique reference after Hussein was captured in mid-December, when Kerry said the Democrats needed a candidate “who got this policy right.”

In Kerry’s case, such reluctance may reflect his own mixed emotions about the war and its aftermath, aides acknowledge. “Given how betrayed Kerry feels by the war, he’s not going to make a hard sell against opposing it,” said one top advisor.

But the candidates’ refusal to challenge Dean also reflects their belief that they cannot win a head-on argument with him over the war, especially in Iowa, where peace groups are an influential constituency.

The Dean camp believes his rivals face a Catch-22: either allow his position on the war to go unchallenged, or provoke a debate they believe Dean will win.

But not all analysts agree that defending the war as a component of an aggressive strategy against terrorism would be impossible to sell even in Iowa, where the winner may need to attract only about 30% of the vote.

An Iowa poll recently conducted for one of the candidates found that less than half of likely caucus participants thought the U.S. should have ruled out war with Iraq under any circumstance; almost as many said they believed the U.S. could not exclude war, but should have built a more effective international coalition before invading.

“Right before the war, I’d say Democrats were divided: one-third opposed, one-third supporting and one-third divided,” said Gordon R. Fischer, the state Democratic Party chairman. “I actually think that’s fairly consistent even today.”

He said there “are definitely folks out there who support the war; they are just less vocal than folks who opposed the war.”

Some of that sentiment was evident last weekend, when Gephardt campaigned in Baxter, Iowa, a small town that is home to many United Auto Workers members who work in a nearby Maytag plant. Mayor Doug Bishop, a UAW official who is supporting Gephardt, expressed impatience with Dean’s continued denunciation of the war. “Once your troops are over there,” he said, “you support them whether you agree with [the policy] or not.”