DERRY, N.H. – Not for nothing did Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry’s presidential kickoff tour focus last week on the cheers of combat veterans and the tears of jobless workers.

Nor was it any accident that Iraq and the sluggish economy dominated President Bush’s return from summer vacation. On Labor Day, Bush went to Ohio, pledging to stoke manufacturing in a heartland state crucial to his re-election. Last Tuesday, he agreed to seek United Nations reinforcements for his troubled occupation of Iraq, a shift that Democrats treated as proof of a failing postwar strategy.

Among the contestants, at least, the 2004 presidential race is off to the earliest start ever – a little more than 400 campaigning days until the Nov. 2, 2004, election – and it is already plain that if Bush is vulnerable, it will be on two issues: the nation’s economy in a time of decline from the booming ’90s and its safety in the era of terrorism.

“Bush’s re-election will depend on the shape of the economy and the shape of Iraq and the war on terrorism,” probably in that order of importance, said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. “If both are going downhill, Bush will be shown the door, just like his father was” in 1992, when recession clouded his victory in the Persian Gulf War.

“If Iraq and the economy are improving, I don’t think it matters who the Democrats nominate,” said Sabato. If the postwar reconstruction and the domestic recovery are still muddling somewhere in the murky middle, then there may be a replay of the virtual tie that Bush and Democratic Vice President Al Gore took into post-election recounts in 2004, he said.

Thus, another big lesson of President George H.W. Bush’s 1992 loss to Bill Clinton is fueling the preliminary battle for the presidential nomination to be awarded next July at the Democratic National Convention in Boston’s Fleet Center.

Anything can happen in politics. Even an obscure, small-state governor can beat a popular commander-in-chief who has just won a war, so the opposition-party nomination is a prize worth pursuing ferociously.

Hence the spectacle of 10 Democrats running full-bore in the early voting states, in the less-visible race for campaign cash, and in a series of six nationally televised debates – with 134 days to go before the first actual ballots are cast in the Iowa precinct caucuses on Jan. 19.

As illustrated by the opening debate in Albuquerque, N.M., the issues of prosperity and peace are important, but the dynamics of the party primary fights are quite unlike those of the main event against Bush next fall. Right now, the rising star is the former governor of Vermont, Howard Dean. He leads in New Hampshire, where the nation’s first primary election will be held Jan. 27, over the better-known Kerry and the best-known name in the field, Connecticut Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, Al Gore’s running mate in 2000.

And the late entrance of former four-star general Wesley Clark could completely change the dyamic.

But one recent national poll found that two-thirds of Americans cannot name a single one of the Democratic candidates, “so this race may change dramatically two or three times before the voting begins,” said Alan J. Lichtman, a historian at American University.

The worries of work and war are legitimate. The Labor Department announced last week that the economy lost 93,000 jobs last month – pushing losses during Bush’s term to more than 2.7 million and raising a favorite Democratic specter. He might preside, at this rate, over the largest loss of jobs since Herbert Hoover was bounced from the White House during the Great Depression. Unemployment is two percentage points higher than the 4.1 percent rate when Bush took office.

Meanwhile, the fear of failure in Iraq has risen. The bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad headlined the worst month since May 1, when Bush stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln to declare the end of major hostilities in Iraq. The U.S. military death toll stood that day at 138; as of Friday, another 149 had been killed since then.

“Bush is definitely vulnerable,” said political scientist Anthony Corrado of Colby College and the Brookings Institution, a Rhode Island native who has worked on national Democratic campaigns.

Like President Ronald Reagan in his first term, Bush “has staked his domestic agenda on a large ideological gamble” to push tax breaks, along with high defense spending, at the risk of deepening federal deficits, Corrado said.

Democrats sought to outdo each other during last Thursday’s debate in pronouncing that gamble a loser. Bush is “a miserable failure,” said Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt, several times, on issues foreign and domestic, and he touted his experience as House Democratic leader in pushing initiatives to create jobs.

But analysts from both parties note that Bush also has some deep-seated strengths that his father lacked in 1992.

Those strengths rest on several factors. One is that Democrats may need the economy to get worse in order to prevail. Weak as the recovery has been, 6.1 percent unemployment is lower than its peak in June and, in any event, would have been considered decent during the recessions under Ford, Carter and the elder Bush. “Right now, times are probably not bad enough to drive a president out of office,” said historian Lichtman.

Bush also has a historically “remarkable” command of his base on the right, with about nine of 10 Republicans committed to vote for him, Corrado said. “It shows he learned the lessons of ’92, when conservatives saw his father as wishy-washy, wimpy, too moderate. The current President Bush has not made that mistake. Whether on taxes or “partial-birth’ abortion or judicial nominations, he has spent lot attention on his base.”

Another Bush strength is in what Corrado called the “amazing” turnaround in Bush’s “leadership profile” since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The popular sense that he was fit for command was “reinforced by the victory in Afghanistan and by his efforts in Iraq and the Middle East,” Corrado said. Still, a hard-core minority of voters disagrees vehemently and that pool of opposition to Bush will expand “if things fall apart in Iraq,” he said.

Not even the most vehement Democrat will root for American failure in Iraq, but the ablest campaign in the crowd so far is the one that has played to the party’s base on the left and – like Bush after Sept. 11 – made the most of an unexpected challenge.

“The war in Iraq came out of nowhere as the issue which suddenly defined everybody in the Democratic race, whether they like it or not,” said Richard J. Killion of Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire. “The candidate might be talking to an elderly group about health care or at a campaign function about jobs, but all anybody wanted to talk about was the war: Are you for the war or against it?”

Dean, who did not run for re-election last fall and had the time and energy to run harder in Iowa and New Hampshire than any of the employed politicians in the race, was perfectly poised to ride the confluence of two powerful streams of feeling on the left: the general antipathy toward Bush and the very specific outrage about the coming war.

On top of that, Dean showed he could give a hell of a speech, electrifying activists at union halls in Iowa and house parties in New Hampshire, and awakening crowds of jaded pols at Democratic candidate “cattle calls” in Washington.

“There’s no question that Howard Dean’s rise is for real and has been sustained since early spring,” said Killion.

“He has done in New Hampshire what very few have done – which is very quickly and cheaply build name identification” by making news with his antiwar position.

Meanwhile, Dean made ingenious use of the Internet to raise crowds and money – commodities which have fed upon themselves because of the medium’s capacity to reach beyond the lists of longtime, true-blue Democrats that Kerry, Gephardt, Lieberman and others may eventually be in danger of tapping out.

“Dean has completely changed the dynamic,” said Killion, by pulling liberal support away from Gephardt and Kerry and pushing them into the position of competing with the more moderate Lieberman and Edwards for middle-of-the-road Democratic voters.

But Killion said one important fact is obscured by the rigor of the campaign and the media attention at this early stage (earlier than the point at which Bill Clinton got into the 1992 race). “Voter support for these candidates is extremely soft,” meaning that Dean’s lead in the polls might well be whittled away, for example, by Kerry’s new round of advertising, or by the attacks that Lieberman and others have launched at Dean.

As he prepared for his “official” announcement tour of South Carolina, Iowa and New Hampshire, Kerry attempted on the war-and-peace front to kill two birds with one stone.

Kerry said Bush’s troubles in Iraq prove that the presidency is no place for “on-the-job training” – a remark meant to underscore Dean’s foreign policy inexperience and the richness of his resume in that field.

Lieberman, perhaps the most conservative of the Democratic candidates and definitely the most supportive of the war effort, has warned that a Dean nomination could be a disaster for the party.

Two key lines of the anti-Dean argument are, first, that too many voters view Iraq as a just cause even if they have qualms about its growing cost in American blood and money, and second, that Dean’s call for the rollback of Bush’s tax cuts would alienate the many middle-class voters who like Bush’s cuts in income-tax rates, his doubling of the child-care tax credit and his repeal of the so-called “marriage penalty” tax.

But Dean, who wants to use the money from the tax rollback to expand health care and cut the deficit, will not go gently, as he showed last Thursday night when another candidate chided him for his willingness to take away middle-class tax breaks.

“I’m sure most would rather have health insurance than the $100 they got,” Dean retorted.

Copy the Story Link