COLUMBIA, S.C. -- Forget the war in Iraq. The key division among Democratic voters as of this past Saturday was between those who are paying attention to the 2004 primary -- now in full swing -- and those who are not. For the vast majority of voters, the so-called invisible primary remains decidedly invisible. A mid-April poll by the Pew Research Center found 69 percent of Democrats unable to name even one of the nine contenders for their party's nomination.
The challenge for each candidate at last Saturday's debate at the University of South Carolina, broadcast to a limited number of viewers by ABC and C-SPAN, was to convert those not yet paying attention into the ranks of those who are. The candidates who did best during the debate understood this; those who performed poorly mistook the already fierce jostling for position as a sign that the campaign season is further advanced than it is. It's early yet, and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.) -- whose nasty personal spat is incomprehensible to all but a few Washington insiders and totally irrelevant to the needs of the American people -- gave pugnacious performances that seemed more appropriate for a campaign's final sprint than its first debate.
In the end, though, the two days of campaigning in South Carolina that preceded the debate may matter more than the Saturday-night face-off itself. That's because both the candidates and the Democratic Party face a unique situation in South Carolina, where outgoing state party chairman Dick Harpootlian was feted, to loud laughter, on Friday night with this quote from Winston Churchill that neatly summarized the plight of Democrats in the state: "Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."
Make no mistake: South Carolina is a red state. "It's very difficult for a [Democratic] candidate to be heard here," said retired teacher Pansy Webb of Anderson, S.C., at a meet-and-greet session with the candidates right before the state party's annual convention, also held on Saturday. "It's part of that southern bias."
The state has a population about half the size of New York City's, and the last Democratic presidential candidate to win here was Jimmy Carter in 1976. In the 2002 elections, Republicans roundly trounced Democrats. The local Democratic Party was so broke it had only $288.93 in the bank in mid-April, according to The Associated Press. Though the party raised $300,000 at its annual Jefferson-Jackson fundraising dinner last Friday, it'll need to raise another $1.7 million just to hold its primary next year. (In South Carolina, the parties pay for their own primaries.) The Dems will also need to recruit 4,000 volunteers to staff the polls, which is also the parties' responsibility. No one knows how many people will vote. The last time the state even held a Democratic presidential primary was 1992; that year 114,000 people cast ballots.
South Carolina is strongly pro-military. This is blindingly obvious on the streets of Columbia. Men in camouflage gear and berets watch sports on TV at local restaurants and drive around town in pickup trucks. Yellow ribbons are a ubiquitous presence, encircling trees at the state capitol, flanking the poles at Seawell's restaurant, where the Jefferson-Jackson dinner was held, dripping from parking meters on busy Gervais Street, drawn on a giant banner that reads, "We support you" and hangs, along with a huge American flag, outside local television station WIS. Just outside of Columbia is Fort Jackson, one of the U.S. Army's largest training bases, where 97,000 people reside on 57,303 acres. The city of Columbia itself has a population around 98,000.
In such an environment, anyone who is tough on defense or seen as a moderate can expect to do well. "We're really concerned," said Harriet Gardin Field of Columbia at U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn's (D-S.C.) Friday night fish fry, a raucous political event held annually on the first floor of an outdoor parking garage that drew more than 1,000 last weekend. "We thought we had a winner in [Al] Gore. We thought Gore was moderate enough to go the distance. We need a moderate."
Sentiments like that one are good news for Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) and other candidates who supported the war in Iraq. Interviews with dozens of South Carolina voters and party activists suggest two things: first, that Lieberman and Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.) are starting off the bid for Palmetto State voters with considerable advantages based on name recognition; and second, that their current -- albeit small -- lead in the polls may not be entirely a function of voters not knowing anything about the other candidates. Gephardt in particular seems to have a loyal following among South Carolina's Democrats, suggesting that his base of support may be harder to sway than Lieberman's during the 10 months before the state's March 3, 2004, primary.
In Columbia, Lieberman's last name is a two-syllable word: LEEB-mun. As in, "I don't like that ole kook up in Washington. . . . I like Lieb'mun." So says 75-year-old Betty Summers, a former Democratic activist and member of the South Carolina Business and Professional Women's association who wore what could well be the de facto red-state badge pinned to her lapel, an angel carrying an American flag.
Or as in: "I think Lieb'mun's going to win it hands down. He's spotless. . . . I think Lieb'mun appeals to swing voters, too." That's Mick Davis of Columbia, a registered independent -- independents can vote in any primary in this state -- who served as a U.S. Army combat medic in the Gulf War and favored Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2000. "The left side got a lot of bad imaging during the war -- Susan Sarandon and Hollywood types," he said to me. "Anybody who's attached to them is going to lose bad."
Lieberman, a longtime foe of Hollywood types, hit his stride during the debate. After a spring of uninspiring performances, he seems to have finally shaken the ghost of Gore and is now campaigning as himself. That means touting his own strong record of supporting military interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and -- more controversially -- both wars with Iraq, along with writing the legislation for the Department of Homeland Security and successfully pushing to create the 9-11 Commission. No one I spoke with seemed to care that he's Jewish. It was more important to them that he's a man of faith who honors the Sabbath and is morally upstanding. The memory of Bill Clinton's transgressions with Monica Lewinsky runs deep here, and even a whiff of personal indiscretion is likely to scare voters off.
Lieberman may have falling poll numbers in each of the three major early states -- Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina -- but he remains one of the top three candidates in each. No one else in the field can make that claim. Kerry appears to be running second in Iowa -- though polls of the caucus-goers are notoriously unreliable -- and is either first or tied with Dean in New Hampshire. Gephardt leads in Iowa and is running second in South Carolina, while Dean has either grabbed the No. 2 spot in New Hampshire or pulled even with Kerry, and now is slowly pulling up to Lieberman in Iowa.
Curiously, Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) has so far been unable to win support in the North and has been slower than the northern candidates to earn it in the South. A methodical man, Edwards has yet to really start campaigning in earnest, and his poll levels are probably partly a reflection of that. He's running third in South Carolina so far, but 46 percent of those interviewed in a Zogby Poll in mid-March didn't even have a favorite candidate, so it's unclear whether that means anything.
Overall, Edwards remains a bit of an enigma. He trotted out his appealing biography -- and his parents, who joined him in the spotlight in South Carolina -- every chance he got, but at the end of the weekend it was still hard to get a sense of what he stood for. Unlike most of those against whom he is running, Edwards is not a creature of the Ivy League and therefore doesn't share the mannerisms of that particular segment of the ruling elite. (Kerry, Dean, Lieberman, Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and President George W. Bush all attended either Harvard University or Yale University at one point or another.) Nor did Edwards' schooling take him far afield. He lived every one of his years before becoming a senator in either North or South Carolina. When he opened his speech at the state Democratic Party convention Saturday afternoon with "Hello, South Carolina! Boy, it's good to be home," it was a careful positioning move. But it also sounded like he was expressing a note of real relief. Talking to South Carolinians, he doesn't talk about his "father"; he talks about his "daddy." He's the only one in the race, besides the Rev. Al Sharpton, who can talk country. How much of a factor that will be is anyone's guess.
Watching Edwards campaign, it struck me that rather than being the second coming of Bill Clinton, he looked more like the second coming of Al Gore. It wasn't that he was awkward, because he wasn't. Indeed, he seemed invigorated by being in the South and was quite relaxed all weekend. But he shares the same sweaty enthusiasm and populist rhetoric as the former veep, with plenty of grip and grin and "How are you?" and "Nice to meet you."
On Friday, Edwards arrived at Clyburn's fish fry earlier than his rivals, who were still stuck at the fundraiser. He was mobbed, but he left quickly to avoid having to share the spotlight with the rest of the candidates, who later got up on a makeshift stage and gave short speeches. "A lot of people were very excited about him originally, but then he just kind of faded off the scene," Edward Francis of Columbia told me, discussing Edwards' campaigning in South Carolina. Now, Francis added, "Gephardt's been here more than [Edwards] has, and that has people feeling a little more tentative. Gephardt's here so much you'd think he lives next door." Delores Gilmer of Charleston reported that she's "been getting e-mail about Gephardt since July." "That's how I know [Gephardt's] going to win. His name is out there," she told me while at Seawell's.
Gephardt also could benefit from his past association with Clyburn. A six-term congressman, Clyburn is South Carolina's only black representative and the first the state has sent to Congress since 1897. He has said he won't offer an endorsement until late in the year, but he and Gephardt have a long history together and many expect that Clyburn will endorse the former House minority leader, Dean or Edwards. Clyburn says he doesn't believe that candidates have to be southern to win either South Carolina or the nation. "They have to have southern values," he said, "basic values" such as family, church, community -- "those traditional things."
While African Americans in South Carolina have tended to vote Democratic in a 9-to-1 ratio, that doesn't mean they are all liberals. The majority of them, Harpootlian told me last winter, are anti-abortion and support the death penalty.
If Edwards is going to win South Carolina, his greatest challenge appears to be dislodging and countering Gephardt. And that's exactly what he tried to do Saturday night at the debate. It was the second instance in the campaign that Edwards demonstrated the dexterity he must have used to win all those trials. (The first was when he gently extricated himself from a potentially distracting squabble with Dean over Dean's misrepresentation of his position on the Iraq War.) Quietly and in the nicest possible manner, Edwards eviscerated Gephardt's $241 billion health-care plan, catching the representative flatfooted.
But in the days since the debate, it has become clear that the attack came at a price. Though Edwards deftly deflated Gephardt's momentum as the first candidate to introduce a big, new idea into the race, editorialists are now accusing the senator of lying about and distorting the Gephardt plan. As an attorney, Edwards can't afford to gain a reputation for lawyering his opponents. The attack, though masterful, did little to advance the campaign's discussion of health care. In fact, all it did was show how difficult it will be for any Democrat to gain traction on health care over the long haul -- the issue is among the most contentious, confusing and technical of policy matters, and therefore one of the most easily neutralized.
Meanwhile, Dean's most important target is Kerry, and Kerry's greatest threat is Dean. The battle for New Hampshire spilled over into South Carolina. Dean came off terribly during this debate. Though his tussles with the other candidates seem to be driven more by strategy than any predisposition toward belligerence, if Dean can't figure out how to play nicer he's going to alienate more people than just the other campaigns' staffers. No candidate unable to gracefully parry a direct and personal attack will be able to beat Bush in 2004.
That said, it was interesting to watch Dean in South Carolina. One of the shorter candidates, Dean somehow managed to appear exactly the right height to look every person he met in the eye. He was willing to engage almost anyone in a real discussion about real issues. Over the weekend, he was spontaneous and garrulous and seemed to really love campaigning. When he crossed paths with fish-fry attendee Joan Trezevant during a walk-through with supporters, she was dancing and he was just some politician in her way. So she asked him to dance, and then and there they did the shag, the South Carolina state dance. Let me be the first to report that the former governor of Vermont dances beautifully. Said a clearly thrilled Trezevant afterward, "He has the moves."
Nor is Dean afraid to take his campaign to venues that wouldn't, at first blush, seem to be his natural base, such as the South Carolina Democratic Leadership Council's (DLC) Saturday lunch. "In the South, Republicans always make sure that race is an issue," Dean told the assembled. "We're going to talk about race. I'm going to talk to southern whites who've been voting Republican since 1968. The way we win the South is that . . . we talk to white southern voters about the issues we care about as Democrats, because they're their issues, too." In his Saturday afternoon speech at the convention, he extended those remarks: We have "to talk to folks who haven't voted for us in 30 years and ask them, 'You've been voting for Republicans for 30 years. What do you have to show for it?'" At the same time, "We have an obligation to the African American base not to ignore them. . . . We are going to make sure that our base does not feel neglected."
The message played surprisingly well with the DLC crowd. "I think that's a very brave statement he's making," said Ed Craig, a businessman who heard Dean at the lunch. "The issues in this state are graphically racial. This is a racially divided population. It's something we need to confess to and we need to stop." Mike Hawkins, an insurance agent from Prosperity, S.C., described himself as "surprised and pleased with what [Dean] had to say." "He works for me," Hawkins said. "Is it going to work in the South? I hope so."
Kerry and Gephardt, for their parts, managed to respond to debate moderator George Stephanopoulos' questions in such a way as to turn the first quarter of the discussion into a referendum on the two issues that most bedeviled Bill Clinton during his first term: universal health care and gays in the military. I do not know what Kerry was thinking. Indeed, Kerry's debate performance seems to have knocked the wind out of his front-runner sails -- which is doubtless what Dean was going for when he set up the conflict. Watching Kerry repeatedly turn the conversation back toward Dean during the debate's opening moments was like watching an ice skater who's spent 10 years training for the Olympics proceed to blow it on his first triple lutz in front of the judges. Which was a shame, because Kerry had campaigned with charm and relish all weekend and had delivered a rhetorically exact and rather lovely oration just that afternoon, at the party's convention.
Sharpton was curiously absent for most of the weekend. He skipped Clyburn's Friday fish fry, preferring instead to make the news by speaking in Vieques, Puerto Rico. Indeed, local political operatives say that the buzz on Sharpton is that he's taking the state's African American leadership for granted and thinking he'll get black votes just because he's black. Others have speculated that he's really using the presidential contest as a launchpad for another mayoral run in New York City. Sharpton's campaign denies this, but ignoring the most important black leader in South Carolina while spending time courting Puerto Ricans -- whose only mainland stronghold is in New York -- didn't do much to quell the speculation. Or perhaps Sharpton, sensing he's unlikely to get Clyburn's endorsement, simply decided not to waste his time at an event thronged with the representative's supporters. Instead, Sharpton preached at two black churches on Sunday. (Lieberman also spoke at a church that day, in Charleston.)
Former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun (D-Ill.) did nothing to embarrass herself during the weekend but little to distinguish herself, either. Braun is proving to be a pleasant and friendly presence at the events she attends, and she's developed a really nice kicker for her stump speech: "It [doesn't] matter if you came to this country on the Mayflower or a slave ship, across the Rio Grande or through Ellis Island -- we're all in the same boat now." Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), however, made me want to hide under my chair when he opened his Saturday afternoon speech by singing a stanza of the "Star-Spangled Banner." FOX's Carl Cameron reported on the afternoon's events using first a clip of Sharpton saying, "I am going to slap the donkey!" (the reverend's metaphor of choice for spurring the Democrats onward), then Kucinich singing, and then Edwards . . . presumably starring as the normal guy running for president. It was enough to make me want to dive under my hotel bed and not come out.
What South Carolina showed is that there is no longer any front-runner or anointed one in the race, if there ever was. There are five top contenders for the nomination: Lieberman, Kerry, Dean, Gephardt and Edwards. Graham may yet prove himself able to join them. Like the Palmetto State's voters, though, everything is up for grabs.
Garance Franke-Ruta is a Prospect senior editor.