Dean seems to regain Iowa steam
By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst
Published 1/17/2004 5:52 PM
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MASON CITY, Iowa, Jan. 17 (UPI) -- Howard Dean's faltering campaign is hitting its stride again Saturday just when he needs it to in the last weekend before the Iowa caucuses.
The audiences were smaller, the applause warm bit not ecstatic in recent days. But on Friday, the candidate and his audiences took fire again, right where he needed them to, in the heart of Dick Gephardt country in north central Iowa.
It started Friday when Dean campaigned in the United Auto Workers stronghold of Newton, former Democratic Rep. Dave Nagel told United Press International.
"All of a sudden, the place erupts," Nagel said.
And it continued in Mason City Saturday. Dean organizers expected about 200 people for their first morning event at a shopping mall. But they got twice that. It was standing room only and packed to the seams. And when Dean lit into President George W. Bush and gave his stock stump speech the waves of applause rolled back at him.
"This should be Gephardt country," Nagel said." All of a sudden, the momentum's back with him."
Polls show a four-way race with Dean running neck and neck with Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina and Gephardt. All are within the polling margin of error.
At first blush Iowa should be a Gephardt victory. He's won here in the past and, while not exactly a hometown boy, is a neighbor from Missouri to the south. But Dean seemed able to erase the thousand miles between Iowa and his native Vermont quite easily.
They are both small states with excellent school systems and neighborly down-home values, he said, and the crowd loved it. But in both places, "The biggest export is people."
Dean is not out of the woods yet by a long shot. Polls show him bunched together with Gephardt, Kerry and Edwards, whose campaigns have also taken renewed life over the past week. And Gephardt is campaigning like a man possessed, hitting seven Iowa counties Saturday.
But the Dean campaign does not feel like it is falling apart and the candidate still exudes enthusiasm, confidence and ease when he campaigns. His physical stature may be small but this is an alpha male like his father was. He likes campaigning and he is a scrappy fellow, belying his upper-crust WASP background.
If President Bush is most comfortable as a Texas rancher and a good ol' boy despite his elite background and Yale education, Dean, who also enjoyed both, appears happiest as an angry populist, an average guy with an average family from an unpretentious rural state. He adopts President Harry Truman's scrappy persona easily. And it seems to work among Iowa Democrat.
If Dean does win outright on Monday, it will be a blow to his campaign momentum, especially in New Hampshire, where he faces the formidable surging challenge of former Gen. Wesley Clark. But it will not knock him out of the race.
This is no Michael Dukakis who froze solid as the attacks from the current president's father pied up on him in the 1988 presidential campaign. Dean will get his setbacks but he will keep fighting.
"On Monday at 6:30 p.m., you have the power to take back the Democratic Party," he tells his Iowa audiences.
They seem to believe him.