CHARLESTON, S.C. — Although obscured by the war in Iraq, the pace is accelerating in the 2004 Democratic presidential race.
The candidates laid down an important marker this month when they announced their fund-raising totals for the year's first quarter.
Last week, most appeared twice together at cattle calls before influential party constituencies. And they are fanning out across the early primary states -- including here, where three of the nine contenders appeared this weekend.
Yet for all the activity, the contest still feels as if it is in exhibition season. Historically, the race for a party's nomination doesn't crystallize until the candidates begin contesting each other's ideas.
Those debates create the contrasts that help voters sort out their allegiances -- and the confrontations that show which candidates can take, and return, a punch.
The dynamics that would settle the 2000 Democratic race didn't emerge, for instance, until Al Gore attacked Bill Bradley's health-care plan and the exchange left Bradley looking impractical and weak.
That trial by fire hasn't really begun this year. So far, only former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean has challenged his opponents, criticizing the four congressional Democrats in the field who supported President Bush on the 2001 education reform bill and the war in Iraq. Those conflicts have ignited Dean's campaign by defining him in a way that has sent liberal hearts racing.
But the rest of the candidates are still mostly ignoring their rivals -- at least publicly --as they begin explaining their own ideas. The conventional wisdom in most campaigns is that it's too early -- and too crowded -- to begin throwing elbows.
Yet it's also clear that when the contenders decide the time is right, they will have plenty to argue about. Even now, likely flash points are emerging. Among them:
* The war in Iraq. Dean has gained great mileage from denouncing the war. But with Saddam Hussein's regime ousted at a remarkably modest cost in American lives, Dean may be vulnerable to a counterattack later from more hawkish Democrats, such as Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut and John Edwards of North Carolina.
And privately, the hawks (who also include Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri) are itching to join Dean in accusing Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, who has blown hot and cold on the war, of trying to have it both ways. An aide to one Democratic hawk predicts that opponents will eventually accuse Kerry of trying to straddle tough choices -- using his swings on the war as Point 1.
