Who's the meanest of them all?

Howard Dean's Democratic rivals cry foul when he criticizes their policies. His sin? Doing so openly, on TV, rather than behind their backs

By Tim Grieve

Oct. 27, 2003 | The television commercials come off as somewhere between somber and sedating. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, dressed in a sweater and standing in what appears to be a park, looks straight into the camera and speaks calmly -- about health insurance and prescription drugs in one ad, in another about the war on Iraq. He refers to "my opponents." He says they failed to deliver prescription drug benefits to seniors. He says "the best" they can do about the war is ask questions that they should have asked before voting to authorize George W. Bush to invade Iraq. And then he describes what he has done and what he has said about prescription drugs and the war on Iraq.

That's it. No names, no name-calling, no personal attacks on anyone.

But when John Kerry's campaign staffers first saw the ads last week, they were all but apoplectic. "Dean goes negative," campaign staffers alerted reporters in an e-mail sent the day the ads first appeared. "Dean attacks fellow Democrats," they said in another. Kerry's campaign manager told the Washington Post that Dean must be desperate, that his campaign staff must see "something alarming" in their polls.

What Kerry's staff didn't say is that Dean  the surprise front-runner in the race for the Democratic nomination for the presidency  has been under attack from his "fellow Democrats" for months. Sen. Joseph Lieberman and Rep. Richard Gephardt have both taken hard shots at Dean in debate. Lieberman has warned that Dean's trade policies would put millions of Americans out of work and cause a "Dean depression," and Gephardt has likened Dean to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. But in recent weeks, it has been Kerry himself  or at least his campaign  leading the most vitriolic charge against Dean.

As Dean has gained ground in Kerry's backyard -- a Zogby poll released Friday shows Dean leading Kerry by 23 percentage points in New Hampshire -- the Kerry campaign has flooded the e-mail in boxes of political reporters and editors with ad hominen attacks that far out-nasty anything in Dean's new TV spots.

Kerry campaign staffers have attacked Dean for "flip-flopping" on NAFTA. They have knocked him for using a debate gag line written by James Carville. When Dean referred to members of Hamas as "soldiers," Kerry's campaign staff sent reporters an e-mail saying that Dean had "insult[ed] the memory of every innocent man, woman and child killed by these suicidal murders" and proven that "the presidency is no place for on-the-job training." And when Dean suggested that the United States should be prepared for the day when it no longer has military superiority over the rest of the world, Kerry's campaign declared that Dean was "unfit" to serve as president.

But for Kerry's campaign staff, there's apparently no comparison between Dean's television spots and the Kerry campaign's more personal attacks. Because Dean's "attacks" are on TV, they are categorically different -- and necessarily worse -- than anything Kerry's camp might say in blast e-mails sent to reporters. "You're comparing apples and oranges," Kerry spokesman Dag Vega says. "Our e-mails are background information, and reporters can do with them what they will. TV ads are direct communications to voters, where you put millions of dollars behind your message. I think that's a stark difference between the two. I don't see there being much of a link."

To some degree, at least, political analysts agree. Danta Scala, a political science professor at New Hampshire's Saint Anselm College, said the difference between Kerry's e-mails and Dean's ads is "in some ways the difference between talking behind somebody's back and saying nasty things to his face -- once you've crossed that line, there's no going back."

As Scala acknowledges, however, e-mail attacks are sent for a reason: in hope that reporters will see something in them that will warrant a negative story about the subject of the messages. And at times, at least, that hope pans out. The morning after the Kerry campaign circulated its first e-mail about Dean's new ads, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press all ran stories reporting that Dean had become the first Democratic contender to run "negative" ads -- a fact duly noted in a follow-up e-mail Kerry's campaign sent to reporters.

Next page: Accentuate the negative