Can Anyone Catch Dean?

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Even if Gephardt wins Iowa, Dean forces are questioning how far he can get after that. Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi was Gephardt's deputy manager in 1988. Winning Iowa then, he says, "got Gephardt nothing. He won Iowa and then went nowhere. Replaying the movie, I don't think you're going to get a different result this time."

A second-place finish in Iowa, though, may be little more than a speed bump to Dean as he heads for New Hampshire a week later. The state is a must-win for Massachusetts' Kerry, who was once presumed to be the front runner but now looks more irrelevant than inevitable. In the latest WMUR-TV and University of New Hampshire poll, released last Friday night, Dean opened a gaping 38%-to-16% lead over Kerry, and no one else topped 5%. Kerry's fund raisers are telling him it's getting next to impossible to find anyone willing to write a check to his campaign. Last week the Senator fired campaign manager Jim Jordan, announced he's following Dean's lead in opting out of spending limits for his campaign and vowed "to get really real and focused." That declaration, of course, only raised the discomfiting question of what he's been doing until now.

Dean has so flattened the competition that the race for third place in New Hampshire is almost as vigorous as the race for first. Lieberman, Edwards and Clark are making their play for independents, who can vote in either party's primary, in hopes of claiming at least a victory over expectations. "In New Hampshire, it's not about what you finish, it's about what you finish compared to conventional wisdom," says Lieberman pollster Mark Penn. "The national constituency and the constituency in the Feb. 3 states would light up considerably if they saw [Lieberman] finish third in New Hampshire."

All these calculations are being made months before the first vote has been cast, and the national polls suggest that most Americans haven't given the race much thought at all. It's not until Feb. 3--with seven contests in South Carolina, Delaware, Missouri, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma and North Dakota — that the Democratic race will begin to take the pulse of the candidates' national appeal. Four days later comes the big state of Michigan, starting off a procession of primaries that leads to the biggest ones of all, New York and California, on March 2.

People in most states aren't as steeped in politics as the voters of New Hampshire and Iowa, and aren't likely to start paying serious attention until primary day is upon them. The trick for each candidate except Dean could be to last long enough to be there when they do. Even the other campaigns concede privately that if Dean hasn't stumbled by then — and particularly, if he has won both Iowa and New Hampshire — the race could be all but over before the other candidates get to test their appeal outside the political-hothouse environment of the small, early states. If so, the front-loaded primary process may backfire, giving the first contests more, not less influence over the outcome.

A major obstacle to any of the other candidates overtaking Dean is the simple fact that there are so many of them. South Carolina, for instance, will be closely watched as the first test of how well the various candidates do in the South. But with nine candidates dividing up the votes there, someone might be able to win with as little as 20% of the vote. Given these numbers and the fact that 40% of South Carolina Democrats opposed the war, that someone could be Dean — a candidate, even his own strategists admit, who wouldn't have a prayer of winning a Southern primary in a smaller field. "In a nine-person field, Dean is in the driver's seat," says Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore's 2000 campaign. Still, no one seems inclined to drop out, because each sees himself as the candidate who could ultimately beat George Bush. This, of course, is why they all got into the race in the first place. But as they have found out in one way or another, thinking you can beat George Bush is a lot different from winning that chance.