Dean focuses on long-term strategy

? One day after shaking up his presidential campaign, Howard Dean said Thursday that he didn’t have to win in the seven states voting Tuesday as long as he does well enough to pick up delegates there.

His new strategy is becoming clear: bank on doing well in Michigan, Washington state and Wisconsin, which vote later in the month and have much larger caches of delegates, not to mention more liberal Democrats likely to respond to Dean’s anti-establishment appeal.

“It’s about delegates,” Dean said aboard his plane. “We’re going to have to win eventually … but we don’t have to (Tuesday). We need to amass as many delegates as we can. That’s what we’re going to try to do.”

For the next five days, Dean is scheduled to touch down in Missouri, New Mexico and Arizona, which vote Tuesday. But he’ll spend at least half of his time in Michigan and Washington, which vote Feb. 7, and Wisconsin, which votes Feb. 17.

Acknowledging challenges

This is a critical time for Dean, who was rich and believed by some pundits to be the front-runner little more than two weeks ago, until the former Vermont governor finished third in Iowa and a distant second in New Hampshire. On Wednesday, Dean brought in a new chief executive to centralize decision-making in his campaign.

The hiring of Roy Neel, a top aide to former Vice President Al Gore who became a highly paid Washington lobbyist for the telephone industry, drove campaign manager Joe Trippi to quit. Trippi created the Internet-driven Dean phenomenon that seemed so unstoppable last year.

During a stop Thursday at the East Lansing campus of Michigan State University, Dean acknowledged the challenges facing his campaign, once cash-flush and soaring, now struggling to right itself.

“Revolutions are historically not so easy … and there will be tough times,” he told several hundred supporters jammed into an auditorium. “And we’re in a tough time right now.”

Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean speaks to supporters at the Michigan State University campus in East Lansing, Mich. On Thursday the Democratic presidential hopeful made a swing through Michigan, a delegate-rich state he hopes to win on Feb. 7 -- a move that reflects his new campaign strategy.

He lambasted his opponents as captives of an entrenched political system and said they had failed to challenge the Bush administration until recently.

“Those who shrank from confrontation from the right wing of the Republican Party in the face of polls and pundits now compete to outdo each other in the condemnation of George W. Bush,” he said. “I’m tired of Democrats who find it convenient to be a Democrat only during primary time.”

Without naming names, the former governor cast the race as a choice between “a Washington insider who shifts back and forth with every poll, who cut the best deals they could get to sell out the interests of ordinary Americans, who spent decades collaborating with the special interests to fuel their campaigns — or somebody from outside Washington who depends on you to fund the campaign.”

He was presumably referring to current front-runner Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts as the first option.

The alternative theory

Dean is now counting on his grass-roots supporters, who helped him raise a record $41 million last year, to restore the campaign’s financial health.

So far, the former governor has spent $8.5 million in television commercials alone, with a large share of that going as far back as last summer, according to Campaign Media Analysis Group, a media research group specializing in political advertising.

Dean’s strategy is to “vacuum up” delegates, hoping to hang in the race long enough to become the main alternative to Kerry, a ranking campaign adviser said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Despite spending lavishly in Iowa and New Hampshire, Dean has enough resources to compete in the later states because the campaign set up organizations there when it was riding high, the aide said.

But the campaign, which had raised more than $40 million, has only about $5 million left to spend in a very expensive stretch. Advisers claim they have raised nearly $2 million through the Internet in the past two weeks.