Now a player, Dean raises campaign goals
By Jill Lawrence, USA TODAY
MILWAUKEE ?- Democrat Howard Dean is boosting his fundraising goals to new heights and is about to escalate his advertising on television in moves that underscore how his campaign is shaping the Democratic primary season: Dean has come from nowhere to lead his rivals on several fronts, and he has the money to maintain an intense pace.
The former governor of Vermont raised $7.6 million in the second quarter of the year, outdoing his eight rivals for the Democratic nomination for president. For the three months ending Sept. 30, Dean is setting his sights on $10.3 million ?- the amount Bill Clinton raised in the same period of 1995, when he was president. That was the best performance by any Democratic presidential candidate in a single quarter the year before an election.
For months, Dean's activities attracted little notice from rivals who assumed that he would be no competition. He was, after all, a prickly maverick with little money from a tiny state with a liberal reputation. And he opposed the war in Iraq at a time when the Bush administration had few critics on the issue.
Now, other Democrats are rushing to try to match him on everything from his angry style to his Internet strategy. Dean has raised millions of dollars and enlisted tens of thousands of supporters online, ensuring that the Web will be a staple of future campaigns.
With state and national polls showing Dean on the rise, the self-styled "people-powered" outsider is spending like a front-runner. This week, he inaugurated his "Grassroots Express," a charter plane decorated with tufts of grass taped between the seats, on a four-day, coast-to-coast tour complete with minute-by-minute schedules and a traveling press entourage.
His campaign, meanwhile, has been on a hiring binge. He has paid staff in 13 states, more states than any other Democratic campaign. And Dean is expanding his TV campaign to more states that have early primaries or caucuses.
"We need to do this to win," Dean says in an interview aboard his plane Saturday night. "The only way to beat George Bush is to run a really tough, hard-hitting campaign and let the American people know what we're doing. And that's why we started as early as we did."
All this before Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry and North Carolina Sen. John Edwards have even officially announced their candidacies. Polls show Dean ahead of Kerry in New Hampshire, which holds the first state primary Jan. 27 and which both men desperately need to win. He is edging out Missouri Rep. Richard Gephardt in Iowa, where the Jan. 19 caucuses are considered a must-win for Gephardt. Dean also is moving up in national polls, a sign that more people know who he is.
Dean's pitch is becoming less strident as his status changes. "If I am more dignified and presidential, it's because I have been doing this for a lot longer," he says. "I have more confidence."
To moderate Democrats, the apparent staying power of a candidate who opposed the war in Iraq raises the alarming prospect of a general election debacle in the mold of Walter Mondale in 1984 or George McGovern in 1972.
"A majority of Democrats understand the need to be strong on defense," says Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, the most conservative Democrat in the field and a strong supporter of the Iraq war. The acerbic British magazine The Economist, referring to Dean's admonition that Democrats lose when they try to act like Bush, says "the only thing more dangerous for the Democrats than Bush Lite is McGovern Extra Strength."
Republicans, meanwhile, aren't bothering to hide their excitement at Dean's impact on the race. In a memo this summer to political observers titled "Happy Days," Republican pollster Bill McInturff said Dean either will win the Democratic nomination or force "a sustained battle" for it while he "continues to drag the perception of the Democratic Party far to the left in regard to the use of force."
Either way, McInturff said, "it's all good" for Republicans.
The 'anti-war' guy
Dean, a medical doctor, advocated balanced budgets, tax cuts, gun-owner rights and capital punishment during his 11 years as governor. He also supported causes such as abortion rights, expanded health services and civil unions for gay men and lesbians. And he never fails to remind audiences that he is a stickler for fiscal discipline ?- a prerequisite, he says, for anyone planning to raise spending on health and education.
But he acknowledges that his image among Democrats is chiefly as "the anti-war candidate," and he receives some of his loudest cheers when he reminds crowds of his stance on the war in Iraq.
"Dean has pretty much carved out the position that he's the candidate of the left," says Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center in Durham. "As moderate voters come into the process, they may say Kerry looks like more of a moderate. It's going to be up to Dean to prove that he ... can beat George Bush."
The transition has begun. Dean has stopped comparing Bush to the Taliban and calling his behavior "despicable." Also gone are offhand remarks in which Dean has suggested that the United States "won't always have the strongest military," and that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's ouster may or may not have been a good thing.
Now Dean confers regularly with former Marine commandant Joseph Hoar and former NATO commander Wesley Clark, the latter a possible presidential candidate himself. Dean routinely tells audiences that he supported the Persian Gulf War and the war in Afghanistan. And in the past few days, Dean has started attacking Bush's national security record.
"I finally realized that this president is actually weaker on defense than I am," Dean says. "It was kind of a startling revelation."
Republicans take issue with that characterization. Dean's "platform has two planks: protest and pessimism," says Christine Iverson, spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee. "President Bush has taken action and implemented policies to make Americans safer."
'People-powered Howard'
Among Democratic candidates, Dean's list of firsts and mosts is long. He was the first candidate to set up a presidential fundraising committee (May 2002), the first to put up a TV ad (mid-June in Iowa) and the first to qualify for federal matching money (early July). This month, he was the first candidate to rate cover stories the same week in Time and Newsweek magazines.
Dean was the first Democratic candidate to recognize and to tap into many Democrats' anti-war sentiment, their anger at Bush, their bitter memories of the Florida recount in the 2000 presidential election, and their desire to do more than just vote the next time around. That desire dovetailed with another Dean first: the extent to which he used the Internet to motivate supporters, connect them with each other and pick their brains for ideas.
"I consider myself a Howard-powered person," says Jay Bullock, 28, coordinator of Milwaukee For Dean, playing off Dean's "people-powered Howard" slogan. Other candidates ask for people's votes, the high school English teacher says, but only Dean has sought their leadership skills and feedback. The result is a surge of involvement by newcomers, and a pledge from Dean to bring 3 million new voters into the process.
Rival candidates are playing catch-up ?- on tactics and tone. "Most of you know that other campaigns have gotten a head start on some uses of the Web as a tool of modern campaigning. We are very serious about working to get ourselves up to speed," Kerry campaign manager Jim Jordan wrote last week on Kerry's Web site.
Gephardt's campaign has taken a much sharper edge toward Bush since July. "We won the war in Iraq, but we're in serious danger of losing the peace," he said then during a speech in San Francisco.
It's a measure of Dean's pace that he is adjusting his campaign to deal with his potential vulnerabilities in a general election. He started by attacking his rivals. Now, in various ways, he's in Bush's face.
The campaign plans to send a group of Texans to Iowa next month to try to persuade Iowans that Dean can beat their former governor.
Dean also uses Bush fundraising accomplishments to spur his own, challenging his supporters to match the president's totals at fundraising dinners. Bush raised a record-shattering $34.3 million in the second quarter. (By contrast, Kerry raised $5.9 million and Gephardt raised $3.9 million in April, May and June this year.)
After Bush raised $1 million in Portland, Ore., last week, Dean asked his supporters to come up with the same amount during his own four-day trip. Today is the last day. As of Monday evening, he had raised almost $630,000.
Two stops on Dean's trip this week ?- Portland and Seattle ?- closely followed Bush's appearances there. Dean drew more than 8,000 people at a Seattle rally Sunday and an overflow crowd at a small community center in Spokane Monday. He then left for a rally in San Antonio. Earlier this summer he ran a TV ad in Austin.
Some strategists from rival campaigns said Dean was wasting money and that Bush wouldn't even see the television spot because he was at his ranch in the Waco TV market.
"We didn't do that to get to Waco," Dean says. "We did that to get to Austin. We want to win the Texas primary." That's March 9.
The long timeline and paid field staff reflect Dean's study of insurgents past: Jimmy Carter, Gary Hart and John McCain. Dean says he learned that you can't "focus on just one state at a time. It goes so fast that if you're not ready ... ahead of time, you're dead."
Some political observers are convinced that Dean ?- or Kerry ?- will be politically dead after the New Hampshire primary, which traditionally culls the field. "Whoever wins will be the New England candidate," says Darrell West, a political scientist at Brown University in Providence. "The other will see his money dry up."
With Dean ahead of Kerry and pressure mounting, fireworks between the two could erupt at a Sept. 4 debate in New Mexico with all nine Democrats.
Meanwhile Dean is organizing in Kerry's home state, as well as Lieberman's and Gephardt's.
"We don't have illusions that we're going to knock off the favorite sons," Dean says, "but there are (convention) delegates to be had there and we're going to try to get them."
Hard-hitting on defense
Dean is in Falls Church, Va., for the first full-blown tryout of his new approach to defense issues. A crowd of several thousand is on hand Saturday.
Dean cites some of the Bush administration's arguments for going to war against Iraq ?- that nation's imminent nuclear capability, its attempt to buy uranium from Africa, its close ties with al-Qaeda, its weapons of mass destruction.
"I will never hesitate to send American troops anywhere in the world to defend our country," Dean says, "but I will never send our sons and our daughters... to die in a foreign country without telling the truth to the American people about why they are there."
Bush thinks "he's awful tough on defense," Dean says, but the candidate adds that the president can't find enough money to fund homeland security and cargo inspections or buy up enriched uranium from defunct Soviet-era weapons programs so terrorists won't get their hands on it.
"On his watch, North Korea's about to become a nuclear power because he won't sit down and talk with somebody he doesn't like," Dean says of the president's chilly relations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. "As they say in Texas, when it comes to defense, this president's all hat and no cattle."
Cheers interrupt Dean as he delivers one applause line after another. But some in the crowd sense he is at a turning point. "I like his abrasive quality, the way he started shaking things up from the beginning," says Hope Brown, 33, of Cheverly, Md., a desktop publisher. But "he's going to have to tone it down in order to win. I think he already has started to tone it down."
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