Clark makes inroads on N.H. trail

PETERBOROUGH, N.H. -- This was once Howard Dean turf, the southwestern New Hampshire landscape of maple trees and pacifists. But here at a midday meet-the-candidate event, some 600 people overstuffed Town Hall and cheered retired Army General Wesley K. Clark. And outside, a Dean operative was passing out anti-Clark fliers -- which the Clark camp took, in a way, as a compliment.

It was another sign of voters' renewed interest in Clark, and a renewed life for a campaign many pundits seemed to write off by the middle of November. After he started with a splash in the national media, then made a well-publicized gaffe about his stance on the war in Iraq, Clark lingered for a while in the single digits in the polls. He registered little national attention even when he rose to third place in New Hampshire behind Senator John F. Kerry.

But with the start of the new year, Clark has emerged as a somebody again, thanks to a steady rise in a closely watched tracking poll in New Hampshire, a statistical tie with Dean in one national poll, and fourth-quarter fund-raising figures second only to Dean's. Now there's a media horde, a string of events that draw 500 or more intrigued New Hampshire residents, an endorsement from Madonna, and a flurry of attacks from other candidates. There's also a different Clark, though the sweaters he has started wearing on the stump aren't the only signs of change in the man and his campaign. After a swing through the South in late December -- not to mention the capture of Saddam Hussein -- Clark's direct pitch to voters has evolved, as well.

Clark's pitch used to be heavy on the military, and many of his personal anecdotes involved him sitting behind a desk in a commander's office. Now, he focuses on his premilitary days, talking about his Arkansas roots, his Baptist upbringing, his days watching Little Rock's integration.

The underlying message has shifted a bit, from Clark's foreign policy credentials to his campaign's contention that he'll play better than Dean in the South. But either way, Clark's candidacy is still premised largely on his electability, and it's on those grounds that some New Hampshire voters now say they're giving Clark a close look.

"I guess there's a big difference between who I like and who I think is electable," said Duncan Watson, 40, a Walpole resident who spent his lunch hour at the Peterborough forum and says he is leaning toward Clark.

"I think that a lot of people saw Dean early. He was politicking in New Hampshire right from the get-go," Watson said.

Watson fits the profile of the new Clark voter, said Dick Bennett, president of American Research Group, which runs the New Hampshire tracking poll that indicates about a 2-point-per-day rise for Clark and a slight drop in a still-formidable lead for Dean. Dean's support among young voters hasn't slipped, Bennett said, even with the recent flurry of negative attention he's received. Women, too, tend to stick with him. Clark's rise, instead, seems to have come from men, many of them 45 or older.

"If the wives of the husbands who are supporting Clark vote for Clark," Bennett said, "then it's a close race with Dean."

Women voters, though, have had a harder time with Clark, in part because of his military background, Bennett said. Indeed, in Peterborough, one voter told Clark that some of his friends refused to vote for a general, something scattered voters have mentioned throughout the campaign.

It was clearly an issue for Margaret Cawley, 82, a retired music professor who lives in a Concord retirement home and who walked away from a Clark event this week saying she liked the man but wasn't sold.

"I'm a pacifist," Cawley said, "so when I see all of these posters that have four stars on the top, I think, `Hmm, that's not my candidate.' "

Clark has treaded more carefully of late when he has talked about his Army past. At a meet-the-candidate event in Keene on Wednesday -- which was moved from the junior high to the high school to accommodate the growing crowd -- Clark said he'd respond to Republican attacks with a fight, because "I'm a soldier." But then he added, almost in parentheses, "at least I started out that way. I'm not one anymore."

And Clark's not-very-soldierlike demeanor -- with his small frame and quiet way of talking, he doesn't seem the stereotypical military man -- has left some women pleasantly surprised.

"People are always completely different in person that what you see on the news," said Jennifer Wood, 63, an artist and dog trainer who lingered after the Peterborough forum, contemplating whether to support Clark or Dean. "He wasn't as forceful as we expected. He was milder." Bennett said women have also been responding well to Clark's most recent television ad, which features a black woman who worked under Clark as an Army major and who says that he was "very supportive of women" and "makes everybody feel important."Political observers attribute Clark's rise to other factors, as well: His steady advertising in New Hampshire since mid-November and the near-monopoly he's had on local media in New Hampshire, because most of the other candidates have been campaigning in Iowa. With success, though, comes increased scrutiny; already, the attacks on Clark have risen. So have the public tiffs between the Clark and Dean campaigns, which battled this week over the Dean flier critical of Clark. Yesterday, Clark's campaign accused an unspecified rival of calling senior, independent voters and telling them they couldn't vote in the Democratic primary -- unless they were thinking of voting for Dean. A Dean spokeswoman emphatically denied making the calls.

Bennett, who first reported the calls on his company's website, said there was no way of knowing who made them.

Clark himself, meanwhile, is trying to strike an ever-more-optimistic tone. In Manchester this morning, he will present a "20-year-vision," heavy on long-term goals.

He'll make the speech before college students, a core component of Dean's support. There's not much time left before the primary, but Clark -- whether he calls himself a soldier or not -- is gearing for a fight.