The New Republic

CAMPAIGN JOURNAL

Dean's List
by Ryan Lizza

... The [Kerry] campaign recently inked a deal with Meetup.com and now regularly implores supporters to sign up for the service. And, while Dean still has ten times more people signed up on Meetup, Kerry's numbers are starting to move. Talk of building a grassroots army has even made its way into the senator's speeches. The Kerry campaign shrugs off the copycat charges. "We're certainly not going to cede the word 'grassroots' to the Dean campaign," says Jordan, who notes that Kerry was marching with Vietnam Veterans Against the War "a couple of decades before Dean entered public life." As for the sprinklings of rage now appearing in Kerry's stump speech, Jordan counters, "Howard Dean, for all of his flashes of heat and anger, didn't invent passion in politics." ...

CAMPAIGN JOURNAL

Dean's List
by Ryan Lizza

Post date 07.21.03 | Issue date 07.28.03 E-mail this article

Now that the Democratic presidential campaigns have had a few weeks to digest Howard Dean's rise from underdog to top-tier candidate, the field has begun formulating plans for dealing with the scrappy Vermontster. And, while the particular strategies vary, there is one common response from all the major campaigns: This is great for us!

Start with John Kerry, the candidate who has the most to fear from Dean. The Kerry campaign's initial response to the Dean surge has been to declare that the nomination is now a two-man race. Dean's success "increases the sense that the race is beginning to tier" says Kerry campaign manager Jim Jordan. "The Kerry and Dean campaigns have opened up a real advantage over everyone else." There are two good reasons for the Kerry campaign to frame the race this way. First, Kerry's people still believe Dean can be defeated relatively easily. After all, the conventional wisdom persists that Dean would be weak in the general election and that pragmatic primary voters who want, above all else, to beat President Bush will eventually abandon the former Vermont governor. A contest with Dean, says Jordan, is "a contest we're looking forward to." And, second, the more the race is about Dean and Kerry, the less it is about the other candidates. Far from shattering Kerry's aura of front-runnerdom, his campaign claims that Dean's rise has confirmed it. "The fundamental dynamic of the race," Jordan argues, "has been to define the challenger to John Kerry." Now that he has been defined, Kerry's campaign can start taking him down.

They've started to do this with a triple strategy of coopting, contrasting, and containing. In 2000, George W. Bush, beaten in New Hampshire by John McCain's reformist insurgency, brazenly stole McCain's message, showing up in South Carolina re-branded as a "reformer with results." Similarly, Kerry is now co-opting some of Dean's messages and tactics. Kerry's speeches are now peppered with the energy and anger that has won over many Deaniacs. And one can't help but notice how quickly Kerry has adopted Internet organizing. The campaign recently inked a deal with Meetup.com and now regularly implores supporters to sign up for the service. And, while Dean still has ten times more people signed up on Meetup, Kerry's numbers are starting to move. Talk of building a grassroots army has even made its way into the senator's speeches. The Kerry campaign shrugs off the copycat charges. "We're certainly not going to cede the word 'grassroots' to the Dean campaign," says Jordan, who notes that Kerry was marching with Vietnam Veterans Against the War "a couple of decades before Dean entered public life." As for the sprinklings of rage now appearing in Kerry's stump speech, Jordan counters, "Howard Dean, for all of his flashes of heat and anger, didn't invent passion in politics."

The second part of the Kerry campaign's response to Dean will be contrasting the two men's records. "At some point, we'll--in a respectful, professional way--be drawing distinctions," Jordan explains. Just as conservatives loyal to Bush argued that McCain wasn't really one of them, there has been a low-level Kerry campaign targeted at liberal Democrats, pointing out Dean's heresies on guns, Social Security, and the teachers' unions. But this represents a tricky strategy for Kerry, who has spent the last two years positioning himself as a centrist and doggedly fighting the label "Massachusetts liberal." After all, Kerry probably assumed his toughest primary challengers would be on his right--Democratic Leadership Council darlings such as Al Gore, John Edwards, and Joe Lieberman. (Again, this is the mirror image of Bush in 2000 who, after preparing for a challenge from the right by Steve Forbes, wound up getting one from the left by McCain.) Rather than risk a wholesale shift to the left, then, Kerry's aides are emphasizing Dean's electability problem. Jordan, for instance, refers to Dean as a "small-town physician" from an "extremely small, homogenous state."

This leads to the final part of Kerry's strategy: containing Dean as the candidate of the liberal fringe. Jordan argues, "The data that's emerging shows very, very clearly that our largest structural advantage is that Senator Kerry is drawing support across the ideological and economic spectrum that's unlike every other candidate. Dean is drawing his support almost entirely from the left wing of the party. [Dick] Gephardt is drawing his support almost entirely from downscale and blue-collar voters." If this is true--and a pair of recent Zogby polls of New Hampshire and Iowa voters supports the thesis--it's significant, because the current conventional wisdom is that Dean and Kerry are fighting over the same small group of elite, liberal voters with neither of them expanding outside that base. "That's empirically not true," Jordan insists.

he assumption that it is true is driving the strategies of all the other campaigns, however. None of the other candidates seem frightened by Kerry's and Dean's top-tier statuses as long as both men are fighting to win over the left-liberal wing of the party. "They are vying over the same votes," says an aide to a rival campaign. "We're going to send them two left-handed boxing gloves." "Dean and Kerry appeal to the same demographics," says a top Gephardt adviser, "white, well-educated, eastern, liberal voters--NPR listeners, Volvo drivers."

Gephardt, Edwards, Lieberman, and Bob Graham are all betting that eventually one of them will emerge as the alternative to the winner of the Dean/Kerry battle. Gephardt aides think he's well-positioned to be that man. They note that Lieberman, Edwards, and Graham have yet to gain much traction and that Kerry, who had previously set his sights on beating Gephardt in Iowa, now must worry about not coming in third behind Dean. "What's shaping up is Dean and Kerry are about to go at it," says a Gephardt aide. "It's going to come down to one of them and Gephardt."

That argument was more persuasive before this week's news that Gephardt had missed his second-quarter fund-raising goal by $1 million, placing him in fifth place in the fund-raising chase for the year. Gephardt has also gotten a little nervous about holding onto his labor base in Iowa, with Dean and Kerry both bashing free-trade agreements in their stump speeches and even anti-free-trade firebrand Dennis Kucinich showing signs of life. In Iowa last week, Gephardt went out of his way to attack Kerry and Dean on trade. "Part of what Gephardt was doing was protecting our base," says an adviser.

The person with perhaps the greatest potential to emerge as the centrist challenger to Dean or Kerry, once the primaries move south and west after New Hampshire, is Edwards. But, though he has amassed an impressive $8 million war chest, the North Carolina senator is still registering in single digits in all the early caucus and primary states--including South Carolina--and continues to be burdened by the decision about whether to abandon the race for his Senate seat. The Edwards camp plausibly argues that they spent the first six months raising money and are only now sending their candidate out aggressively to meet voters in Iowa and New Hampshire. If the candidates were stocks, Edwards might be the most undervalued in the race and the best buy of the next quarter.

By contrast, the Lieberman campaign's argument that their man could be the one to stop a post-New Hampshire Dean insurgency ran into a major obstacle this week. While the inside-the-Beltway chatter focused on a staff shake-up and a meager bank account, a potentially far bigger problem is the rift opening between Lieberman and black leaders. The Connecticut senator got roughed up by the Congressional Black Caucus on July 9 for his stand on issues ranging from his response to the 2000 recount to his failure to strongly support a U.S. intervention in Liberia, and he was denounced by the naacp's Kweisi Mfume for skipping the organization's July 14 forum. Black voters are a cornerstone of the coalition Lieberman is trying to forge, and, in one week, he seems to have alienated many of the most influential black leaders in the country.

Still, like the others, the Lieberman campaign seems to relish Dean's rise, seeing it as a vehicle to take down Kerry and then position their man as the mature, electable alternative who can actually beat Bush. In fact, it seems that all the candidates have an argument for why Dean's success is good for them. And what does the Dean camp think of all this? "I don't know which one of them it's good for," campaign manager Joe Trippi says with a chuckle. "I know it's good for us."

Ryan Lizza is an associate editor at TNR.

Link: http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030728&s=lizza072803