http://www.townonline.com/lynnfield/news/local_regional/nss_newnsupdean11262003.htm
Kerry, the comeback kid?
By Chad Konecky
Wednesday, November 26, 2003
With the 2004 Iowa caucus only 50 days away, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry has stepped up a presidential campaign widely perceived to be sagging with bold strokes this week.
Kerry television spots in Iowa on Wednesday attacked President Bush's record on health care less than 48 hours after he levied topically related charges at Democratic frontrunner Howard Dean and less than 24 hours after the president stewarded a controversial Medicare overhaul package through Congress. On Tueday, Kerry pledged to increase federal education spending by $20 billion should he win the presidency.
Of nine consensus Democratic candidates vying for the 2004 nomination, counting retired general Wesley Clark's entrance into the fray, Dean is cast as the most ideologically polarized from the incumbent ("Deanie Boppers," Sunday, Sept. 21). Because the primary voters most likely to decide whether Dean or Sen. Kerry is the more viable New Englander in the field - those in New Hampshire (Jan. 27) and in the commonwealth (March 2) - the junior senator from Massachusetts has apparently realized his resurgence must come sooner rather than later.
In a major staff shake-up on Nov. 10, Sen. Kerry fired campaign manager Jim Jordan and hired Mary Beth Cahill, the chief of staff for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. Earlier this fall, internal tensions led to the departure of Chris Lehane, the campaign's communications director, who is now advising Clark.
Barring an epic misstep, Kerry will win the Massachusetts Democratic primary in March. The state's political establishment is too tilted in his favor to produce any other result. Yet if Dean, 54, wins the Granite State eight weeks from now and runs a strong second here, he may not end up the nominee when confetti tumbles from the FleetCenter rafters at next summer's convention, but Kerry will be quarry dust.
"Put as bluntly as I can put it, only one of those two people will be alive after New Hampshire," veteran Democratic political consultant Michael Goldman of Marblehead, a Tufts University professor and host of "Simply put" on New York's Bloomberg Radio, told Sunday this fall. "The person who loses N.H. is gone. Both campaigns will deny it and both campaigns know it's true. If you can't win your geographic base, you have no rationale for candidacy."