Democrats Say Answers Needed, Not Anger

Jabbing at front-runner Howard Dean, two rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination told a packed partisan dinner crowd here Saturday night that the party would need more than anger at President Bush to retake the White House.

Both Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina implied that Dean, whose sharp denunciations of Bush have electrified many Democrats, was offering a message that could not win next year.

“We need to offer answers, not just anger,” Kerry told the roughly 7,500 Democratic loyalists who jammed a downtown auditorium for the state party’s annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner.

Referring to the state caucuses on Jan. 19 that begin the nomination process, Kerry added: “So Iowa, don’t just send them a message next January; send them a president.”

Likewise, Edwards declared: “We are all angry with George Bush. We should be angry with him.... [But] if we are the party of anger in 2004, we will not win.”

Except for those remarks, the candidates focused their fire on Bush rather than each other at the high-profile gathering, which drew even more attention than usual thanks to the master of ceremonies, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. In some ways, the candidates undercut their suggestion that Dean was excessively angry by denouncing Bush themselves in pointed terms that underscored the influence the former Vermont governor has exerted on the rest of the field.

In his remarks, Dean suggested that his rivals had failed to oppose Bush forcefully enough on issues such as the war with Iraq and education reform.

He said U.S. troops were ensnarled in Iraq “not only because of George Bush.... We’re there because we didn’t fight hard enough to stop him.”

But mostly he avoided criticizing them, even declaring at one point that any of them would make a better president than Bush.

Instead, Dean, who had the largest contingent of supporters in the hall, offered a message of empowerment to his backers, telling them over and over again, “You have the power.”

“You have the power to take back this party and make it stand for something again,” he said.

The dinner highlighted a weekend that was part political convention and part carnival. The candidates and their supporters swarmed over Des Moines all day Saturday, waving signs, chanting at each other, marching and cheering at boisterous rallies.

The dinner at Veterans Memorial Auditorium was filled with activists who paid between $40 for a balcony seat and $5,000 for a table near the stage. The evening raised more than $300,000 for the state Democratic Party.

Traditionally, the dinner has marked a milestone in the state’s caucus campaign.

This year’s race has developed into a battle between Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri and Dean, with Kerry looming behind them.

A poll conducted this month by the Des Moines Register of likely caucus-goers showed Gephardt with 27%, Dean with 20%, Kerry at 15% and Edwards at 5%.

Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who have pulled out of the state to focus on New Hampshire, drew 5% and 4% respectively.

Ohio Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun and the Rev. Al Sharpton all drew 3% or less.

Polls earlier this year showed Dean with a slight lead over Gephardt, who won the caucus in his unsuccessful 1988 bid for the Democratic nomination. But Gephardt has regained ground here by pounding Dean over comments during the mid-1990s, when he expressed support for cutting the growth in spending on Medicare.

Dean signaled a new aggressiveness in his response to Gephardt late last week with a mailing to Iowa Democrats that contrasts Dean’s opposition to the war in Iraq with Gephardt’s prominent support for it.

The mailing highlights a picture of Gephardt in the Rose Garden with Bush after the passage last year of the congressional resolution authorizing the invasion of Iraq and declares that Gephardt “stood shoulder to shoulder with President Bush.”

That was much rougher criticism than any of the candidates directed toward each other Saturday night. All stuck closely to their standard stump speeches as they competed to deliver the toughest indictments of Bush.

“He’s led us from the edge of greatness ... and it is time for us to lead George W. Bush out of town,” Edwards declared.

Kerry, playing off his new slogan of “The Real Deal,” repeatedly insisted that Bush had given America “a raw deal.” And he promised to confront Bush aggressively on foreign policy.

“If George Bush wants to make national security an issue in this campaign, then I have three words for him that I know he understands: Bring it on,” Kerry declared. His supporters through the hall immediately picked up the chant.

Gephardt mostly recounted the central policy proposals of his campaign, such as expanding access to health care and establishing an international minimum wage.

But he also introduced new rhetoric criticizing Bush, portraying him as “the vanishing president” who has “lost” jobs, the budget surplus he inherited from Bill Clinton and support from allies abroad.

He added: “We have lost Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. They’ve vanished. There’s only one answer to this problem: We’ve got to make George Bush vanish.”

Kucinich, a longshot contender, centered his speech on a call for replacing all U.S. troops in Iraq with United Nations forces. “America cannot go it alone; America must stand on truth,” he said. “The truth is this administration lied to the American people.”

Moseley Braun, the final speaker, married the twin themes of Bush-bashing and Democratic unity before sending the crowd out into a 40-degree night.

“We’re going to clean house and we’re going to set the country back on a track to peace and prosperity and progress again,” she said. “The truth is that all of us will come together and support whoever is our nominee.”

Before the dinner, some campaign strategists had privately grumbled that Clinton might overshadow the 2004 contenders, even though she’s repeatedly said she does not intend to enter the race. But she delivered a relatively low-key speech that warned the party against excessive “nostalgia” for the 1990s, urged Democrats to unify behind the eventual nominee and joined the candidates in denouncing Bush.

“In just a few short years, this president has squandered two precious surpluses,” Clinton charged. “A budget surplus that was obtained because of the hard work of a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress.... He also squandered a surplus of goodwill that this nation had. We had the respect of the world. After 9/11, we were a unified country.”

Before the dinner, the candidates had fanned out across the city, participating in a flurry of events.

Gephardt held a downtown rally with union supporters and marched his backers across the street to the dinner.

On Saturday morning, Kerry laced up skates for an hour of ice hockey with Des Moines firefighters, and then addressed a rally of his own.

Edwards began his day with supporters at a tailgate party two hours away at a University of Iowa football game.

Dean drew more than 700 people to a rally at a Des Moines high school that still buzzed with enthusiasm even after the campaign announced that rock singer Melissa Etheridge, who was due to endorse him, had missed her plane.

Dean, a physician, also stopped on his way to the rally to help give medical attention to a campaign organizer, Jake Edwards, who had collapsed with an epileptic seizure. Campaign aides later said Edwards was in good condition at a local hospital.