Desperate to Stop Dean, His Rivals Escalate Criticism

Inexperienced. Unelectable. Shifty. Insular in his cultural views. Elitist in his economic views.

Those are the arguments Howard Dean’s rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination are hurling against him as they try to slow his accelerating momentum in the final five weeks before voting begins.

Other top-tier candidates in the race -- and two of the three long-shots -- are now trying to raise doubts about Dean on a panoramic array of issues. The attacks are coming from so many angles in part because they are shaped by his rivals’ contrasting calculations about where they might draw their own support. Yet the intensifying assault is powered by the common belief that if someone can’t find a chink in Dean’s armor soon, he may be impossible to stop.

“There’s a very narrow window for everyone else,” a senior advisor to one of Dean’s rivals said.

With the former Vermont governor still leading in the polls as the initial contests approach next month in Iowa and New Hampshire, and with him getting endorsed by former Vice President Al Gore this week, the barrage against Dean has intensified.

Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt is mailing fliers to Democrats in Iowa, condemning Dean’s views on Social Security and Medicare. On Friday, he also lashed Dean over a report that he had provided lucrative corporate tax breaks to encourage insurance companies to relocate to Vermont. Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts this week sharpened his accusation that Dean flip-flopped on the war in Iraq, the same charge Dean has used against Kerry for months.

On Friday, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina delivered a speech charging that Dean was too angry and too narrow in his appeal to beat President Bush next year.

“We need a leader who can bring people together,” Edwards said at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club. “We need a leader who can reach out to more than just the party faithful, but to every American in every region of this country.”

And in an interview with the Los Angeles Times this week, retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark of Arkansas emphatically escalated his criticism of Dean’s foreign policy record and agenda. “There’s no depth in his foreign policy views to my knowledge,” Clark said. “He gets advice from people and he spits it out.”

Amid this cross-fire, Dean is giving as good as he gets. After months of using his position on the war in Iraq as a sword against his rivals, he is now raising it as a shield to blunt virtually all of the attacks against him.

Largely because of his opposition to the war, said David Loebsack, a political scientist at Cornell College in Iowa who is backing Dean, the candidate’s core supporters saw him as “a man of conviction” -- a connection that hardens them against the proliferating criticisms.

“A lot of people are willing to cut him a tremendous amount of slack ... because they are hungry for a Democrat they can believe in, and they believe in him,” Loebsack said.

These attacks could come back to haunt the Democrats if Dean wins the nomination and Republicans recycle some of them against him next year. But the Democrats chasing Dean can’t afford the luxury of that long view.

Gephardt has probably developed the most focused and targeted attack. Beginning with a September speech in Iowa, Gephardt has tried to portray Dean as an economic elitist hostile to core Democratic social programs.

Gephardt opened the assault in September by citing a series of comments in which Dean expressed support for cuts in Medicare and Social Security during the budget fights between the GOP-led Congress and then President Clinton in the mid-1990s. Gephardt followed with a November speech, again in Iowa, in which he accused Dean of attempting as the governor of Vermont to cut education, welfare and programs for the elderly.

These arguments -- including Gephardt’s parallel charge that voters can’t trust Dean’s conversion to skepticism of free trade -- are aimed primarily at blue-collar and elderly voters who are most responsive to bread-and-butter arguments. They are far more plentiful in the Iowa caucus than the New Hampshire primary and have shown less attraction to Dean in the early states than college-educated voters. Even Iowa Dean supporters believe this focus on lunch-bucket issues has nicked him in the state.

But it’s not clear whether the assault from Gephardt and other Democrats will hurt Dean enough to overcome his other advantages. A Pew Research Center poll last week showed Gephardt running even with Dean in Iowa among voters without a college education, the principal target for Gephardt’s assault.

Dean led, 29% to 21%, among Iowa voters overall because he held a 2-to-1 advantage over Gephardt among college-educated voters.

Kerry’s camp believes two keys to Dean’s strength with those upscale Democrats are his opposition to the war in Iraq and his reputation as a John McCain-like straight shooter. Kerry this week has targeted both of those pillars by intensifying his charge that Dean sent conflicting signals about the Iraq war in the fall 2002 period when Congress approved the resolution authorizing the invasion.

Clark’s camp, which has been much more reticent about engaging the front-runner, also challenged Dean’s experience and electoral viability, using arguments meant to highlight the former general’s own potential strengths in the race.

In a conference call with reporters on Wednesday, several of Clark’s Southern supporters warned that Dean could lose so badly in the region -- and other culturally conservative parts of the country like the Midwest -- that he would drag down Democratic candidates for the House and Senate.

“If Gov. Dean gets the nomination, his base will force him to stay in the left lane,” charged Rep. Lincoln Davis (D-Tenn.). “If that happens, it will be another George McGovern race.”

Clark charged that Dean’s prescription for handling Iraq today -- centered on transferring authority for designing a new government to the United Nations -- was unrealistic.

“The real thing the Democrats need to be focusing on,” Clark said, “is one clear fact: ‘I told you so’ is not a policy ... We are going to have a very hard time [beating Bush] with a candidate who has no foreign policy experience or background or military service whatsoever.”

Dean has responded to the specifics of these charges, arguing, for instance, that he protected social programs as Vermont governor and endorsed Medicare reductions only to stabilize the program for the long-term, not to retrench it. He says he qualified his support for free trade after being exposed through the campaign to its effect in the industrial heartland.

But at a more basic level, Dean has used the war, either directly or indirectly, to rebut all of these attacks. “If all those folks came up with the conclusion that we ought to go to war in Iraq and support President Bush -- I don’t think that’s the kind of foreign experience we want in the White House,” Dean said recently at the Florida Democratic Party convention.

Meanwhile, the jabs at Dean keep coming. Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut says Dean is offering a retrograde liberalism that would doom the party to defeat if he wins the nomination, and he is planning a speech Tuesday criticizing his views on taxes and trade.

Edwards on Friday derided Dean’s recent suggestion that he could win Southern voters by downplaying cultural issues and emphasizing economic concerns.

“You can’t tell voters what to believe or what to vote on,” Edwards said. “It doesn’t work that way in the South, the North, the East or here in the West.”

The Rev. Al Sharpton of New York and Ohio Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, two long-shot liberal candidates, have attacked Dean on such issues as welfare reform, affirmative action and his support for a continuing American military presence in Iraq.

The question for Dean’s rivals may be whether the proliferation of so many arguments against him creates a synergy that magnifies their effect, or a dissonance that undermines it.