A fight to the finish in N.H.
Campaigns turn bitter before today's voting
MANCHESTER, N.H. -- The Democratic candidates exchanged bitter words as they hurried across New Hampshire yesterday, overwhelming the state's towns, roads, and airwaves in their final campaigning before polls open today.
The candidates, most chastened by an upset in the Iowa caucuses that seemed driven by negative attacks, had waged a much friendlier fight for most of the week before the nation's first primary. But with some polls indicating that Howard Dean was gaining steadily on Senator John F. Kerry -- with Senator John Edwards, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, and retired Army General Wesley K. Clark not far behind -- the candidates went on the attack at the last minute, another sign of how hard-fought the presidential nominating contest has become.
Dean, who has seemed to rebound in the past few days, tried to close the gap by accusing his rivals of making nasty phone calls to voters about him, a tactic he says was used in Iowa and helped contribute to his defeat there last week. But Dean doled out attacks of his own, mocking Kerry for not concluding in 2002 that the Bush administration had falsely asserted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. "Where was John Kerry when George Bush was giving out all this misinformation?" Dean said. "Foreign policy experience depends on patience and judgment. I question Senator Kerry's judgment."
In response, Kerry issued a statement saying the former Vermont governor "is ending this New Hampshire campaign the same way he started it, by angrily tearing down his opponents rather than offering any positive vision of his own."
For complete primary results, including votes in each N.H. town, visit www.boston.com.
Kerry, meanwhile, criticized his rivals over abortion rights, dropping his careful plan to rise above the fray. "I'm the only candidate running for president who hasn't played games, fudged around" on the abortion issue, Kerry said.
Some equally tough criticisms came from Clark, who seemed to be attacking the privileged upbringings of Dean and Kerry. "Unlike all the rest of the people in this race, I did grow up poor," Clark said.
And Edwards repeated his assertion that his rivals cannot change a bureaucracy they helped build.
"Do you believe somebody that's been in politics all of their life, or in Washington for decades, will bring that change?" Edwards said.
What once looked like a runaway race for Kerry, then began to seem a shoo-in for Dean, has turned into a tight race among at least four candidates. In the latest Boston Globe/ WBZ-TV tracking poll, conducted last night and Sunday, Kerry held a 37 percent to 20 percent lead over Dean, followed by Edwards at 12 percent, Clark at 8 percent, and Lieberman at 7 percent, with 16 percent undecided. The margin of error was plus or minus 5 percentage points. Others polls have suggested that Kerry has a much narrower lead, with Dean having moved up over the weekend.
New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner predicted a record turnout of 184,000 people in the state's primary, topping the 170,000 who voted in 1992, when former Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas defeated Bill Clinton. Freezing temperatures were forecast to continue today in the state, with highs in the low 20s.
Some strategists have questioned whether a less confrontational approach by candidates is as effective in New Hampshire as it seems to have been in Iowa, where Dean and Representative Richard A. Gephardt waged open battle and paid for it at the party caucuses. Gephardt finished fourth and dropped out the next day. Once the sniping resurfaced yesterday, it perpetuated itself, with a cycle of attacks and counterattacks.
Clark's remarks were arguably the most personal. "I didn't go to Yale," he said. Kerry, Dean, and Lieberman attended the Ivy League school in New Haven, as did President Bush.
"My parents couldn't have afforded to send me there," Clark continued. "I went to West Point. I paid my own way through college, I worked my way through, I worked for this country, and I'm running in this race because I want to help Americans like me."
Clark also declared himself "an outsider," a tag also adopted by Dean, who has never served in Washington, and Edwards, who took his first political office five years ago. "I'm not part of the problem in Washington," Clark said.
For the most part, Edwards stuck to his cheerful stump speech. Only after an appearance in Concord did he take aim at Kerry. "We need someone who's not a Washington insider . . . it's a difference between Senator Kerry and me," he said.
Dean returned to the issue that propelled his campaign onto the national stage last year, the Iraq war. As he did for months, Dean drew a distinction between himself and his major rivals, all of whom except Clark voted to authorize the invasion. Once the Kerry campaign began to fire back, Dean scaled back his remarks, insisting he had not meant to attack. "I'm not here to pick a fight with Senator Kerry or Senator Edwards or Senator Lieberman," Dean told supporters at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. "All I'm saying is, Washington is a place where sitting on a committee is considered to be experience."
Joanna Weiss, Glen Johnson, and Raja Mishra of the Globe staff contributed to this report. 