It's official: Dean's the frontrunner

Can anyone deny Dean the nomination? He's stomping Kerry now in NH and he's about to set a record in Dem fundraising by announcing over 10 million in the last reporting period.

I still think Clark could give him a tough run, but I'm less and less convinced he will. For one thing, they seem to be pretty friendly and to share a lot of issues. For another thing, man, look at Dean go:

http://www.newsday.com/templates/mi...ap-democrats-poll&section=/news/politics/wire

Dean Surges to 21-Point Lead Over Kerry

By WILL LESTER
Associated Press Writer

August 27, 2003, 11:19 AM EDT

WASHINGTON -- Democrat Howard Dean has jumped out to a commanding 21-point lead over rival John Kerry in the latest New Hampshire poll.
Dean, who held a single-digit advantage in a recent survey, led Kerry 38 percent to 17 percent in the Zogby International poll of likely primary voters conducted Aug. 23-26 and released Wednesday.
Kerry, the Massachusetts senator, led in New Hampshire polls earlier this year, including a 26 percent to 13 percent advantage in February. The two candidates were essentially tied in a poll by Zogby in June.
The August survey comes as Dean has shown political strength in his fund raising, drawn large crowds for his "Sleepless Summer" tour and appeared in television ads in New Hampshire, which is slated to hold its primary Jan. 27.
Pollster John Zogby said Dean's support was in all regions of the state, among men and women, Democrats and independents, liberals and moderates. Dean took support from Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri and from undecided voters.
Gephardt, who was at 11 percent in February, dropped to 6 percent. Undecided voters fell from 29 percent to 23 percent.
"His support is really across the board," Zogby said of the former Vermont governor.
The rest of the Democratic field was in single digits. Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut was at 6 percent, and Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina was at 4 percent. Edwards also is airing ads in New Hampshire.
Retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who is considering a presidential bid, was at 2 percent, while Sen. Bob Graham of Florida and Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio were at 1 percent. Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton were at 0 percent.
Almost two-thirds of those in the poll, 64 percent, said they think it is likely that President Bush will be re-elected in 2004.
The poll of 501 likely primary voters has an error margin of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/27/p...00&en=caeccc71707114cf&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

In a Long Presidential Race, Dean Sprints
By JODI WILGOREN

risscrossing the country this week with Howard Dean, the underdog turned top dog who has surged toward the front of the Democratic presidential primary field, you would almost think there was an election coming up.

Five months before the first ballot is cast and 15 months before the last will be counted, Dr. Dean, the former governor of Vermont, spent the past four days being ferried from rally to rally in a chartered jet as though in the heat of a head-to-head national campaign rather than in the nascent chapter of a long-shot bid in a crowded field. He hit states like Oregon that have little to do with nominations but could be crucial in a general election and all but ignored his Democratic rivals as he roused rabid audiences against their Republican nemesis, George W. Bush.

The staggering, seemingly spontaneous crowds turning up to meet him — about 10,000 in Seattle on Sunday and a similar number in Bryant Park in Manhattan last night — are unheard of in the days of the race when most candidates concentrate on the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire and would seem formidable even in October 2004.

Yesterday morning, the campaign took another audacious step, saying that it would broadcast television advertisements in six new states beginning on Friday, and that it expected to raise $10.3 million in the three months ending Sept. 30 — more than any other Democrat in a similar period save for President Bill Clinton in 1995.

"We have to be in the president's face to win," Dr. Dean, 54, said aboard the ancient Boeing 737 his staff dubbed the Grassroots Express.

"When this president talks, sometimes the opposite of what he says is really the truth," he said yesterday in Chicago, between speaking to a tepid union convention and being embraced by about 1,500 supporters atop Navy Pier, "and if we don't call him on it, we can't win."

Billed as the Sleepless Summer Tour, Dr. Dean's 6,147-mile, 10-city rampage cost $200,000 and had its own rock-concert-style T-shirt listing places and dates. (The concept: Americans are sleepless over unemployment and the lack of jobs and health care, while President Bush sleeps soundly at his Texas ranch. The reality: Plane-riders are sleepless from crammed schedules that stretch from 5 a.m. to midnight.)

It was the flashiest and most expensive of a spate of gimmicky Democratic campaign swings this summer, from Grillin' with the Grahams (as in Bob, the Florida senator) to Get on the Bus With Dennis (as in Kucinich, the Ohio congressman) to the Real Solutions Express, featuring Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

The large and energetic crowds that followed Dr. Dean, and the meticulousness of his schedule and stage-managed events, prove he remains a phenomenon.

But the presidential-style trip could increase the risk of Dr. Dean peaking too early — and revealed other potential pitfalls. Holding oceans of blue Dean placards at every stop were nearly all white hands, a homogeneity the campaign tried to counter with a rainbow of supporters on stage, which only drew more attention to the lack of diversity in the audience. The feisty crowds were filled with Birkenstock liberals whose loudest ovations always followed Dr. Dean's antiwar riff — there were few union members, African-Americans, or immigrants.

It remains unclear how such untraditional rallies will translate into the nuts-and-bolts of nominations like endorsements, voter registration, fund-raising and debates. The campaign also may have trouble keeping people interested and preventing its events in coming weeks from seeming mundane.

"We have momentum," Dr. Dean said. "Keeping it is going to be a struggle."

Though polls taken this early in the race can be unreliable predictors, there are statistical signs to back up Dr. Dean's surge in popularity on the street. Zogby International, an independent firm, is scheduled to release Wednesday a poll showing Dr. Dean leading in New Hampshire with 38 percent of the vote to 17 percent for Senator John Kerry; in early July Senator Kerry had 25 percent to Dr. Dean's 22 percent. The poll has a margin of sampling error of 4.5 percentage points.

As the tour began its final day, Joe Trippi, the campaign manager, announced plans not only to match President Clinton's record $10.3 million quarter, but also to buy two weeks worth of advertisements, likely to cost $1 million, in Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Wisconsin and Washington. He and the candidate both refused to say whether the campaign would abide by spending limits to obtain federal matching funds, something they originally promised to do but later reconsidered.

"Running for president of the United States is a marathon," Mr. Trippi told reporters en route from San Antonio to Chicago. "We decided we were going to run the first four miles at a 100-yard-dash pace. We decided we're going to run the second four miles at a 100-yard-dash pace."

The new advertising plan came after the campaign spent four days soliciting its Internet supporters to match the $1 million President Bush collected last week in the Pacific Northwest, a goal it reached during the Bryant Park rally. (There were also $100- to $1,000-a-plate parties at most stops during the Sleepless tour.)

Linda Ornelas, 54, said she came to Portland State University on Sunday uncommitted but left planning to sign on to her computer and "give him some money."

"It's not that what he says is really so different from what anybody else says," said Ms. Ornelas, an administrator at a large athletic club. "It's that it doesn't feel like it's rhetoric."

After months of low-key question-and-answer sessions in small-town living rooms, Dr. Dean adapted to the masses by sprinkling call-and-response lines and defiant finger-pointing into his standard spiel.

"For the first time I realized the fate of the country might be in my hands," he said later. "Not just because I might become president of the United States of America. Because there were a very, very large number of people depending on me to change the course of this country."

In Spokane, Wash., organizers had cut a basketball court in half with a burlap curtain, expecting 250 people. Instead, several hundred had to watch an enormous television behind the curtain, and 100 more were left on folding chairs in the patio, surrounding a faceless microphone.

"He's not running a campaign, he's running a movement," wrote Natasha C., one of four people the Dean campaign invited to chronicle the trip on their Web logs. "These are protest-size crowds, these are not politics-size crowds, and that's the critical difference."

But it is unclear what the movement is for.

Dr. Dean's standard presentation is a smorgasbord of universal health insurance, opposition to the Iraq war, balanced budgets, tax-cut repeal, affirmative action, gay rights, early-childhood intervention and a broad appeal for "community." The defining theme is all about getting rid of the incumbent.

"What brought me here is Dean — and George," said Karin Overbeck, an independent at her first political rally, in Spokane. "For the second time in my life, I'm ashamed of my nationality. I was born in Germany and I was ashamed; now I'm ashamed to be American."

Though Dr. Dean often says that his message is appealing to independent thinkers across the political spectrum, when he polled the crowd in Portland there were loud claps for the Green Party and Democrats, but sparse smatterings when he asked about supporters of Perot and McCain. And while the people introducing him included Hispanic teachers and black preachers, the people buying the "Doctor is in" buttons were mostly aging flower children and the tongue-studded next generation.

"We're working really hard to change that," Dr. Dean said. At the union convention yesterday in Chicago — where the undecided audience offered mainly polite claps for the zingers that had delighted the devoted — he tried one of his newer lines: "When white people and brown people and black people vote together, that's when we make social progress in this country."

Between stops, Dr. Dean had his first lengthy talks with a large press corps aboard the Grassroots Express. He rarely veered off-message, even when turbulence forced him into a seat between reporters from Rolling Stone and Modern Physician magazines, who traded questions on guitarists and prescription drugs.

Regardless of the record crowds, it is still August — of 2003.

For each of the 800 people who skipped the Green Bay Packers game on Saturday night to chant "We want Dean" in a Milwaukee airplane hangar, there must be many like the young woman in the pink taffeta strapless bridesmaid's dress who went to the hotel bar where reporters and supporters were mingling over martinis and wondered, "What's going on here?"

Told it was the Dean campaign, she looked blank. Howard Dean, someone said. Running for president.

"President?" she asked. "President of what?"

 

Yeah, I saw that, mark. Good stuff. It's been trending that way all summer. So much for that sure thing we heard so much about.

The Dean thing is really blowing my mind though. I think it's about time for Edwards to start worrying about his Senate seat. Graham's long since over. And Lieberman and Gephardt haven't caught on even a little bit, anywhere but South Carolina. I'm starting to wonder how Kerry even stays in for long without New Hampshire. That was supposed to be his slam dunk. He'd better make up some of that gap fast or it's going to be hard for him to keep going too. All signs point to a Dean nomination now. The only guy that looks to have a chance to stop that's Clark. I like the hell out of that. Either one of those guys gets my very enthusiastic support.

 

RM95: Then Edwards is living in a fantasy world. This race has already passed him by.

Major: It's true that a great deal of Dean's support comes from the growing anti-Bush sentiment in the country, but his platform is out there for anyone to see. He's not just against things -- every speech he makes demonstrates what he's for. Balanced budget, increased health care, etc. It's easy to frame his positions as negatives, as so much of what Bush has done needs correcting, but it's a mistake to say he doesn't have a clear platform. But even if he didn't, I think he could do at least as well as Bush by leaning almost exclusively on "restoring honor and dignity to the White House."

 

p.s. Major, I'm not sure what election you were watching in 2002, but there was virtually no Bush "bashing." The guys who lost did so primarily by saying they agreed with him. Real Republicans beat fake ones every time.

 

Mr. C: See Dean's site. www.deanforamerica.com

He already has a platform. His views on each of the relevant issues are well known by anyone who seeks to hear them. And, unlike Arnold, he has a record of acting on those issues.

A visit to his site will also put the lie to the idea that he needs to move to the right. He is already arguably more moderate than any Democrat in the race except for Lieberman. The only issue on which he can successfully be painted "too liberal" is Iraq. And his surge is consistent with the movement of the center on that issue. Anyone who seeks to paint Dean as an unelectable lefty does so at his peril. The only place he's soft, in these times, is that he has no foreign policy experience and he didn't serve. And, in case you forgot, he'd be running against a guy who had no foreign policy experience and didn't serve. If he's doing that with Wes Clark as his running mate, look out.