Dean Airs Tough TV Ad Against Top Rivals

Looking to regain the initiative in an increasingly fierce Iowa campaign, Howard Dean on Tuesday launched a tough new television ad attacking his three main rivals in the state for supporting the war in Iraq.

The Dean ad bluntly criticizes “the Washington Democrats” for voting to authorize the war in Iraq, targeting by name Sens. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina and Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri.

The ad, which began running statewide Tuesday, significantly escalated the offensive Dean started Monday against his rivals, who have pressed him in recent weeks over his agenda, record in Vermont and temperament. It also underscored the Dean campaign’s belief that his opposition to the war -- and his charge that Democrats have failed to sufficiently confront President Bush -- remain his most powerful political assets.

“We’re going back to what got us to where we are,” said Joe Trippi, Dean’s campaign manager.

Other presidential contenders immediately attacked Dean for the new commercial, one of the few that has criticized another candidate by name in the history of the Iowa caucuses. The ad comes only two weeks after Dean had asked Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe to prod other candidates to tone down their attacks on him -- a request McAuliffe rejected.

Gephardt, asked about Dean’s ad at a campaign stop in Seattle, said, “He must feel that he’s falling behind because that’s what he usually does when that happens.” The Missouri congressman, Dean’s closest rival in polls here, said he had not ruled out an on-air response.

As the ad appeared in Iowa, Gephardt was defending his vote for the war in Iraq during a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City.

Gephardt said he did not apologize for supporting the resolution. And he argued, as Kerry has done for months, that voters opposed to the war should be angry at Bush for the way he conducted it, not at those who voted to authorize the attack.

Gephardt said that Bush’s policies had led the country into “a deadly quagmire in the sands of Iraq, with no exit strategy and scant international support.”

The administration “now has no apparent plan to bring democracy and safety to the Iraqi people,” Gephardt said.

Kerry focused his fire on the new ad, rather than debating the war itself.

Standing outside his campaign bus in Independence, Iowa, Kerry told reporters: “Last week, Howard Dean said that he’s running a campaign on straight talk and that he was going to run a positive campaign. But today, we see he’s gone back to the old-style negative attack ads.”

He added: “We should stay focused on the real target, which is George Bush.”

Edwards, in comments before a speech in West Des Moines, struck a similar note. “It’s ironic that because I’m running a positive, optimistic campaign, and it’s catching on ... that the response is the typical politician’s response -- to attack,” he said. “I don’t think it will work.”

Though critical of Dean’s direct jab on Iraq, the Gephardt campaign began airing a television ad Tuesday assailing his opponents by name on trade policy. The ad, appearing in markets reaching New Hampshire, criticizes Dean, Kerry, Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark for supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“We must raise global standards so that everyone, everywhere does better,” Gephardt declares in the ad.

The new Dean ad begins with a narrator asking: “Where did the Washington Democrats stand on the war?”

The narrator continues: “Dick Gephardt wrote the resolution to authorize war. John Kerry and John Edwards both voted for the war. Then Dick Gephardt voted to spend another $87 billion on Iraq” -- a reference to Gephardt’s support for the money Bush requested to stabilize and rebuild the country, as well as Afghanistan. Both Edwards and Kerry voted against that request.

After the narrator declares, “Howard Dean has a different view,” the former Vermont governor appears on camera and says: “I opposed the war in Iraq and I’m against spending another $87 billion there.... Our party and our country need new leadership.”

The ad comes as daily tracking polling in the state conducted by independent pollster John Zogby for MSNBC shows Dean maintaining a small but steady advantage over Gephardt among likely voters at Monday’s caucuses.

The poll released Tuesday showed Dean backed by 28%, Gephardt, 23%, Kerry, 17% and Edwards, 14% -- results similar to those in a Times poll conducted in Iowa last week.

The Gephardt, Kerry and Edwards campaigns insist their private polling shows Dean’s support eroding -- and they take the new ad as a sign they are right. Aides to some of the rival campaigns said they believed Dean launched the ad more to generate enthusiasm among his core supporters than to attract undecided voters.

Like other surveys, the recent Times Poll found that likely Iowa caucus voters are strongly opposed to the war: three-fifths said they would prefer a nominee who opposed it. But three-fourths said they would support a candidate who differed with them on the war.

The ad may also be attempting to reestablish Dean’s credentials as a political outsider after he’s spent much of the last few weeks campaigning with prominent politicians who have endorsed him, including former Vice President Al Gore, former Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa).

“A little bit of the purity of his message has been sacrificed to win these endorsements,” said a top advisor to a Dean rival.

Trippi said the campaign produced the ad -- likely to remain on the air through Monday’s voting -- for two main reasons. One was for Dean to regain the offensive after weeks of having to defend himself on an array of fronts.

“The damage has been that for the last couple of weeks, our message hasn’t gotten through,” Trippi said.

He said the campaign also wanted to again spotlight the war after new questions about the administration’s motivations and justification were raised in recent reports, including a study published by the Army War College and a charge from former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill that President Bush appeared intent on overthrowing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein even before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Dean, who spent the day in Burlington, Vt., off the campaign trail, seized on those reports in a statement he released Tuesday. “I ask Iowans to remember who stood up to the president a year ago, who stood up for what he believed, who stood up to say that this was the wrong war at the wrong time,” he said.

As they have for weeks, his rivals charged that at the time the decisions were made, he sent far more mixed signals on both the war and the money for reconstruction than such unwavering comments today would suggest.

“Dean’s only consistency is changing positions,” the Kerry campaign said in a statement.

Gephardt said he believed Democratic voters had moved beyond the question of how the candidates stood on the decision to attack Iraq.

“We’re in a new place. In Iowa right now, you don’t get a lot of, ‘Why did you vote for that resolution?’ he told reporters. “You get more, ‘Where do we go from here?’ ”

Times staff writers Maria L. La Ganga and Scott Martelle contributed to this report.