WASHINGTON, 21 January 2004 — Iowa Voters have thrown the Democratic party presidential nomination race into turmoil by picking the experience of John Kerry over the populist anger of Howard Dean.
The Iowa caucuses were to have been the first step in what Dean had hoped would be his coronation for the Democratic presidential nomination.
After flirting for weeks with Dean’s “claim our country back” campaign, voters were finally turned off by his rage-filled invective against President George W. Bush and gaffe-prone style, analysts said.
Instead, they turned to the softer-speaking Kerry, the patrician senator from Massachusetts.
Kerry won the vote with 37.3 percent, closely followed by North Carolina Senator John Edwards with 32.5 percent, according to official party returns.
Dean, the early favorite, trailed badly with 18 percent followed by Missouri congressman Richard Gephardt with 10.9 percent who was expected to withdraw from the race leaving seven candidates in contention.
Dean found favor as a new face in US national politics and his stint as Democrat front-runner at first made him a media darling.
But he soon became a target of rivals, political pundits and even the Democratic party’s political establishment in Washington.
Questions about his temperament, his record as governor of Vermont state and whether he had the mettle to defeat a popular Republican incumbent have cast combined to overshadow his campaign.
“People in the media and his fellow candidate went after him. Once they did and exposed his flaws, his bubble burst,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.
“I don’t know if Dean can recover” from the Iowa defeat, Sabato added. “He’s very much on the edge of the precipice,” Sabato said, adding that failure to win the New Hampshire primary on Jan. 27 would be the end of the road for Dean.
Doubts about Dean and Gephardt, who had also been an early frontrunner in Iowa, led voters to give a fresh look at Kerry.
Iowa voters also signaled their interest in the youthful senator, John Edwards, whose relentlessly upbeat message wore well on Iowa voters weary of negative attacks by Democrats against each other and downbeat messages about the state of the economy.
The state’s Democratic governor Tom Vilsack said Iowans are known for their independence and penchant for choosing idiosyncratic politics.
This year though, Iowa Democrats appear to have been thinking ahead to the Nov. 2 presidential election and chosen for two candidates they believe have the best shot of defeating Bush.
What Iowa Democrats want, Vilsack said, was “someone who can go up against George Bush. Democrats have to field a very strong candidate,” he said.
Washington political pundit Michael Barone told Fox television that the vaunted Dean political machine fueled by its youthful “Generation Dean had failed him.
“It wasn’t enough. The mobile phone vote ended up not to be as strong as we thought,” he said. But the campaign may not be smooth sailing for the remaining contenders.
The Kerry candidacy is also fraught with problems, Sabato said. “He’s still stuffy and aloof and arrogant. He still has all the same problems: He’s a liberal Democrat from Massachusetts, which doesn’t hurt you in the Democratic nominating campaign, but it will be a killer in a lot of places in the fall.”
The attacks will now shift, Sabato predicted. “There’s no more positive coverage for Kerry or Clark.”
The Washington Post attributed Kerry’s triumph to “his capacity to reach into his deep pockets,” referring to his decision earlier this year to mortgage his home in order to raise six million dollars to plough into his campaign.
Like Kerry, Dean too dropped out of the federal campaign financing system, allowing him to spend as much money as he wanted on his campaign. Despite his wealth coffers, however, Dean finished a surprising third in Iowa.
