Advisers to the other front runner, Sen. John Kerry, don’t want to attack Dean now because they think he’ll crumble quickly when they finally do. In the meantime, Kerry advisers say, it’s good for the race to be seen by many party insiders as a two-way Kerry-Dean contest, since that deprives the other top-tier candidates–Dick Gephardt, John Edwards and Joe Lieberman–of media attention and campaign donations. “We can take Howard Dean out whenever we want to,” said one Kerry adviser. “Why do it now?”
If it really is a two-man race, Kerry hopes ultimately to argue that the party can’t afford to nominate the antiwar Dean. Another Kerry adviser says, “The Democratic Party isn’t going to want to nominate another 49er–a guy who loses 49 states, the way George McGovern did in 1972.” Other Dean rivals are happy to leave Dean alone on the theory that he is most bothersome to the Kerry campaign, especially in New Hampshire, where the primary next January is do or die for both men. “Either Kerry or Dean is going to survive the New Hampshire Primary, but not both,” said an adviser to another rival. “Why should any of us get in the way of that? If Dean defeats Kerry there, it opens things up for the rest of us.” Gephardt’s and Lieberman’s advisers see Dean blocking the progress of Edwards, who has positioned himself as a new-face, new-ideas outsider but who has yet to make any headway in the polls. Lieberman and Edwards are delighted to see Dean rising in the polls in Iowa, where he is making life more complicated for Gephardt.
But some independent Democratic strategists say all this Machiavellian restraint could backfire on Dean’s rivals. When Kerry finally does unload, for example, the theme will be that Dean is a phony because he really isn’t the progressive–or liberal–he claims to be. The Kerry team will focus on the fact that Dean has supported a balanced-budget amendment, opposes gun control, now supports the death penalty in some cases and has talked about raising the retirement age for Social Security. The Kerry team will use these issues to attack Dean’s character. But, ironically, those issues could undercut the other point Kerry’s advisers want him to make: that Dean isn’t mainstream enough to win the general election. “This race isn’t about left and right in any case,” says Simon Rosenberg, an independent Democratic strategist and head of the New Democrat Network. “It’s about insider and outsider. Dean has lucked into being the only credible outsider.”
