The New Republic

TNR offers a free 4-week online subscription. Unfortunately it is not working for me for what looks like a great Dean cover story. You might try and see if it works for you. Here is something I was able to get to

What other candidates are thinking about Dean

The Kerry campaign's initial response to the Dean surge has been to declare that the nomination is now a two-man race. Now that he has been defined, Kerry's campaign can start taking him down. They've started to do this with a triple strategy of coopting, contrasting, and containing.

Just as conservatives loyal to Bush argued that McCain wasn't really one of them, there has been a low-level Kerry campaign targeted at liberal Democrats, pointing out Dean's heresies on guns, Social Security, and the teachers' unions. But this represents a tricky strategy for Kerry, who has spent the last two years positioning himself as a centrist and doggedly fighting the label "Massachusetts liberal."

"The data that's emerging shows very, very clearly that our largest structural advantage is that Senator Kerry is drawing support across the ideological and economic spectrum that's unlike every other candidate. Dean is drawing his support almost entirely from the left wing of the party. [Dick] Gephardt is drawing his support almost entirely from downscale and blue-collar voters." If this is true--and a pair of recent Zogby polls of New Hampshire and Iowa voters supports the thesis--it's significant, because the current conventional wisdom is that Dean and Kerry are fighting over the same small group of elite, liberal voters with neither of them expanding outside that base. "That's empirically not true," Jordan insists.

Gephardt, Edwards, Lieberman, and Bob Graham are all betting that eventually one of them will emerge as the alternative to the winner of the Dean/Kerry battle.

The person with perhaps the greatest potential to emerge as the centrist challenger to Dean or Kerry, once the primaries move south and west after New Hampshire, is Edwards. But, though he has amassed an impressive $8 million war chest, the North Carolina senator is still registering in single digits in all the early caucus and primary states--including South Carolina--and continues to be burdened by the decision about whether to abandon the race for his Senate seat

Like the others, the Lieberman campaign seems to relish Dean's rise, seeing it as a vehicle to take down Kerry and then position their man as the mature, electable alternative who can actually beat Bush. In fact, it seems that all the candidates have an argument for why Dean's success is good for them. And what does the Dean camp think of all this? "I don't know which one of them it's good for," campaign manager Joe Trippi says with a chuckle. "I know it's good for us."