E-Mail This Article to a Friend Dean: The more you get to know him . . . Leading Democratic presidential candidate spends latest debate on the defensive BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2003 -- It was a bit of a liberal love-in Monday afternoon in Des Moines, Iowa. Senator Joe Lieberman -- normally the right wing of the Democratic Presidential debates -- did not participate, so the audience got a steady stream of progressive politics on Medicare, the war in Iraq, civil marriage rights for same-sex couples, and agri-business. More important, the often mind-numbing repetition of these frequent forums is beginning to demonstrate its purpose: the candidates have greatly improved, and with less than two months left before the Iowa caucuses, they are actually starting to look, dare we say it, Presidential.

In fact, they’ve gotten so good that Reverend Al Sharpton wasn’t the highlight of the show.

Instead, Iowans and MSNBC viewers got a look at what happens when candidates have a few months to do opposition research. Even leaving the recent revelations about former Vermont Governor Howard Dean’s Vietnam deferment to host Tom Brokaw ("You had an unfused vertebrae in your back. But then you went skiing for the next year," Brokaw said. "I’ve skied the moguls. I know how tough they are on your back"), Representative Dick Gephardt and Senator John Kerry keep coming up with new material on Dean. Gephardt accused Dean of cutting services to "the most vulnerable" in Vermont to balance his budget. "He cut Medicaid. He cut the prescription drug program," Gephardt said. "He cut funding for the blind and the disabled."

Kerry -- appearing via satellite from Washington, DC -- also trotted out material on Dean’s Medicaid cuts in the early 1990s, claiming that Dean took money out of a teachers’ pension fund. He then demanded that Dean admit that he plans to cut the rate of growth in Medicare -- and kept demanding an answer as Dean kept talking around the question.

Then Gephardt came up with another tidbit: Dean, who has built his campaign around his opposition to the "blank check" Congress gave to George Bush to wage the Iraq War, had favored the Biden-Lugar resolution. That, Gephardt said, was essentially the same as the resolution Dean has railed against. Kerry seconded that assertion, and offered another. "Howard Dean said he believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but he offered no way to try to deal with it," Kerry said

But Dean showed once again that he doesn’t need any help putting his foot in his mouth. In a discussion on ethanol subsidies, he uncorked a beauty. "If you put 10 percent ethanol in every gas tank in America, you would reduce the entire world oil output by two percent," he said. "Right now you can’t get peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians because our oil money goes to the Saudis, who then spend it on terrorist groups and on teaching small children to hate Americans, Christians, and Jews."

Not only is this an astonishingly simplistic reading of the Middle East situation, but it appears to place blame squarely on the Palestinians -- which is contradictory to his assertions of impartiality on the issue that he made earlier in the campaign.

Dean got through the debate reasonably well, but was on the defensive throughout. And he has to be wondering, what else are they going to find in my records? As long as he’s leading in the polls, the opposition researchers’ work isn’t done.