Leading Democrats at Work on Iowa’s Undecided Voters

John F. Kerry talked a populist line Friday and defended his record on agriculture. Dick Gephardt attacked his rivals on trade policy. John Edwards embarked on a trek across Iowa, and Howard Dean traversed the midsection of the state, from south to north.

Three days before the crucial Iowa caucuses, the four leading Democratic presidential candidates and hundreds of their fired-up field workers scoured the state for the support needed to break out of a tightly bunched pack.

Advertising tactics began to shift as the candidates, recognizing Iowans’ traditional aversion to attack politics, moved to buff their images. Dean said he would pull a spot attacking his rivals for supporting the war in Iraq; Gephardt pledged to respond in kind, dropping a spot critical of the former Vermont governor’s position on Medicare.

But the overall tenor of the campaign remained harsh -- harsher than many observers have seen in an Iowa presidential contest. There was still plenty of incendiary mail being sent to voters, including a Gephardt piece that quesitoned Kerry’s support of ethanol, a corn byproduct.

In their speeches, the candidates hammered away at core themes intended to fire up their faithful -- and perhaps sway some undecided voters -- and worked to make sure their backers make it to the caucuses Monday night.

Each of the four wants to finish first, naturally, and opinion surveys suggested each had a shot. But second, or even a close third, could be enough to keep their hopes alive and perhaps offer a burst of momentum heading into the next contest, Jan. 27 in New Hampshire.

But none of the contenders faces higher stakes than Gephardt. Without an outright win in a state he captured in his first presidential run 16 years ago, his campaign could die a cash-starved death the way it did last time.

Stumping on Friday, the Missouri congressman reminded voters of his opposition to the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement and of his vote in 2000 opposing the normalization of trade ties with China.

“Howard Dean was for both of those treaties. John Kerry voted for both of those treaties. John Edwards voted for [the China bill],” he told a crowd at his campaign headquarters in Fort Dodge.

He concluded: “I have the only candidacy that was really there fighting against bad trade deals in the mid-’90s that have helped lose Iowa 30,000 jobs in the last 10 years.”

Kerry, riding a last-minute tide of support, kept to his usual swift pace of six campaign events preceded by two interviews on morning TV shows.

On the stump, Kerry attacked President Bush for what he said was pandering to special interests. The GOP administration, he said, “embraces a creed of greed.”

He also blasted corporations for taking jobs overseas, exploiting the U.S. tax code and treating the American worker unfairly.

Kerry, who served as a Navy lieutenant in Vietnam, jabbed at Bush over the war with Iraq. “I know something about war, because I fought in a war,” he said. “That’s why I’ve always said America should never go to war because it wants to; we should only go to war because we have to. That’s the standard. And this country broke that standard.”

Like Edwards and Gephardt, Kerry voted for the congressional resolution authorizing the war. And also like them, he has since said Bush erred in attacking Iraq before building broader international backing for the war.

The Kerry campaign spent much of the day fending off attacks on his agricultural record -- an uncomfortable position for a candidate seeking support in Iowa.

The Gephardt mailer slammed Kerry for a 1994 vote in which the senator opposed eliminating the fuel addictive MTBE and replacing it with ethanol.

Stephanie Cutter, a Kerry advisor, bristled at the characterization that Kerry was opposed to ethanol. “He voted just last year ... to double ethanol use,” she said. “But it didn’t make sense for [the federal government] to require ethanol use in 1994 when there wasn’t enough ethanol produced to use.”

The Dean campaign circulated quotes from a newspaper interview Kerry gave in 1996 in which he said the U.S. Department of Agriculture should be abolished or its staffing slashed.

The Kerry campaign did not dispute the quote, but argued it was taken out of context. Cutter said Kerry favored eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” at the agency.

“Sounds like the other campaigns are engaging in desperate distortions to stop our momentum,” said David Wade, Kerry’s press secretary.

Edwards continued to project a sunny campaign style, starting at the Czech and Slovak Museum and Library in Cedar Rapids, where he mentioned the Gephardt ad assailing Dean on Medicare. Such tactics, he suggested, were a distraction from the important problems Americans face. He told the crowd that “every hour that an attack ad runs,” 80,000 Americans file for bankruptcy, 190 fall into poverty and 270 lose their health-care coverage.

Dean is struggling to avoid a setback in Iowa, after months of surging from the pack and leading the other Democrats in fundraising. Although he began his campaign more than a year ago as a little-known politician from a small state, he now would be hard-pressed to present slippage to second place as anything but a disappointment.

After addressing a packed room in the student union hall of William Penn University in Oskaloosa, Dean told reporters he was not fazed by the recent polls showing the caucuses a tossup.

“At this point, it’s all organization,” he said as he worked his way through a crush of supporters. “It’s just getting out your vote, people you know are going to support you, and getting them to be draggers for Dean -- drag somebody to the caucus.”

With just a few days left, Dean is still encountering undecided voters taking one last look at him before they make up their mind. One of them was Suzann Holland, who waited to quiz the candidate after his stump speech in Oskaloosa.

“I was wondering if you could give me a reason not to vote for John Edwards,” Holland, a 32-year-old library administrator, asked Dean.

“Oh, I wouldn’t give you a reason not to vote for John Edwards,” he said. “I’ll give you a reason to vote for me.”

“What about a key difference?” Holland asked.

Dean noted that he opposed the war in Iraq and the No Child Left Behind education bill that Bush pushed through Congress, while Edwards favored the administration on both issues.

“I believe that America needs to stand up to George Bush and get corporate interests out of Washington,” Dean said. “John is a good guy, but he’s from Washington.”

“All right, you got me,” Holland responded. She smiled and shook Dean’s hand. But as the candidate moved away, Holland said she’s still on the fence.

While only one contender will emerge in first place Monday night, there could be multiple winners under the quirky interpretations that often follow Iowa’s caucuses.

As runner-up, Kerry could declare victory after weeks of being written off as a weak link in the presidential lineup, and use newfound momentum to go after rival Wesley K. Clark in New Hampshire. (Clark and Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut decided to skip active campaigning in Iowa.)

Edwards could build on the attention he would receive if he finishes second.

But Gephardt risks seeing his campaign die in early February if he does not finish first.

At a library in Rockwell City, he waved off a question about whether Iowa is, for him, a must-win. “I’m going to win Iowa, and I’m going to win the nomination, and that’s what I’ve said to all of you many, many, many times,” Gephardt told reporters.

What about second place? “That’s one of those iffy questions,” he said. “You know what Harry Truman said: Can’t answer those iffy questions.”

Times staff writers Mark Z. Barabak, James Gerstenzang, Matea Gold and Scott Martelle contributed to this story from Iowa; Eric Slater contributed from New Hampshire.