Kerry said he had clarified his message, and his criticisms of Dean in particular, because of the way the field has shaped up. "It's more clear now how the race is dividing up, and who's where, and who the competition is," he said. "Back earlier, it was unclear sort of where you're heading. But its pretty much a clear race here, and I've got to draw the comparisons: what's he going to do to you, what am I going to do."

In recent days, Kerry has dispensed with any pretense of subtlety in making those comparisons. At appearance after appearance over several days of campaigning in New Hampshire, Kerry attempted to paint Dean as a panderer and a flip-flopper who was unprepared for office and who planned to bleed working families with a massive tax hike. Take for example, his appearance at a Manchester police station. He'd gone to watch a shift change and to chat with some officers about their jobs. It was a fairly basic retail campaign event, with fairly benign conversation. ("So you wear the turtleneck when it gets cold?" he asked one officer about his uniform).

But the questions afterward from the few reporters who had shown up were, as they often are these days for John Kerry, about Howard Dean. And whereas several months ago, Kerry might have declined the opportunity to engage this subject -- before he plummeted in the polls in New Hampshire and nationally -- in Manchester he was only too happy to oblige.

Since last week, when Dean responded to a question about his relationship with the NRA from the Des Moines Register by saying, "I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks," Kerry (among others) criticized Dean for the comment, suggesting that it represented his willingness to pander to the gun lobby. Reacting to a subsequent apology from the former Vermont governor, Kerry took his cue: "The governor moves faster in more different directions, tells more stories, than anyone I've met in politics," he said. "This is not a straight talker. This is a guy looking for the new angle every time he can."

And on the announcement that he was polling supporters about the issue of public matching campaign funds, Kerry said: "What he's really trying to do is weasel out of the agreement that he made," he said.

The next day, at a press conference in front of the Merrimack County Court House in Concord about gun safety -- coincidentally, the very issue upon which he had been criticizing Dean for the past two days -- the big shots of the national political press showed up expecting to hear more of the same.

Kerry didn't disappoint them.

"It's time for us to tell it straight to America," he said, as though speaking to Dean. "You've changed your position on Social Security and you go on Tim Russert and you say you're not in favor, never were in favor of a 70-year age for retirement and then a week later you have to retract ... You say you never supported cutting Medicare, but then it's clear you did support Newt Gingrich's position ... You go to the NAFTA signing, you thought it was that important to be there, that you wanted to be there to support NAFTA, and now you say NAFTA's wrong ... You say only three months ago that you think the Confederate flag is a states' rights issue, won't take a position on where it ought to fly, and then three months later you embrace it, and now you say you're against it."

He added that Dean suffered from a "belief system in the making."

Associated Press veteran Ron Fournier -- one of the agenda setters for the national political media -- aggressively questioned Kerry on whether or not it was hypocritical for him to criticize Dean for dropping out of the campaign-finance system, when he clearly planned to follow suit.

Kerry was resolute. "If I go out," he said grimly, pointing toward Fournier, "I'm preparing to take on someone who doesn't have the principles..." The reporters got what they wanted, and so did Kerry: the attacks dominated the next day's news cycle. (The lead story in New Hampshire's Union Leader was simply headlined, "Kerry Blasts Dean.")

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