Harkin’s Heated Attacks on Rivals May Fail to Catch Fire

Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin was halfway through a routine afternoon of handshaking with voters when a woman asked him how government should handle fathers who fail to pay child support.

“I’ve learned a lot about that issue from my wife,” Harkin said, gesturing to Ruth Harkin, who stood next to him. “Ruth used to be a county attorney back in Iowa and went after a lot of those guys and put some of them in jail. And wouldn’t it be great to have a First Lady in the White House who had the experience of going after people and putting them in jail?”

Perhaps no other presidential candidate in history has mentioned jailing people as an attractive quality for a future First Lady. But the remark was vintage Tom Harkin, a man who sees the world sharply divided into good and bad, black and white, us versus them.

That world view has been dramatically on display during the past week as Harkin has taken on the role of street fighter of the Democratic primary race, lashing out constantly at his rivals.

But his relentless attacks, many of which have little hard evidence behind them, seem to have backfired. At one press conference, Harkin fended off a question about the effectiveness of the attacks by saying “our tracking polls show us going up every day.” When a reporter pointed out that Harkin’s New Hampshire campaign manager had said one day earlier that the campaign had done no tracking polls, Harkin conceded: “We’re not doing our own tracking polls, but we’re following other tracking polls” conducted by the media.

Reminded that those polls showed little upward movement for him as Tuesday’s vote approaches, Harkin said: “Well, I’ll tell you, some of these polls read the waves on the water, but they don’t understand the currents underneath. Different polls show different things.”

In fact, most polls have been fairly consistent about Harkin, showing him stuck at about 10%, more or less tied with the other U.S. senator in the race, Nebraska’s Bob Kerrey.

Tracking polls taken in the final days of New Hampshire campaigns are notoriously unreliable, and Harkin’s sharply worded attacks on President Bush have established some solid support for him among labor groups and traditional liberals. But these voters are a relatively small segment of the electorate in this moderately conservative state.

The chief recipients of Harkin’s ire in recent days have been his fellow Democratic candidates, particularly the leaders in the polls--former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton--attacks that Tsongas has begun to treat with humor.

For the last few days, Tsongas has abandoned his contact lenses for glasses after an eye injury. Asked what happened, Tsongas smiled mischievously and said: “I was going to say Tom Harkin did it.”