MANCHESTER, NH, 15 January 2004 — While political attention is riveted on Iowa, Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark is closing the once-commanding lead Howard Dean had in New Hampshire.
The tightening of the New Hampshire race has injected new energy into the retired Army general’s campaign and prompted Dean, the former governor of Vermont, to revise his strategy.
Clark is not competing in the kickoff Iowa caucuses on Jan. 19, instead focusing much of his energy and attention on New Hampshire’s Jan. 27 primary. He was in New Hampshire yesterday to outline his plan for improving homeland security.
The Clark security strategy includes bringing in US allies and better using law, diplomacy, law enforcement and intelligence but resorting to war only as a last resort.
“We’re in Iraq. We have to make a success out of it,” Clark said yesterday on CNN’s “American Morning.” However, he criticized the way troops had been deployed. “The Bush administration is trying to use the armed forces as a political weapon in this domestic election,” Clark said. “The simple truth is, the armed forces exist to protect the United States, to be used as a last resort. That’s not the case of Iraq. We’ve been misusing our armed forces. It was a mistake to get into Iraq.”
Dean, locked in a close four-way fight in Iowa, was in Vermont on Tuesday but planned a campaign stop in New Hampshire yesterday before heading back to Iowa.
Private polling by two campaigns in New Hampshire showed that Dean’s lead has shrunk to single digits from a first-of-the-year high of about 25 percentage points, according to officials familiar with the polls. However, an independent poll, by the American Research Group, Inc., showed Dean with 34 percent support and Clark with 20 percent in the three-day period that ended Monday, far ahead of the rest of the field.
Meanwhile, the Dean campaign, concerned that Clark is closing the gap in New Hampshire while other major candidates are focusing on Iowa, planned to deploy surrogates and other campaign tactics to question Clark’s views on the war, ties to the Republican Party, commitment to abortion rights and special-interest connections.
The Dean camp also began running a new anti-war ad in Iowa. “Where did the Washington Democrats stand on the war?” an announcer asks in Dean’s ad, which drew protests from his rivals. “Dick Gephardt wrote the resolution to authorize war. John Kerry and John Edwards both voted for the war.”
Clark was spared criticism in the ad, but officials familiar with Dean’s strategy said the retired army general was about to become a campaign target. There were no plans to run ads criticizing Clark before Iowa’s caucuses.
For his part, Clark sought anew to dismiss criticism from his rivals that he had vacillated on the war in Iraq, signaling earlier his support for it. He contended that charges he had different positions on the war were examples of “old-style politics.”
Clark has called for a congressional investigation into the lead-up to the war “to bring all the relevant factors in and find out exactly why we did go into Iraq.”
Dean aides expect he will face questions in New Hampshire on Clark’s rise. They said he may use the opportunity to point out differences between his record and Clark’s..
With polls showing Dean running strong in key early states, he’s come under increasing fire from his rivals. The attention has forced him to balance the need to respond to attacks against the fallout from doing so.
But Dean waded back into the fight Monday when he criticized his rivals by name and said he was tired of being treated like a “pincushion.” Sen. John Edwards, D-NC, who has seen his own polling figures rise in Iowa, predicted that the race would get closer in New Hampshire, too. He blamed attack tactics of his opponents for helping to narrow the gap.
Meanwhile, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said Tuesday that some of Dean’s Democratic rivals have succumbed to “mad Dean disease.” He warned that the party would self-destruct if the campaign remained “too hostile and too bloody.”
As did Clark, Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut also chose to sit out the Iowa primary and to focus on New Hampshire.
Rep. Dick Gephardt yesterday called chief rival Howard Dean a “fair-weather friend of the American worker” whose promises can’t be trusted and motives must be questioned.
“To me, there is no room for the cynical politics of manufactured anger and false conviction. I believe in standing for something,” the Missouri lawmaker said a speech that heightened his criticism of the Democratic presidential front-runner.
Gephardt, whose candidacy depends on an Iowa victory Monday, is locked in a tight caucus race with Dean and two other candidates, Sens. John Edwards and John Kerry.
An opponent of free-trade accords signed by Presidents Clinton and Bush, Gephardt appealed to his supporters in organized labor by lumping his rivals together as trade advocates.
Gephardt then launched into a list of examples that he said underscored his view that Dean flip-flops on policy for political convenience.
“John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, Howard Dean and Wesley Clark, who all supported NAFTA, are now acting like they fought against it. And John Edwards supported the China deal,” Gephardt said of the North Carolina senator who is making inroads on his blue-collar base.
“Howard Dean went so far as to call himself a strong supporter of NAFTA,” Gephardt said in a text of the speech distributed by the campaign. “Then he later denied it, even though he was captured on videotape saying just that.”
“The only way we can beat George Bush is to be clear about where we stand and to be truthful with the American people,” he said. “It’s become nearly impossible to know what Howard Dean really believes.”
It is the latest in a long line of criticisms from Dean’s rivals, who hope to slow his momentum with a defeat here and cut into his lead in the follow-up New Hampshire primary.
Dean, meanwhile, won the nonbinding District of Columbia primary, more a voting-rights rally than a chance to express a preference for one of the major candidates for the Democratic nomination for president.
Dean, the former Vermont governor, won Tuesday with 43 percent of the vote. Al Sharpton had 34 percent, Carol Moseley Braun 12 percent and Dennis Kucinich 8 percent. The other five major candidates did not participate. City leaders moved the primary up from May to call attention to the city’s lack of voting rights for its representative in Congress.
