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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
John Kerry may be the new front-runner, but he knows how dangerous that can be. Case in point: The retooling Howard Dean.
Jan 22, 2004 | At a "town hall" event Thursday at Daniel Webster College, there wasn't nearly enough room to accommodate the media who came to see John Kerry, let alone the voters he was actually there to address.
Over at Kerry headquarters in Manchester, staffers were asked to give up their cellphones to a bunch of veterans who had shown up to volunteer, and the campaign ran out of phones to spare.
After his emphatic come-from-behind victory in Iowa, all eyes -- and the dreaded "front-runner" label -- are on Kerry, whose campaign is now bracing for assaults from six opponents desperate to knock him down.
"The last two weeks of this campaign have really been very different," he told the audience at one of his appearances.
Kerry's not the only one adjusting to dramatic changes ahead of the New Hampshire primary on Jan. 27. All the candidates now face a field completely realigned since just two weeks ago, when Howard Dean dominated the polls here. Kerry trailed both Dean and Wesley Clark before Iowa, but polls now show him ahead. A Boston Herald poll has Kerry 10 points ahead of Dean among likely primary voters, with Clark in third place.
It looks certain now that the primary season will be highly competitive and drawn out. The good news for Democrats, at least theoretically, is that whoever comes out of it will be a stronger general election candidate. Kerry and John Edwards have already improved dramatically, as the results in Iowa prove. (Kerry won with 38 percent of Iowa's delegates and Edwards finished with 32.)
But the new alignment of the field pretty much kills the possibility of the quick and orderly contest that Democratic Party chairman Terry McAuliffe had hoped for, meaning that the nominee is likely to emerge depleted of funds to take on President George Bush in November.
Dean, who before placing third in Iowa was the only candidate with the means and popularity to win quickly, now finds himself under enormous pressure to change course. The danger is that many undecided voters in New Hampshire are reaching the same conclusion many Iowans did: The man may not be electable. (And for all you Dean supporters who think this is all a consequence of media overkill, please note that Iowa made its choices well before the deluge of down-on-Dean analysis over the last couple of days.) The task of calming those concerns becomes more challenging every time his unusually raucous concession speech is lampooned on television.
One elderly voter at the Nashua forum, Milton Willis, said that he supported Dean, but was rethinking his options after Iowa. "I just didn't think he was very presidential," he said.
Along with retooling his image, Dean will also have to find a new issue. The fact that even the most fervently antiwar Iowans went heavily for Kerry and Edwards -- despite massive spending by the Dean campaign on a commercial about his early opposition to the war -- suggests that Dean will have to find a different way to contrast himself with his opponents.
He's already expanding his message. There's a new TV ad about Dean's vision to fix the economy. And Thursday, Dean introduced a new campaign finance proposal to limit contributions to $250 across the board.
In the meantime, his supporters have bombarded Dean's Blog for America with desperate suggestions about how to turn things around, and some of his big contributors have vented their concerns on emotional conference calls with campaign staffers.
