Can Anyone Catch Dean?

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r the past year, whenever one of the leading Democratic presidential candidates made his way to the downtown Washington office of Andrew Stern, head of the nation's largest union, he came away with two things: a bit of advice and the names of local officials across the country. "I'm the voice of 1.6 million members," the president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) told those who sought his endorsement. "Go talk to them." Only one candidate, Stern says, took him up on it. Howard Dean not only talked to SEIU members, he showed up on their picket line at Yale University, cheered their organizers at a San Francisco hospital and consulted the union's nurses in Iowa as he put together his proposal for solving the shortage in their profession. "Howard Dean didn't start on top," Stern says, "but he certainly ended up on top."

If the onetime long shot looked like a front runner before last week, the political pundits were declaring him all but unstoppable after Wednesday's joint endorsement by Stern's union and the 1.4 million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). As recently as six months ago, the betting was not if but when Dean would flame out. But the former Vermont Governor has roared ahead by defying three early assumptions about the race. When the leading candidates believed it would be political suicide to oppose George Bush on national security, Dean unambiguously inveighed against the Iraq invasion and caught the Democratic Party's antiwar wave. While the others were dialing for $2,000 checks and lining up big-name political consultants, Dean seized on the Internet's potential to raise money and organize grass-roots support. (He had been running for more than a year before he hired a pollster.) And as consequential as anything else, he focused his energy outside the political establishment at a time when the top contenders — nearly all of them creatures of the Beltway — believed that big donors, party kingmakers and powerful interest groups were the best assets to have in an overcrowded field.

Just as Dean's supposed weaknesses have turned out to be strengths, the supposed strengths of the other candidates have turned out to be their weaknesses. John Kerry tried to make his campaign about courage, but his was called into question by his conflicting — and conflicted — stances on Iraq. Joe Lieberman sold his candidacy on integrity but came off as a finger-wagging scold (and the only major Democratic candidate whose unfavorable ratings outweighed his favorable ones in a New Hampshire poll this month by the American Research Group). The exciting new face in the field, John Edwards, seemed too green and untested for a post--9/11 nation, and the most seasoned, Dick Gephardt, appeared too scarred by his long service and too bound to the ways of Capitol Hill for Democrats desperate for a win. As for the latest entry, retired General Wesley Clark, his clumsy first weeks have proved his boast that he's not a politician and have shown that military discipline doesn't always apply to other endeavors. "The people that were supposed to break out just never did," says Steve Jarding, an adviser on Florida Senator Bob Graham's failed campaign. "It just seems like everyone has been stuck in neutral."

At the same time, Dean has been running so fast that his vulnerabilities haven't caught up to him. "He's quick of lip, and quick of temper and stubborn," says Democratic activist Harold Ickes, a close adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton. "In another time, the Confederate-flag story [Dean's comment that he's courting the voters who display them on their pickup trucks] would have taken him down the drain." It took Dean five days to apologize for the Confederate-flag gaffe, but that mini-brouhaha might be just a prologue to the scrutiny he will face on inconsistencies in his record on issues from affirmative action to trade. That's why many believe the greatest threat to Dean is Dean himself.

The Vermonter's rise has relegated every other candidate to positioning himself as Dean's foil. Aides to the top-tier candidates are all whispering to reporters, "It's us and Dean." Right now each candidate is looking for a message with traction and for a turn in the road where he might ambush the front runner. To add some intellectual ballast and gravitas to his image, Edwards last week started airing ads stressing the depth of his ideas and inviting viewers to download from his website a 60-page booklet of his proposals. Clark will run his first ads in New Hampshire this week, and he plans to announce a series of congressional endorsements — moves that he hopes will burnish his political credentials and emphasize his ability to defeat Bush.

The candidate who has the first and maybe the best chance of tripping up Dean is Gephardt. Showing the skills that come with having run for President before, Gephardt has mounted the most steady, effective and coherent line of attack, blistering Dean over his earlier support for Newt Gingrich's Medicare-reform plan and for raising the retirement age for Social Security. It's paying off in Iowa, which has one of the oldest populations in the country and which Gephardt won in 1988. But even in Iowa, where the latest polling shows Gephardt's lead widening, the Missouri Congressman is hearing footsteps. Two months before the Iowa voting starts, Dean already has as many paid campaign workers there as Gore did on the day he overwhelmingly won the caucuses in 2000, and Dean's AFSCME endorsement gives him an additional army on the ground there.