DES MOINES — Howard Dean's presidential rivals offered two distinct lines of argument against the Democratic front-runner on Tuesday, challenging him for opposing the war with Iraq and for having too little foreign-policy experience.
Dean took particular heat for his statements that the capture of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein would not make America safer. Some rivals also hit him for being too willing to cede power to the United Nations.
But Dean did not back down, and he reiterated his statement that the capture of Hussein did not make the U.S. safer.
Leading the attacks on Dean was Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, the Democrat who has been the most consistent supporter of the war. Lieberman told an audience in New Hampshire: "I don't see how anybody could say we're not safer with Saddam Hussein in prison than loose." A show of hands by the crowd indicated that most agreed.
Lieberman argued that Dean's antiwar stand has become part of a larger problem for the former Vermont governor and onetime physician -- naysaying on many issues, without offering constructive alternatives.
"Dr. Dean," Lieberman said, "has become Dr. No."
Speaking in Philadelphia, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri took a different tack as the candidates continued to recalibrate their strategy in a contest unsettled by Hussein's capture.
Gephardt said Dean's contention that the seizure of Hussein had not made America safer showed he lacked foreign-policy expertise, highlighting the "difficulty that he would face in any election contest against George Bush."
That argument, in contrast with Lieberman's, allowed Gephardt to attack Dean's credentials without broaching whether the Iraq war was justified -- and thus avoid angering antiwar party activists.
In Iowa, meanwhile, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts used both of the arguments against Dean, saying: "When America needed leadership on Iraq, Howard Dean was all over the lot, with a lot of slogans and a lot less solutions."
Kerry said as president, he would chart a "third path" between what he said would be Dean's over-reliance on the United Nations in setting U.S. foreign policy and what he described as President Bush's "policy of schoolyard taunts and cowboy swagger."
The criticism comes as Dean leads in polls nationally and in the two states that will conduct the crucial first contests of the presidential primary season -- Iowa and New Hampshire.
