Still in the Running

To judge by many news accounts, the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination is rapidly narrowing to two New Englanders: Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont.

Which makes this a propitious moment to suggest that Rep. Richard Gephardt and Sen. John Edwards are being written off too quickly. The reason: Foreign policy and Iraq have been the dominant issues for the past several months. If the argument moves homeward, Gephardt and Edwards will have an opening.

The context of the contest has changed radically in just three weeks. Democrats who questioned whether their party could defeat President Bush next year now think they have a fighting chance...

The power of the economic issue depends on how much the growth signaled in yesterday's Commerce Department report pushes unemployment down and incomes up. And Sen. Joe Biden or Gen. Wesley Clark could scramble the race by getting in.

Nor are Edwards's current rivals sleeping. Just this week, Kerry declared that "real Democrats don't walk away from the middle class." He was seen as zinging Dean and Gephardt for favoring a rollback of even some of Bush's middle-class tax cuts.

But Kerry's speech also suggests that as the caucuses and primaries draw closer, the domestic worries of poor and middle-class voters will loom larger. If the contest turns, that will be why.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10954-2003Jul31.html