DETROIT -- If Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was hoping to focus attention on the problems of his city -- or those of urban America in general -- by hosting the latest Democratic presidential debate, he must have been sorely disappointed with the event itself. Moderator Gwen Ifill (of PBS) and panelists Carl Cameron (of FOX News) and Huel Perkins (of Detroit's local FOX affiliate) largely ignored urban issues, choosing instead to confront the candidates with what Ifill called the "conventional wisdom" about their weaknesses and yet another round of questions on Iraq. Detroit itself got little attention during the debate -- which was co-sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus Institute and FOX News -- except when Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) incorrectly declared that the city had suffered 300 murders in September; actually, the number was 35, as Perkins pointed out later in the debate. "I think it's horrible," Kilpatrick later said of Kucinich's blunder, according to columnist Rochelle Riley of the Detroit Free Press. "I think not only was it grossly inaccurate, but he never really came back and cleaned it up, and then ended the debate with a message of despair."
Riley probably represented other Detroit residents in echoing the mayor's sentiments. "It showed once again just how hard it is for urban centers such as Detroit to get national leaders to focus on what's real," the columnist wrote. Most reporters and many of the candidates and their staffs stayed in the fortress-like Detroit Marriott Renaissance Center, whose 72 stories offer guests a spectacular view of Canada. An exception was former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.), who recently described himself to an MSNBC reporter as "the cheapest SOB you have ever met"; his debate staff stayed in a budget hotel a half-hour's ride from the Fox Theatre, where the debate took place. Dean's staffers got a look at the realities of life in the low-rent neighborhoods of urban America when a transformer blew Sunday morning, knocking out electricity at the hotel and forcing staffers to take cold baths and eat breakfast in the dark before heading out into a drizzly, overcast day.
Just getting through the debate and moving on with things seemed to be the top priority of the day for a number of campaigns. Former Gen. Wesley Clark's goal going in, according to his communications director, Matthew Bennett, was "survival." To do that, an aide predicted, Clark would be taking advantage of the right to self-defense. But I was also warned not to get my hopes up. "Clark hasn't debated since he was at West Point in the '60s," Bennett said. "The rest of these guys are very experienced debaters . . . so debates are a tough forum."
Clark looked a bit peaked at the debate -- he was still recovering from viral laryngitis -- but he answered questions clearly and showed that he was well prepped both for continued questioning about his somewhat variable Iraq position and for Cameron's assertion that he was "effectively fired for what [former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Hugh Shelton] called character and integrity issues." Clark responded by saying, "We used to call charges like that 'McCarthyism' when they came out in the 1950s," and he then launched into a long explanation of his role in leading NATO forces to success in Kosovo. "That's what I stood for," he said. "We were successful. I received two distinguished freedom medals, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for that kind of leadership. Why Hugh Shelton would say that now, I have no idea. But if anybody knows, would you please let me know?" It seemed a reasonable answer, though perhaps a bit more detailed than was necessary.
Not content to leave well-enough alone, though, Clark's communications director showed -- in the postdebate spin room -- that his candidate's frequent valorization of dissent as patriotic doesn't mean the campaign is above using patriotic rhetoric to tar people with whom it disagrees. "Gen. Clark values few things more than his integrity, and his integrity was challenged without any sort of backup. That's un-American. We don't make charges, baseless charges. It's un-American. It absolutely is," Bennett told me, when queried about Clark's comparison of Shelton to former Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.). "I think it's very fair to say when somebody slanders you . . . then refuses to say why, I think you could say that that is not consistent with American values and I think that he would say that the way McCarthy conducted his hearings was not consistent with American values."
Clark himself avoided the spin room -- preserving his voice, explained his aides -- and instead headed off to a Young Democrats event around the corner from the Fox Theatre. There, he was mobbed by autograph-hungry young Clark devotees and gigantic men with buzz-cut hair.
Dean was subdued at the debate, neither knocking any question out of the park nor stumbling in any important way. Though he demonstrated that he still hasn't arrived at a wholly effective retort to Sen. John Kerry's (D-Mass.) attacks against his position on middle-class tax cuts and Rep. Dick Gephardt's (D-Mo.) accusations about his past positions on entitlement reforms, Dean was nonetheless subjected to far fewer attacks than at debates past -- and left largely unscathed. In fact, after five debates, it's becoming clear that, while they may not aid Dean considerably, they are not going to be the ground of his undoing, as many of his opponents had hoped. Dean may often look like he's about to lose it, but he never quite does. It's the same with his campaign: For months no one took it seriously because it always looked like it was on the verge of making some huge, disastrous error that would cause the whole thing to fall apart. Yet that anticipated moment hasn't arrived.
Clark's campaign appears to be on a similar path, though it's been more heavily scrutinized for its errors so far than Dean's was early on. Clark's poll numbers are down from their initial highs and he still has no campaign manager, but he does have a team of 40 or 50 people in place in Little Rock, is raising money hand over fist and plans to start airing paid TV ads toward the end of November, according to aides. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if he comes in with $7 million to $10 million at the end of the quarter. All of which would mean that even if he fades over the next month, he could be poised for a comeback by December or January. (Indeed, Clark might actually benefit from having a month or two out of the national spotlight to polish his stump speech, lay out his agenda, gear up a ground operation in New Hampshire and try to build a base in South Carolina.)
As for the other candidates, keeping track of who attacked whom on what issues is becoming both so complicated and tedious that it seems a task better suited to charts than prose. Still, the debate revealed a few things about the current status of the field. Now that both Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Clark have abandoned Iowa, the jockeying for third in New Hampshire has become fierce, prompting the middle-tier candidates to intensify their competition with one another. Lieberman -- the candidate who pushed for the current series of Democratic debates after finding the format particularly to his liking in South Carolina last May -- lit into Clark, Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) and Kerry, who's running second in New Hampshire, on Sunday night, while more or less leaving Dean alone.
"I don't know how John Kerry and John Edwards can say that they supported the war but then oppose funding of the troops who went to fight the war that the resolution they supported authorized," Lieberman said. It's a fair question, and one Lieberman will soon be asking in New Hampshire TV spots. He also took on Clark with both fists, saying the former general had "six different positions on whether going to war was the right idea" and drawing gasps in the press room when he declared that "nobody's used the reference 'Bush-lite' to me since Wes Clark became a Democrat and got into this presidential race."
Edwards, for his part, drew unintentional laughs in the press room when Ifill asked him, "What happened?" -- referring to the high initial expectations that greeted his candidacy -- and he replied, "First of all, nothing happened," which he intended as a denial that anything was wrong with his campaign rather than a description of it. After months of being stalled in single digits, though, Edwards' poll numbers are slowly moving up, and other campaigns are abuzz with the possibility that he has an expectations-besting third place in Iowa in his sights -- which would, in turn, seriously damage Kerry's campaign.
Kerry, meanwhile, is under increasing pressure from all sides -- from Edwards in Iowa and from Dean, Clark, Edwards and Lieberman in New Hampshire. Kerry's main plan in recent weeks seems to be have been to work the ref (that is, the press). His campaign has tried to change the media's impression of Dean by telling reporters that Dean is fading, that Dean is negative and that Dean is going down, while also attacking the former Vermont governor directly and publicly on taxes, entitlement reform and military issues.
Unfortunately for Kerry, he's no longer running against just Dean. And when Lieberman hit him Sunday night on his vote against the $87 billion for Iraq, he hit back hard. "Well, Joe, I have seared in me an experience which you don't have," he said, again drawing gasps from what by night's end seemed an unusually breathy press corps, "and that's the experience of being one of those troops on the front lines when the policy has gone wrong."
Meanwhile, all the candidates except Kerry seem to have ceded first place in New Hampshire to Dean, with only Gephardt publicly fighting Dean for first in Iowa. This means that, at least in terms of debate strategy, Gephardt and Kerry continue to operate as something of a tag team, attacking Dean on taxes and entitlement reform and taking the lead in going after him more generally. Gephardt, perhaps returning to type now that he's once again enjoying a (narrow) lead in Iowa, was more subdued in Detroit than he had been in any debate since New Mexico, only using the word "abominable" once to refer to Bush and not calling him a "miserable failure" at all. Dean's research team, for its part, distributed material that branded Kerry and Gephardt "failed" for sponsoring, respectively, 13 and 20 pieces of unpassed legislation on health issues.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, playing to a friendly crowd, got the biggest applause of the night, and had a great retort to Cameron's question about sacrifices that would be made in "the coming Sharpton economy." The candidate replied, in part, "It is an insult to keep telling Americans to send our children to war is an honor, to risk their lives to die for the country, but it's a burden for the rich to pay their taxes to the country." Former Ambassador Carol Moseley Braun continued to answer questions with both grace and passion, proving that it's not just campaign spin when she says her detractors have long underestimated her. At the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History in Detroit -- the largest and most important such museum in the country -- the third-to-last picture in the main exhibition space is of Braun. She's still the first and only black woman to have served in the U.S. Senate, and one of just four black senators in U.S. history. What she's showing is that even though she has no chance at the presidency, that accomplishment was no fluke.
Oh, yeah -- and everyone was critical of George W. Bush, too.
Garance Franke-Ruta is a Prospect senior editor.
