Dean Caught Between Outsider Message, Insider Backing

Has success spoiled Howard Dean?

Once a scrappy outsider, Dean has won a succession of endorsements from big-name Democrats -- a trend that continued Thursday when former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois dropped out of the race and backed him.

But as the endorsements have piled up, Dean’s standing in the polls has fallen, both in Iowa and New Hampshire. And strategists for his rivals believe Dean’s decision to surround himself with well-known politicians has muddled his message -- leaving him to condemn “the Washington establishment” while joined on stage by some of its members.

“One of the things that has happened to Dean is he has taken on the trappings of an establishment candidate,” said David Axelrod, an advisor to Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina. “There is a tinny quality to his message right now.”

No advisor for any other Democratic contender believes voters are deserting Dean specifically because prominent Democrats such as former Vice President Al Gore, former Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey and Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa have endorsed him.

But privately, even some Dean advisors agree that his backing from Gore and the others has blurred his appeal to supporters -- one reason that Dean this week, in both his television advertising and stump speeches, has recharged his attacks on “Washington Democrats.”

Yet his campaign also is eager to tout his acceptance by party leaders -- a desire underscored by the decision to leave Iowa the day before Monday’s caucuses to visit former President Carter in Georgia.

The mixed message reflects a basic tension in Dean’s strategy for the nomination. He wants to stoke the fervor of his grass-roots base by defining himself as a reform-minded outsider, but he hopes to use endorsements from insiders to create the impression that the party is consolidating around him. In effect, Dean is trying to simultaneously pursue a strategy of insurgency and inevitability.

Appearing with Harkin and Braun on Thursday, Dean denied any contradiction between his anti-Washington rhetoric and the endorsements from politicians. “I believe I can bring in the people who have been inside the Beltway,” he said. “They’re all good Democrats; they’re going to want to win.

“They just need to be retrained,” he added jokingly.

Given Dean’s start as an asterisk in the polls, he’s gained remarkable support from elected officials. These include not only Gore and Bradley -- who vied for the party’s 2000 nomination -- but New Jersey Gov. James E. McGreevey and a parade of state and national lawmakers.

With endorsements this week from Reps. Diane E. Watson of Los Angeles and Grace F. Napolitano of Norwalk, Dean’s total of House supporters grew to 34. That’s as many as have endorsed Rep. Dick Gephardt -- who was House Democratic leader for several years.

Gephardt pointedly joked to reporters this week: Dean has “been endorsed by a whole bunch of Washington insiders. Maybe I’m the ‘outsider’ candidate now.”

Dean’s endorsements have brought him favorable publicity, a sense of momentum and, in Harkin’s case, organizational and personal help in Iowa. The senator sent an e-mail to voters trumpeting his support.

But the tension between such backing and Dean’s efforts to sustain his appeal as an outsider was on display at a Des Moines rally Wednesday night.

The day before, the Dean campaign began airing an ad condemning “the Washington Democrats” -- Gephardt, Edwards and Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts -- for voting to authorize the war in Iraq. With Harkin standing behind him at Wednesday’s event, Dean also criticized the three lawmakers for supporting President Bush’s education reform initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act.

“These aren’t bad people, but they are Washington people,” Dean insisted. “They aren’t like Tom Harkin.”

Yet Harkin also voted for both measures.

This month, at a house party in Altoona, Iowa, Dean was reviving one of his most barbed lines about the Democratic national leadership.

“I used to use the line in my speech that I don’t use anymore because it’s divisive ... but it’s true: that Americans when I started out were almost as mad at the Democrats in Washington as they were at the Republicans,” he said.

A few moments later, the candidate was interrupted by his cellphone ringing. “This is Vice President Al Gore,” Dean said, after retrieving the phone from his jacket pocket.

Dean’s rivals believe the price of such juxtapositions is a blurring of the sharp antiestablishment identity that ignited his campaign. Ed Reilly, Gephardt’s pollster, said his research shows many Dean voters share qualities similar to supporters of Ross Perot in the early 1990s.

“They want somebody who has an angry voice and represents change,” Reilly said. “What’s happening is these voters need to be constantly fed with rhetoric, and as Dean tries to tack to the center, or campaigns with Gore and Bradley and Harkin, you put on the face of an establishment candidate.”

A senior Dean advisor said the candidate’s recent decline has been driven by other factors, mainly comments he made in a 2000 television interview criticizing the Iowa caucuses and a weak performance at a debate on racial issues Sunday.

But the advisor added: “There is some truth to the notion that for all the value the endorsements have had for other reasons, they have tended to muddle our message a little bit.”

That may explain the shift in emphasis by Dean this week, first with the ad on the war, then with his tough words for his rivals on the stump. Still, he has received conflicting advice on that strategy.

Harkin said Thursday he had urged Dean to stress a more positive message. “In these closing days of a campaign ... I think [voters] are looking for a positive message,” he said.

Dean followed that advice in Fort Dodge, shelving references to “Washington Democrats.”

But in Carroll, Dean was again deriding his opponents as part of “the old boys’ club that’s been there forever,” while Harkin and Braun -- a current and former member of the world’s most exclusive club, as the Senate calls itself -- stood behind him.