E-Mail This Article to a Friend Dean gets duller Candidates take their final shots in Iowa BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

MONDAY, JANUARY 12, 2004 -- It’s amazing that Howard Dean still seems to come to debates unprepared to answer the questions he knows he’ll get asked. For crying out loud, hire a James Carville to write up a 30-second bit, and memorize it, like a real politician.

One example of this ill-preparation was immediately picked up nationally from Sunday night’s Iowa Brown and Black Forum debate. This was Dean’s stammering at Al Sharpton’s accusation that he had never had an African-American or Hispanic cabinet member in his decade as Governor. You can’t sound much more grasping and patronizing on this question than Dean did, offering up that "We had a [minority] senior member of my staff on my fifth floor."

That was bad -- it doesn’t suggest that he’s prejudiced, but that he might not have much credibility speaking to minority issues as the campaign heads into more racially mixed states. (Iowa is so whitebread that the three minority guest questioners for the Brown and Black Forum had to be pulled in from Texas, New Mexico, and Georgia.)

But a potentially more damaging moment for the immediate future came in the very first exchange, when MSNBC’s Lester Holt asked Dean about an old quote, captured on film, when he denigrated the Iowa caucuses as catering to special interests. It’s not much of a national issue, even if one were to disagree, but it was front-page news last week in Iowa.

Holt asked whether, as his old comments suggested, Dean would be beholden to special interests if he won the Iowa caucuses next Monday. Dean should have knocked that out of the ballpark by claiming, as he often does, to have run a different kind of campaign, a grass-roots campaign, a campaign of the people and not special interests, and so on. Instead he pouted that "I, frankly, think people are a little tired of having debates about who said what four years ago."

That’s neither an apology nor an answer, and voters like to decide for themselves what they’re tired of. Suggesting that four years is beyond the statute of limitations for political speech is disingenuous, and hardly comforting to those worrying what might be in those sealed Gubernatorial records in Vermont.

As for the other candidates -- well, let’s say it’s about time to lay down a law that if a candidate has been given every opportunity to participate as an equal, and is still polling below five percent a week before the election, they should get off the stage and give voters a chance to hear the candidates who matter. (Even if Kucinich did get the most applause, and pulled off the best laugh line when asked about Bush’s Mars plans: "Maybe he’s looking for the weapons of mass destruction, still.")

There is a suddenly very interesting four-way race in Iowa, and those four spent far too much of the two-hour debate, the last before the caucuses, standing idly at their podiums. Viewers in particular needed to get a better look at Senator John Edwards, who has enjoyed a bump in recent polls and, the very day of the debate, an endorsement from the state’s biggest newspaper, the Des Moines Register. That’s going to send a lot of caucus-goers looking in his direction, many for the first time. He did well, sticking to his upbeat, "positive about America" message. He also blasted a home run when asked about Bush’s plans to cap damages in lawsuits against corporations. Edwards, who made his personal fortune off of huge jury awards in such cases, turned it around on Bush. "He hates the idea that six or 12 Americans sitting on a jury box can have the power.... He hates the idea that his corporate buddies can walk into a courtroom and be treated like any ordinary person."

Kerry tried out a couple of jokes, most of which clunked, but otherwise neither helped or hurt himself. His best line is one that might stick regardless of the eventual nominee: "I think it’s a Bush-league recovery," Kerry said of the economy. "A recovery for people in the board rooms."

Gephardt was not at his sharpest -- he bizarrely insisted that he could achieve zero-percent unemployment, an absurd claim -- but spoke well about job creation. He also took Dean to task on recently promising to propose middle-class tax cuts at a later date. (This is another issue that hurts in Iowa more than we might see from outside -- don’t Iowans deserve to know his plan before they vote?) Gephardt got Dean to say that he would not introduce this to-be-determined tax cut until after balancing the budget -- which he has previously said he would do in his sixth or seventh year in office. Gephardt also got Dean to say "I think cutting the payroll tax" -- social security -- "is a good idea to look at." Dean insisted that such cuts would not affect the social security fund, but that’s one more front on which Dean now must play defense.

A variety of recent Iowa polls show Dean slightly ahead of Gephardt, with Kerry and Edwards not far behind and gaining. Almost any finishing order looks possible at this point. The TV talking is about over; now the campaign organizations get to show who can bring their people to the polls next Monday.