Josh Benson

This tension between the dueling public perceptions of Kerry — war hero vs. liberal lawmaker — has been readily apparent in the primary season so far, as Kerry has won every contest except those in the most conservative states, South Carolina and Oklahoma. Now, after rising to a wide lead in the polls in Virginia, and receiving an important endorsement from Democratic Gov. Mark Warner, Kerry is now in good position to pull off the symbolically important achievement of winning two Southern contests on Tuesday, here and in Tennessee, where he also leads in the polls.

But even if Kerry does win on Tuesday, prevailing over charismatic, populist Sen. John Edwards from North Carolina and retired four-star Gen. Wesley Clark from Arkansas, the questions about Kerry’s popularity here likely will remain. Would a Kerry win represent a real breakthrough into what has been an impenetrable Republican stronghold, or merely the mop-up operation on a nomination that’s already his to lose?

Kerry’s supporters, at least, see themselves making inroads into typically solid GOP voting blocs like Southern whites and veterans. “It’s a major change we’re seeing here in Virginia,” said O’Dell, chair of Virginia Veterans for Kerry. “It’s being driven partly by Kerry’s record, but also by just a sense of betrayal by George Bush. I’ve just been amazed, calling up this list I have of veterans here. These are people who predominantly are uninterested or who say that they’re Republicans, but I’d say 50 percent of the people I’m reaching now are for Kerry.”

Many veterans are upset that Bush hasn’t done more to protect or promote their benefits, and many are unhappy with his handling of the war in Iraq, O’Dell says. “They just think Bush is overtaxing the military, and that he’s made cuts in Veteran’s Administration healthcare. A lot also don’t like it when his side starts damning Kerry, who they look at as a fellow veteran. I think Bush is becoming to veterans what Bill Clinton was to Republicans.”

The general election groundwork has already been laid here for whoever the Democratic nominee is, say some observers, because of growing unease with President George Bush among his onetime supporters. It helps that there’s not one, but two military men in the Democratic race who are forcefully opposing the administration’s foreign and domestic policies.

The other Democratic veteran in the running is, of course, Wesley Clark. At Virginia Wesleyan College in the military town of Norfolk, where a Clark campaign organized a rally over the weekend, the Clark event was staffed largely by soldiers — ones who served under the general in Europe and Panama and at least one active-duty officer just home from Iraq.

Taking a break from hanging signs, Clark’s national veterans coordinator Larry Weatherford said, “I see an opportunity for a significant change in how these people look at the candidates. I think what Clark has done is going to make a difference … I think he’s helped change the perspective of the race by making it OK to talk about Bush’s handling of Iraq without it being any reflection of patriotism or support of the troops. And I think a lot of swing voters are taking a second look at the Democrats because of the military records of Clark and Kerry.”

John Edwards, who’s also been running strong in Virginia, is not a veteran, but he is a drawling Southerner from a small rural town. Edwards has been working the state intensely, especially the rural and economically depressed regions in the south and west where Kerry has spent little time. Edwards, like his opponents, has thrilled Democrats here and elsewhere by his tough-sounding challenges to Bush in one of his areas of electoral strength. “The South is not George Bush’s backyard,” he told audiences throughout Virginia. “It’s my backyard. And I will beat George Bush in my backyard.”

Kerry’s campaign is certainly taking advantage of his military experience, appealing to voters here by making a campaign premised on his personal war stories even more muscular. In addition to his now-standard lines about “knowing something about aircraft carriers for real” and invitations to Bush to “bring — it — on,” Kerry has now issued a more direct challenge than ever around the idea that he, and not the “extremist” president, represents mainstream American values.

Kerry uses his military experience, too, to rebut GOP attacks that he’s too liberal. “I have news for George Bush, Karl Rove, Ed Gillespie and the rest of their gang,” he said at a rally in Richmond on Saturday. “I have fought for my country my whole life, and I’m not going to back down now. This is one Democrat who’s going to fight back.”

At the least, Kerry may be having success already in insulating himself from the stereotype that he’s a wimpy Northern elitist. Conservative pundit and morality maven Bill Bennett told Fox News over the weekend that simply trying to stick him with a Boston liberal label won’t work. “You can’t do to Kerry what you did to Dukakis,” he said.

That’s all fine. But any progress Democrats feel now in breaking out of their Southern slump may not play out come November. A little history: The last time Virginia voted Democratic in a presidential election was for Lyndon Johnson in 1964. (By most estimates, that also happens to be the last election in which the Democrats scored any respectable percentage of the military vote nationally.) Twelve years later, Virginia became the only Southern state to vote for Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter. Michael Dukakis, the last New England Democrat to run for president, lost here by more than 20 points. And the all-Southern Bubba-Bubba ticket of Clinton and Gore went down to defeat here twice.

So whatever happens in the Tuesday primary, Democrats here probably aren’t seriously counting on carrying the military vote or actually winning the state in November. Kerry indicated as much when he said, perhaps unwisely, recently that the importance of winning the South was overblown. “Everybody always makes the mistake of looking South,” Kerry said. “Al Gore proved he could have been president of the United States without winning one Southern state, including his own.”

What Democrats likely hope to achieve instead of an unrealistic Southern sweep is a steady and incremental erosion of conservative bases of support, not only in the South, but in other areas of the country with conservative-minded swing voters. “This is all about marginal politics,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “It’s exactly how Karl Rove looks at the electorate from Bush’s perspective. He’s not actually trying to grab a majority of African-Americans or Hispanics — he’s trying to tack two or three or five percentage points onto Bush’s showing in those communities. So with Kerry, the military side of the population votes about 70-30 Republican right now, and he might be able to reduce that by a few percentage points. That’s what this is about.”

Sabato also warned against reading too much into what happens here and in Tennessee today. “What happens here has nothing to do with November,” he said. “We’re in Never Never Land right now, but Virginia is still redder than red. None of these candidates can win here in the fall.”

Although Virginia has stayed reliably in the Republican column in recent years, some state Democrats insist that something bigger is happening that political theorists and outside media aren’t getting. Laura Bland, director of communications for the state party, pointed to the level of interest in the primary here as an indication that something is very, very different this year.

Attendance at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner on Saturday night dwarfed anything the Virginia Democrats had seen before, attracting 2,000 people — several times more guests than in the past. “We’ve just never seen interest like this before, and I think it’s really going to make a huge difference in November,” she said. “We’re going to see a lot of new people voting in the Democratic primary, and we’re here to make sure they come back in the general.”

Other local Democrats sounded equally optimistic, and their enthusiasm fueled sharp barbs at Bush. Barnie Day, a former state legislator from southwest Virginia, opened the night’s comments by joking that “Somewhere in Texas tonight, a village has lost its idiot.”

“I’ll tell you, maybe it’s George Bush who’s helping down here, or maybe it’s the Democrats, but they’re really doing quite well,” Day said.

Howard Copeland, a former legislator, Vietnam vet and Kerry supporter, said he sees a movement that transcends party lines. Virginia’s primary is open to all voters — the state doesn’t make voters register by party. And Copeland hears that some Republicans will go for Kerry. “It’s like when John McCain campaigned here,” he said. “I crossed party lines to support him because he was one of us. There are 700,000 veterans in this state, a hell of a voting bloc, and now they’re feeling the same way about Kerry,” he said.

That may or may not be the case. But even with Kerry fresh off a sweep over the weekend of contests in Michigan, Washington and Maine, there are some Democrats who are somewhat less optimistic about their chances to attract traditional Republican voters if he is the nominee.

“We’re definitely seeing lots of interest from Democrats here who were dormant before,” said David Crain, a young Democratic operative who runs the Clark campaign office in Tidewater, a huge military area. “I think Clark or Edwards might be able to win here, and I think this party building will be really useful for years down the road.”

And if Kerry is this year’s nominee? “John Kerry has no chance of winning in Virginia in November,” Crain said. “No. 1, he already claims that he doesn’t need the South, which is a quarter of the country right there. And, fair or not, people here are just going to be afraid of a Massachusetts liberal.”

This dim assessment of Kerry’s chances in the South is shared by his Republican opponents. The Bush campaign has shown clear signs of concern about the president’s standing nationally — witness Bush’s appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” after polls showed him trailing in hypothetical matchups with Kerry and Edwards — but they seem largely unworried about any erosion of their usual bases of support. “I think this is a president who has shown these voters that he’s a leader,” said Kevin Madden, a Bush campaign spokesman. “They respect the fact he makes decisions on how to deal with problems and follows through, and that he’s strongly grounded in his convictions. I think it’s going to be nearly impossible for the Democrats to convince those voters otherwise.”

Madden also doubted Kerry in particular would hold up as a candidate once the primary was over. “A lot of people are going to find out as the campaign becomes a two-person race that there’s a canyon of credibility with regards to the person he’s pretending to be on the campaign trail and who he really is,” he said.

For now, Democrats are continuing to stump throughout the state to attract support. Edwards is seemingly everywhere, trying to make the most of his strength as a campaigner, while Clark has been stumping with all the intensity of a candidate fighting for his survival. Meanwhile, Kerry has been doing his best to get to the corners of the state that he has largely ignored until now.

On Monday morning, Kerry was in Roanoke in southwest Virginia, talking to about 300 people who turned out in the cold to see him. He was introduced in a throaty bellow by International Association of Fire Fighters president Harold Schaitberger, who urged the crowd to vote for a candidate “who knows what the words ‘service,’ ‘honor’ and ‘courage’ really mean.”

Kerry took the stage and picked up where Schaitberger left off, saying he would “fight with the same tenacity, with the same focus, the same commitment and sense of duty” that he has demonstrated throughout his career.

David Cook, a local emergency medical technician, veteran and active reservist said afterward he had heard enough to vote for Kerry in the primary because of his promises to improve medical care for families of veterans. His own family, he said, didn’t have enough money even for basic care. Asked if he also planned to vote for Kerry in November, he said, “It depends on what he does. I’m just going to have to wait and see.”

For sure, by dominating two Southern contests Tuesday night in Virginia and Tennessee, where he won by respective margins of 25 and 14 points, Kerry essentially obliterated the last remaining argument against his ability to appeal to Democrats, moving the campaign into a phase in which he is going to get what he’s been spoiling for: a general election fight with President George W. Bush.

The primary, of course, will continue: John Edwards, who finished second in both states, will press on in hopes of setting up the one-on-one matchup with Kerry. Howard Dean, who has yet to win a state but is still urged on by a true-believing core of supporters, will also continue to contest the nomination. But Wesley Clark, who finished third in both states, brought his short but eventful campaign to an end, saying to supporters in Memphis that “we may have lost this battle today, but … we’re not going to lose the battle for America’s future.”

Kerry’s victories Tuesday are likely to change a dynamic that, over the last month, has been an extremely fortuitous one for him: Dean and Missouri Rep. Richard Gephardt destroyed each other in Iowa, enabling Kerry to fight his way to a stunning victory there. That result instantly made him the front-runner of a field that collectively renounced negative campaigning, sparing Kerry the attacks that had sent Dean into a tailspin. Meanwhile, his momentum, driven by a ubiquitous “Comeback Kerry” story line in the media, carried him to wins in 10 of the next 12 contests, with Edwards, Clark and Dean each grabbing a big enough share of the leftover vote to keep any one of them from offering a serious challenge. The capper was the pair of wins tonight, moving him closer than ever to the nomination.

That may turn out to have been the easy part. Now, having consolidated his chances for the nomination, Kerry faces the prospect of both unceasing assaults from a Bush-reelection apparatus with almost unlimited resources and tougher treatment from the national press.

He already seems to be bracing himself: In a private phone conversation with Clark about an hour after his victory speech, Kerry was overheard telling the general, “I know what these guys are going to do … these guys are scary.”

It’s not just that Kerry’s going to face unprecedented criticism — it’s that everyone is going to be paying attention. As long as the primary was competitive, Kerry and his opponents were able to go after the administration with relative impunity. But in a head-to-head matchup with Bush — as it started to be even this week — Kerry is getting hit back by Republicans for liberalism, hypocrisy and dirty campaigning, among other things.

“We’ve dominated the whole time there’s been a competitive primary,” said Virginia Democratic Party communications director Laura Bland. “George Bush is at rock bottom of his approval ratings, in part because of the pounding he’s taken from all our candidates. If you have this quick consolidation and the primary’s over, a window on people’s interest closes, and you guys [in the media] stop writing about us and go back to writing about whatever Bush is saying.”

For now, Kerry has done well to parry many of the Republican attacks. He effectively preempted some of them simply by predicting the “same old tired lines of attack,” and effectively surrounded himself with a shield of fellow combat veterans to prevent being caricatured as a weak-kneed Massachusetts liberal.

He has also benefited from continuing controversy about Bush’s service in the National Guard during the Vietnam War, which Kerry discussed at a press conference in Richmond on Sunday. On Tuesday, he seemed happy to let the controversy continue with its own momentum, telling reporters that he had said all he was going to say on the subject.

It will be interesting to watch how well Kerry deals with the attention, but one thing that is certain is that he’ll no longer have the option of ducking issues, as he has tried to do with such controversies as the new court decision in Massachusetts permitting gay marriage. Pressed for his position by reporters at a press conference yesterday in a terminal at the Memphis airport, Kerry said that his position in favor of civil unions was “very clear,” but that it also depended on what the Massachusetts Legislature does in reaction to the new ruling.

There was one other question during that media availability that Kerry avoided. It came from a French television reporter who had traveled with the campaign for days, and who had even spoken French with Kerry in an off-the-record moment on the campaign plane earlier that day and was hoping to capture a quick utterance on camera. Kerry is fluent, having spent time growing up in Switzerland and France, an offense for which he was accused by a nameless Bush administration official of “look[ing] French,” according to the New York Times. Here was Kerry’s answer: “I want to just deal if I can — here — with — can we do that?” He didn’t speak to the French crew again.

Meanwhile, the part of this campaign in which the media coverage focused on Kerry’s winning streak appears to be over. John Solomon, the Associated Press’ ace campaign finance reporter, came out with three potentially damaging stories over the last week (on the Big Dig, speaking fees, and federal home loan bank nominees) about contributions accepted by Kerry from interests that sounded distinctly like the sort that could be called “special.”

“I have fought against the way money is involved in politics all of my public life,” Kerry told reporters in an airport terminal in Memphis, one of several times over the last few days in which he was asked about the charges that he accepted contributions and speaking honoraria from individuals and companies that stood to benefit.

And today’s Washington Post has a big story, picked up from the Web site PoliticsNJ.com, about disgraced New Jersey Sen. Robert Torricelli’s role in raising money for a political action committee that helped Kerry by running attack ads against Dean in Iowa.

Then there’s the self-fulfilling horse race stuff, where pundits talk to pundits for an audience of pundits, which also has a dragging effect on Kerry’s momentum. Shortly after tonight’s results were announced — remember, Kerry won — there was CNN’s Jeff Greenfield asking whether that was actually a good thing: “Is it really in his interest to become a general election candidate now?” he asked.

Perhaps an even better example was the conclusion Dean campaign manager-turned television analyst Joe Trippi came to later in the evening on CNBC’s “Hardball” about Kerry’s twin lopsided victories: “The momentum’s running out … and now we’re going to start talking about his flaws.”

Oh, and about that primary: There are now four candidates remaining besides Kerry. Of the four, two are setting up for a dramatic last stand. (Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich, who are in the race to prove a point, will probably stay in until the end of the primaries.)

Edwards has at least the potential to make things somewhat complicated. He has sought out a “one-on-one” matchup with Kerry since Iowa, and his supporters here feel that he’s now done well enough to achieve that. “Clearly this is now a two-person race between Edwards and Kerry,” said Virginia House Minority Leader Frank Hall. “From my very first conversation with [him] some eight months ago to my last one, two days ago, he has said he’s in this thing until it’s over. I believe him.”

Looked at another way, however, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that Edwards is either delusional about his chances or simply running to be the vice presidential candidate on a ticket headed by Kerry.

For the conspiracy-minded, there is even the whiff of collusion. Edwards, of course, is running an almost impossibly positive campaign that appeals to many Democrats but essentially precludes him from directly criticizing Kerry. And while sentiments in the Kerry camp these days about the Dean and Clark campaigns range from scornful to scathing, those feelings are strangely charitable when it comes to Edwards’ efforts to prolong his fight with Kerry.

“John Edwards has run a very strong campaign,” said one key Kerry supporter after the candidates’ speeches tonight. “I think he’s just deeply driven — sometimes personal drive trumps strategy or logic.” For now, though, Edwards will have the opportunity — should he take it — to point up Kerry’s weaknesses by contrasting his blue-collar background with Kerry’s aristocratic (French!) upbringing, and his engaging speaking style with Kerry’s wooden oratory.

Then there’s Dean, whose situation seems hopeless, but whose potential one last nuclear attack still scares the hell out of many of Kerry’s supporters. “He says he won’t do anything to harm the nominee,” said Ed Kilgore, policy director at the Democratic Leadership Council who backs Kerry, “but then before he finishes the sentence he’s calling Kerry a Republican and a captive of special interests.”

Unlike Edwards, Dean has never pretended to be a nice candidate, and will almost certainly not feel constrained from doing whatever he can to induce a severe case of buyer’s remorse among Democratic voters about Kerry.

For all of that, a win is a win, and Kerry has reason to celebrate. He won in the ostensibly hostile territory of the South, using a formula that blended red-meat attacks on Bush, progressive policy proposals and an unwavering image of strength built on support from the omnipresent fellow veterans he refers to as his “Band of Brothers.” He has now won in every part of the country, and across all economic, ethnic and generational strata.

That’s not a bad thing at all. And Kerry, for his part, doesn’t seem in such a hurry for things to change. Asked Tuesday if he looked forward to “consolidating” the field, he said, “There’s a process. I respect each state’s right to make its own decision and I respect each candidate’s right to make their decision … I’m simply going to campaign from state to state and keep asking people for their votes as I am today … I respect the process.”

Kerry is ascendant now, having won in seven of nine states so far and likely heading toward a big win this weekend in Michigan and perhaps in Washington as well. But the conventional wisdom on Kerry is that he’ll be vulnerable to a “Massachusetts liberal” line of attack in the general election, when Bush’s supporters will do their best to make him personally answerable for gay marriage, Willie Horton’s furlough and Chappaquiddick. Having Edwards or Clark on the ticket, the thinking goes, could complicate such efforts to caricature the nominee.

Obviously, assessing the vice presidential field in early February, with the convention more than five months away, is a highly speculative exercise. Kerry is still a way from nailing down the nomination. And, of course, there is an entire universe of Democratic names — governors and former governors like Bill Richardson of New Mexico, Tom Vilsack of Iowa and Janet Napolitano of Arizona, Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, along with other presidential contenders like Dick Gephardt or Bob Graham — who might as easily end up in the No. 2 spot.

But in ways so obscure that they are almost subliminal, the VP courtship dance has already begun.

John Kerry is no doubt still focused on the primary contests ahead. But it’s certain that a very smart man or woman in his campaign is already giving a great deal of thought to the issue of which person could most help their man beat George W. Bush. The right running mate could broaden Kerry’s geographic appeal, soften his starchy image, help him with outreach to minority voters, help him raise money or, ideally, all of those things.

“There’s only one thing that matters,” said Robert Zimmerman, a major fundraiser and DNC committeeman who is supporting Kerry. “And that’s who can deliver what.”

Each in their own way, Edwards and Clark offer stylistic and geographic counterbalances to the front-runner. Kerry is a Yankee; Clark and Edwards both hail from the South. Kerry is an aristocrat; Clark came up through the Army and Edwards is the son of a mill worker. That’s the good news.

But the two potential veeps also have weaknesses. Edwards made his millions as an aggressively litigious trial lawyer. He’s served less than one term in the U.S. Senate. And he’s got an earnest Boy Scout quality that might not contrast well in a debate with Dick Cheney, who exudes experience. Clark might be a better debate opponent, and his foreign affairs and national security experience is superior. But he’s still somewhat unsteady as a political candidate. And he’s effusively praised the leadership of the president he’s running to replace.

For now, the strongest argument in favor of any one candidate is his ability to attract support for his own presidential bid. Again, that’s a close call. Clark narrowly won Oklahoma on Tuesday; he placed second in North Dakota, New Mexico and Arizona. But Edwards has arguably done better. He won South Carolina, placed second in Missouri and Iowa. In all, he’s won more than a quarter of the votes cast so far.

“When I talk to Democrats across the country about this, John Edwards is the person who’s mentioned most,” said Rep. Marty Meehan (D-Mass.), a Kerry ally. “He’s done a great job in this campaign and he communicates well with people. And he and Sen. Kerry have a good relationship.”

Edwards is commonly cited as an attractive running mate because of the regional balance that he, the folksy Carolinian, would be able to provide Kerry, the Boston Brahmin. But the idea of regional balance is increasingly antiquated, as the successful Clinton-Gore (Arkansas-Tennessee) and Bush-Cheney (Texas-Texas/Wyoming) tickets prove. With voters in different parts of the country getting their news from the same national sources, that trend is only accelerating.

“It couldn’t hurt that Edwards is a Southerner, but I don’t think that delivers anything by itself these days,” said James Chace, a professor of government at Bard College and the author of a forthcoming book on the election of 1912. “Everyone is watching the same thing across the country, so you look to pick someone with a national reputation.”

It might turn out to be a more important consideration that Edwards can provide a stylistic balance: His rise over the last few weeks was due to interest inspired by his almost unapologetic optimism, youthful appearance, and his outsider (sort of) status, all things that Kerry decidedly doesn’t have.

“Kerry has seemed to be of the old guard — a conventional liberal senator,” said Chace. “I think Edwards, who can come across as an outsider, could have a lot to offer him.”

The other thing that makes Edwards such a logical choice is that he has run a nice guy’s campaign, often passing up obvious opportunities to criticize Kerry. The most recent glaring example of this was at a debate last week in Columbia, S.C. Edwards was asked what he thought of comments Kerry had made about Democrats not needing to win in the South during the general election. Although he has made his own ability to win Southern votes a central theme in his campaign, Edwards refused to take the bait.

“He was given a chance to attack Kerry on the South — his issue — and he took a pass,” said Democratic consultant Mattis Goldman.

The result of the nice-guy campaign, other than maintaining good relations with Kerry, has been that Edwards has turned himself into a pollster’s dream and a potentially valuable asset on a national ticket. “Edwards has emerged from this entire process with a very heavy favorable rating,” said pollster John Zogby. “That’s the best news if I’m sitting in a meeting picking a running mate.”

Given all that, it should come as no surprise that the Kerry camp is rumored to be laying the groundwork for a partnership with Edwards, even as they maintain a public line that they’re still in a fight for the nomination and are “taking nothing for granted.” Kerry’s wife, Teresa, and stepson Chris have already talked privately about their preference for Edwards, according to one Kerry ally who discussed it with them, and Teresa has a particular affinity for Edwards’ wife, Elizabeth. In addition, talk from the Kerry camp about Edwards is almost invariably positive, stressing the personal relationship between the senators and their compatibility on the issues.

There’s even been talk of deliberate machinations by the Kerry camp to boost Edwards through the primaries to make him more of an asset on the ticket. MSNBC, reporting on the night of Feb. 3 from Kerry headquarters, passed on a suggestion that “the Kerry camp intentionally pulled back in South Carolina … because they wanted Edwards to win by a significant enough margin that he might appear to be a national candidate.”

Edwards, of course, is still in the race to win, and has issued the requisite denials — again and again — of any interest in becoming vice president.

Here, from a recent appearance on NBC’s “Today” show, is a conversation he had with host Matt Lauer.

Lauer: Would you consider being a vice presidential candidate?

Edwards: No.

Lauer: No, final?

Edwards: No. Final.

It was a refreshingly straightforward, hedge-free denial. But how many media heavyweights believe him? According to “The Note,” ABC’s political Web page: exactly zero.

It’s more likely that other considerations will weigh against Edwards’ getting on the ticket. Any argument against him will include his being a senator: A Kerry-Edwards ticket would be the first to feature two members of Congress since John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in 1960. Or his career as a trial lawyer, not one of the most popular professions in the country.

The case for Clark as vice president is somewhat more complicated. He’s a decorated war hero, a retired four-star general and the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO — those are handy attributes going into an election in which security will be a major issue. A Kerry-Clark ticket would fulfill a certain liberal fantasy of a lefty-hawk ticket to break the Republican election-time dominance of security issues. “Kerry is clearly going to use themes of security and defense,” said David Bositis, analyst with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. “If he picked Clark it would further emphasize that and challenge Bush in his strongest area.”

Because of that possibility, Clark is still a decent bet to wind up in the mix of vice presidential choices. “I would put Clark on a short list,” Meehan said.

But in the past five weeks, the Democratic race has turned upside down, and that’s hurt Clark, weakened the rationale for his candidacy. When he came into the contest last September, the front-runner was Howard Dean. Clark instantly gained credibility and popularity because he seemed like the perfect antidote to the former Vermont governor, whose glaring weakness was a lack of experience dealing with matters of national security.

At the same time as he was pitching himself as the stop-Dean candidate, he also seemed like an obvious choice to run as Dean’s running mate, lending instant military credibility to a small-state governor with no foreign policy experience. Dean supporters were euphoric about the possibility.

But Clark skipped the Iowa race, and Kerry’s win there changed everything. Kerry became what Clark had hoped to be, the Dean alternative with strong national security credibility. Clark instantly tanked in the polls in New Hampshire, where he had been in second place and climbing. And just as his campaign has slowed after showing such great promise, so has his vice presidential star dimmed as it becomes less and less likely that Dean will be the nominee.

Another practical question about Clark would be whether he’s a good enough candidate. Though he prides himself on not being a “politician,” Clark’s difficulties in answering basic questions about his policy positions and priorities — starting with a disastrous interview on the second day of his campaign in which he muddled his antiwar message — isn’t a good quality for a running mate. He’s improved since then, but he still sometimes comes across on the stump and on television as unsure, bearing little resemblance to the confident war analyst he was on CNN last year.

“As a revered commentator on a subject on which he was an unquestioned authority, he was treated differently,” said Martin Kaplan, associate dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California and a former speechwriter for Walter Mondale. “But when you are a presidential candidate, you’re thrown into the sort of grotesque reality show our campaign has become. It’s a game of ‘gotcha’ with your opponents and with the press, and if you don’t enjoy and relish that game, you can come across as not engaging.”

Clark has been further hurt by the perception in some quarters that he’s a Republican in Democrats’ clothing. He admitted to voting for Nixon and Reagan, and was quoted as recently as 2002 effusively praising the Bush leadership team for its handling of the war on terror after Sept. 11.

“Clark can’t happen,” Zogby said flatly.

Oh, and Clark’s campaign says he has no interest whatsoever in being vice president. “If he doesn’t become president, he’s going to go back to his life,” said communications director Matt Bennett. “It just never comes up, except when other people bring it up with us.”

But then, maybe that’s just politics. David Doak, the veteran Democratic consultant, has this to say about that dynamic: “You know what they say about the vice presidency — it’s like the last cookie on the plate. Everybody swears they don’t want it but next thing you know it’s gone.”

Bush supporters are closely watching to see what unfolds and seem to have a plan for whoever emerges. Rick Wilson, a Republican consultant, thinks that neither Clark nor Edwards would help Kerry deflect an attack that will paint him as a wimpy Massachusetts liberal. “He’s Mike Dukakis with a better suit and better hair,” said Wilson, who helped engineer the 2002 campaign that defeated Georgia senator and Vietnam war hero Max Cleland on the grounds that he was weak on national security. “I know he’s a veteran and was brave in combat, but none of that — and certainly not his running mate — is going to save him from his liberal record.”

Wilson’s prediction: Edwards will end up being the choice. “The Kerry people will like Edwards better,” he said. “Clark just strikes me as too icy and kind of freaky. Edwards has got that trial lawyer empathetic I-feel-your-pain thing. And the Southern aspect of his candidacy can’t hurt, although I don’t think at the end of the day he’s going to be able to out-Southern George W. Bush.”

Republican National Committee chair Ed Gillespie read from the same playbook recently — or at least the part about not being able to beat Bush — when he told reporters in Edwards’ home state of North Carolina: “I don’t believe that John Edwards on the ticket makes it any more likely for Democrats to carry this state in 2004 than it was for Al Gore to carry Tennessee in 2000.”

In any event, it might seem unlikely that any running mate could make the difference for Kerry. But remember how close the Gore-Bush race was in 2000? “Generally they say that a vice presidential nominee doesn’t impact the race more than 1 percent,” said Zogby. “Well, 1 percent is huge these days. We’re going to be counting in tenths of a percent in many of these states. We’re going to be looking at things in this election that move by the hundreds and thousands [of votes].”

Of course, like so much of the other speculation that has gone on throughout this primary season, the discussion about who’s actually going to fill that vice presidential slot might mean nothing at all. As supporters of Edwards, Clark and Dean will point out, all of Kerry’s successes so far have won him only a small fraction of the delegates needed to wrap the contest up. Edwards and Clark each see a chance of emerging from the Feb. 10 primaries in Virginia and Tennessee as strong alternatives to Kerry, and Dean is hoping to prolong his campaign with a win in Wisconsin on Feb. 17.

That’s why Kerry’s campaign will not discuss vice presidential politics on the record: The race isn’t over, and if his near-fatal fall from front-runner status in 2003 didn’t serve as a lesson against premature presumptuousness, nothing will.

“My feeling is this thing has a few twists and turns left,” warns Doak, who thinks that Edwards in particular still has a chance of making a run.

If Kerry does end up with the nomination, there’s also the chance he might choose a running mate who hasn’t been widely considered, someone with some of the positive Clark and Edwards attributes but fewer of their negatives. Among the “outsiders” he could pick are Graham and Gephardt, who are thought to be able to deliver a key state like Florida or a swing region in the Midwest. He could also run with a Democratic governor, although the talent pool there has dried up somewhat in recent years.

Ultimately, though, the choice is most likely to come down to the most basic considerations. Said Meehan: “My own sense is that making a splash would not be as important to Sen. Kerry as having someone who’d be prepared to be president and form a partnership to work together through a very difficult campaign.”

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected since its original publication.

Roy Neel, former chief of staff to Al Gore, was appointed CEO of the campaign, supplanting Trippi, who served as a high-profile campaign manager, ad man and inspirational icon to many of Dean’s Internet supporters.

It was devastating news for a candidate who, just four weeks ago, had been seen as the strong front-runner to win the Democratic presidential nomination. The campaign was basking in the glow of upbeat news coverage, fundraising prowess and endorsements from elected officials, labor leaders and celebrities. But after two decisive losses in the space of eight days, chaos that apparently had been percolating through the campaign organization broke into open view.

After Tuesday’s clear defeat at the hands of Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, Dean’s “one remaining hope was to be able to pivot very quickly this week onto a sort of new substantive message,” said Democratic consultant Howard Wolfson. “This is going to completely interfere with that.”

The pessimism even had spread to many of the operatives and volunteers who staffed an organization known for its idealism and optimism. “The wheels are coming off the chassis,” one said yesterday.

Even before Wednesday’s shakeup, Dean had been undergoing a public, on-the-fly makeover — tempering his language, making fun of himself on the David Letterman show and appearing with his wife, Judy Steinberg Dean, for an emotional TV interview. But the latest developments were more than cosmetic, and they made clear that a campaign once deemed unstoppable is now in very real danger of disintegrating.

Financially, donors wondering about the viability of the campaign are likely to hold onto their money. And critics are certain to question whether a candidate who could not manage the estimated $40 million he raised last year is capable of managing the world’s biggest economy.

There will be political fallout, too. With a crucial, seven-state primary day coming Tuesday, stories about the campaign turmoil are likely to drown out Dean’s appeals for votes. And with John Kerry coming off of two monumental wins, and with John Edwards and Wesley Clark moving into contests on friendly soil in the South and West on Feb. 3, prospects for the former Vermont governor are not bright.

While Dean was in Burlington Wednesday reorganizing his campaign and dealing with the fallout, front-runner Kerry and other candidates were already on the ground and courting votes in crucial states like Missouri and South Carolina.

The Dean campaign was a pretty disorganized affair from the beginning. That was almost the point: It was a “different” kind of campaign, driven by the candidate’s refreshing spontaneity and consultant-free cadences, and fueled by the zeal of its idealistic volunteers and small grass-roots donations. That “roll with it” aspect carried over to the campaign’s organization as well, which was roughly divided into three groups of the governor’s top advisors from Vermont — Kate O’Connor and Bob Rogan in one camp, Trippi in another, and everyone else in a third.

The result was that internal decision-making processes tended to be chaotic, with top supporters getting contradictory marching orders from Trippi and the Burlington staff in the same day.

“We couldn’t get answers on simple things,” said one, who asked to remain anonymous. “It just seemed like there was no coordination between Trippi, the fundraising machine and the governor’s closest aides from Vermont. I guess that turned out to be the case.”

But none of that mattered in the fall, when the Dean campaign could seemingly do no wrong. The media was writing process story after process story about the brilliance of the movement and Trippi, its tech-savvy orchestrator. After all, it was hard to argue with the enthusiastic crowds who flocked to campaign events, the estimated $40 million the campaign raised over the Internet, and the resultant lead compiled by Dean in the polls.

While Dean fought fierce opposition from moderates in the Democratic Party and from Kerry and Dick Gephardt on the campaign trail, he won an avalanche of high-profile endorsements from politicians such as Al Gore and Bill Bradley and from activist celebrities like Rob Reiner and “Acting President” Martin Sheen, star of the popular “West Wing” television series.

By early January, Dean’s strategy was clear: The campaign would overwhelm all contenders in Iowa and New Hampshire, making clear that opposition was futile. But a series of inopportune comments and outright gaffes fueled questions about whether an antiwar candidate with no foreign policy experience could defeat President George W. Bush. And in Iowa, voters repeatedly suggested that they found the candidate arrogant.

After finishing a distant second in New Hampshire this week, the campaign’s spin was that Dean was making a comeback. But that was called into question — sharply, and unexpectedly — on Wednesday.

According to staffers, Dean held a meeting with campaign workers in which he announced that there was no money to pay staff at the beginning of February. He said that the campaign had $3 million in the bank, but that it had also racked up $3 million in debt that needed to be paid off. A senior aide confirmed the meeting, but not the numbers in question.

Even before the Iowa caucus, the Dean campaign spent aggressively in states with later contests in order to drive home the advantage of being the only “national” campaign. In Iowa, the campaign spent millions on advertising and on a massive organization of paid staff and volunteers in custom, bright-orange watch caps. But that spending did more to attract press attention than actual caucus-goers, and Dean finished third. And in New Hampshire, Dean outspent his closest rival by hundreds of thousands of dollars to air an ad blitz that helped to reverse damage to his campaign from Iowa.

“[Money] has nothing to do with the management changes at all,” Dean said on an evening conference call with reporters.

According to some campaign sources, it was a change that Dean had contemplated since the Iowa loss, if not before. But it came to a head this week. “I think the governor just kind of had it with losing,” said one campaign source who asked to remain anonymous. “He was itching to make a move, but he made a very good call post Iowa to stand pat. It was just time.”

Whatever his ultimate reasons, Dean had seen enough, and decided to bring in Neel. Trippi, upon hearing the news, handed in his resignation Wednesday and left.

On Wednesday night, Dean said Neel was brought in to be a “centralizing” force in the campaign. Others suggested the appointment is meant to impose discipline on the reeling campaign, and, just as importantly, the appearance of discipline. Neel is a close friend of Gore’s and a longtime aide; he was also a central figure during the 2000 campaign. But while Neel’s lobbyist background only confirmed Gore’s image as a Washington insider to those who wanted change, his corporate leanings are unlikely to harm Dean’s outsider credentials — and may even bolster his campaign with centrists.

Clearly, though, the timing is less than ideal.

When Kerry’s campaign seemed moribund in November — he overhauled his staff and attracted a ream of critical coverage. But Trippi’s departure comes just a week before a series of contests in which Dean must either win something or risk going into free-fall.

At such a crucial juncture, it’s not clear whether Trippi’s departure will dent the seemingly infinite enthusiasm of the legions of “Deaniacs” who propelled him to the front of the field in 2003. Trippi, a veteran political consultant who came to the Dean campaign from a private-sector job with an Internet company, was the visionary behind DeanforAmerica.com, and was something of a hero to many of those supporters.

Shortly after news of Trippi’s departure broke, “Brad in Mass” posted this comment on Dean’s Blog for America: “Man. This is genuinely, truly harsh. I really, truly do not want you to go, Joe.”

The danger is also that supporters loyal to Trippi will come to see him as a scapegoat, as some strategists clearly believe him to be. “I guess it was Joe Trippi who told Dean to act hysterical and say dumb things every day,” Wolfson said sarcastically. “If there was ever a situation where a candidate should have fired himself, it was this one.”

But Dean expressed no hostility for his former campaign guru. Instead, he said he regrets Trippi’s decision, and hopes to convince him to come back and work for the campaign “after he’s thought it through.”

Trippi, for his part, also sought a graceful exit. “Howard Dean is the guy who is going to fight for the country for real change and [I] hope people stick with him,” Trippi said as he left campaign headquarters with his wife, Kathy Lash, who also worked for Dean.

“I’m out of the campaign, but I’m not out of the fight,” he said in an account reported by the Associated Press. “We need to change America.”

Can Dean recover? Maybe. Even without Trippi, he has a core of supporters that will never abandon him. And while the other campaigns will be fighting each other all over the country in the Feb. 3 states, the Dean camp will hope to rebound by focusing on and winning delegate-rich states like Michigan and Washington on Feb. 7. As John Kerry can attest, comebacks have been built on less.

On the conference call, Dean discussed the strategy of patience. “It’s going to be a long, long war of attrition, and we’re preparing for that,” he said.

But it’s an untested theory, and time is running out.

Laura McClure contributed to this report.

“I really do have a great feeling,” Kerry said to an unruly gaggle of reporters standing in the snow at roadside. “You’ve got to fight for every vote, and we’ve worked long and hard at this. I feel really good about this.”

He had good reason. After a week of energetic if cautious campaigning, John Kerry emerged as the big winner in New Hampshire, and his support seems to be based largely on a simple argument: that he has the best chance to win in November. With 94 percent of precincts reporting, Kerry had 39 percent of the vote, with Dean at 26, Wesley Clark at 13, John Edwards at 12, Joe Lieberman with 9 and Dennis Kucinich with 1. And in most exit polls, Kerry’s supporters tended to be those who placed the highest premium on the belief that their candidate could beat President Bush.

The Kerry campaign hopes that the win, coupled with his surprise victory last week in Iowa, will catapult him to victory in most of the seven contests a week from now, in South Carolina, Oklahoma, Arizona, New Mexico, Missouri, North Dakota and Delaware. Kerry takes off tomorrow for Missouri, where the withdrawal of native son Richard Gephardt last week left the state up for grabs.

“Now this campaign goes on to places all over this country,” he said Tuesday night. “And I ask Democrats everywhere to join us so that we can defeat George W. Bush and the economy of privilege, and so that we can fulfill the ideal of opportunity not just for some, but for all Americans.”

Meanwhile, it was the second straight defeat for Howard Dean, who was widely regarded just a couple of weeks ago as a heavy favorite for the nomination, but will now face huge pressure to win in the next round of contests. The question Tuesday night was how Dean supporters and opponents would spin his second-place finish, and whether North Carolina Sen. John Edwards’ showing — probably fourth, but just behind Wesley Clark, whose third-place finish wasn’t impressive given the resources he invested — was strong enough to give him momentum heading into Feb. 3.

Dean started off the week in a dire position, coming off an upset defeat in Iowa and an incessantly replayed concession speech that will go down in history as “I have a scream.” After seeing a quick collapse in his support here, his campaign managed to do some nifty damage control, and ran a good enough race here in the last week to avert a defeat that some polls predicted would be even more lopsided than it turned out to be. He replaced his stock stump speech, whose refrain of “You have the power! You have the power!” was perfect for rallying the converted, with practical discussion of his executive experience as a moderate Vermont governor.

He lessened the fallout from his post-Iowa speech by addressing it with humor, simultaneously making the story seem trivial and strengthening the conviction of his dedicated supporters that the media was against him. It helped when he yielded to advice from many of his staffers by bringing his wife, Judith, out onto the trail. And his new ads were considerably brighter than the stark and negative fare served up by his campaign in Iowa, as Dean tried to make the angry caricature of a week ago seem like a distant and irrelevant aberration.

“We came in a solid second,” Dean told Larry King on CNN after Kerry’s victory was projected. “We needed a recovery from our performance in Iowa. We did what we needed to do.”

But that’s still not clear. The Feb. 3 contests don’t favor Dean. John Edwards, thanks to his relatively strong finish here after a surprise second-place showing in Iowa, as well as his Southern roots, may well be able to claim a position as the chief challenger to Kerry in the South and West. The advantage in those Feb. 3 contests — large and spread out as they are — will go to the candidates with money for ads and positive coverage in the media. Following this result, Edwards should have plenty of both.

In comments to reporters while watching the returns come in, Edwards talked about his momentum. “Just a week or 10 days ago, we were in mid-single digits here, and we’re clearly moving up,” he said. “It’s very encouraging.”

Wesley Clark will have a harder time characterizing his share of the vote as anything quite so positive. Because he skipped Iowa to focus on achieving a good result here, and because his support in the polls fell so much from where he was just a week ago, the result has to be viewed as a disappointment.

Clark, whose rallying cry is “I’m not a politician,” watched his support melt away over the last week when his lack of political skill became clear. After building up a lot of support while the other candidates were in Iowa, he spent the entire week trying to get the media to talk about something other than seeming discrepancies in his position on abortion rights, a comment from Michael Moore at one of his rallies that President Bush was a “deserter,” and, in the final days, his slipping position in the polls.

But Tuesday night may have been most disappointing for Joe Lieberman, who comes from the neighboring state of Connecticut. (There were even rumors today that he would suspend his campaign in the event of a weak showing, which Lieberman denied.) His appeal was premised upon his ability as a moderate Democrat to win votes from independents and moderate Republicans. But for now, Kerry seems to be making that case most effectively. The veteran Kerry’s strongest appeal is the line he uses over and over: “If George Bush wants to make this campaign about national security, I have three words that I know he understands: Bring it on!” As in Iowa, he has reenforced this selling point by surrounding himself with veterans, especially Max Cleland, the former Georgia senator who lost three limbs in Vietnam, and then lost his Senate seat when the Republicans painted him as weak on national security.

Kerry’s appeal clearly worked on Democratic and independent voters united by a visceral desire to get Bush out of the White House. “It’s the same thing over and over,” said one frustrated Dean campaign worker, after logging dozens of calls to pledged supporters. “‘I really like Dean, and his heart’s in the right place, but we just gotta get Bush outta there.’”

But it’s not clear sailing for Kerry. On Feb.3, he’ll have to prove that he can appeal to the more conservative voters who dominate those states, as well as to black voters, who comprised almost none of the electorate in Iowa and New Hampshire. And even with whatever bounce he gets out of his win today, he’ll have to overcome a natural disadvantage to Edwards and perhaps Clark, both of whom are Southerners.

Kerry didn’t help his cause earlier today when he tipped his hand about the stock he would put in the South if he’s the general election candidate. “Everybody always makes the mistake of looking South,” Kerry said, in response to a question about winning the region. “Al Gore proved he could have been president of the United States without winning one Southern state, including his own.” It may have been an honest assessment of the situation, but it’s hardly the sort of thing he wanted to put into the hands of the Edwards campaign in time for next week’s contests. No doubt Clark and Edwards would like to see it become the kind of issue that Dean’s past remarks disparaging the Iowa caucuses became in that state.

For now, though, the Kerry crowd can celebrate another solid performance by a campaign that was brought back from the dead after a big shakeup at the end of last year. Over the last week, Kerry racked up endorsements from the Boston Globe and the League of Conservation Voters, which he quickly repackaged into his ads here. He spent the week keeping up a full schedule campaigning, including a fly-around on a helipcopter yesterday, while his staff pointed out just how hard he was working. “He gets up every day and zeroes in on voters like a heat-seeking missile, talking about what matters in their lives,” said Kerry spokesman David Wade a couple of days before the vote.

It wasn’t that Kerry was the most electrifying candidate. The crowds at Dean and Edwards events were certainly more responsive. Even in the context of his new, punched-up stump speech, Kerry still tends toward old-school faux-Kennedy rhetoric over his opponents’ more conversational styles. (Even his line about the need to offer “solutions, not slogans” is itself a slogan.) But this is a year in which notions of natural charisma are taking a back seat to general election credibility.

Which brings us back to Dean, who now faces real questions about whether he can stabilize his candidacy, and whether the adjustments in his campaign over the last week came too late to prevent the idea from taking permanent root that he is a weak general election candidate. While his staffers talked about the momentum he gained by not being shellacked after his Iowa upset, it’s still not clear which, if any, of the Feb. 3 states will provide him with an electorate that’s any more sympathetic to him than New Hampshire. The Granite State, after all, neighbors Vermont, and voters there are highly familiar with him. He also had a top-flight ground organization. Now, he has to win fast: He can only spin second-place finishes as moral victories for so long.

For all his staff’s spinning, the candidate seemed to know this, and was fully aware of the urgency of his need to come up with a big result tonight. Following a town hall meeting at Exeter Academy on Monday, Dean plunged into the crowd to shake hands, and to urge supporters one last time to get out and vote for him.

“We’re gonna win tomorrow,” said one.

Said Dean: “We’d better.”

But he didn’t, and it’s still not clear when he will.

For the record, there were actually fewer people shut out of the Clark event. But the fact that these trailing candidates are creating fire hazards wherever they go demonstrates that there’s a lot more to the picture here than the marquee Kerry vs. Dean event. Because of the unprecedented primary schedule this year, Clark, Edwards and even Joe Lieberman are arousing interest on the ground that isn’t necessarily clear from the polls, which generally show John Kerry with a lead and Howard Dean trailing.

The compressed primary calendar, which has seven states holding contests on Feb. 3, has only made things seem more competitive. For the moment, each of the major candidates has hope that he can lose in New Hampshire and still hit the electoral jackpot a week later in the season’s first big Tuesday, which features seven contests spread from Delaware and South Carolina in the East to North Dakota, Missouri and Oklahoma in the middle of the country, to New Mexico and Arizona in the Southwest.

That will shift the means of voter outreach dramatically from person-to-person politics to press coverage and television ads. Fair or not, positive “free media” and ad money will come to those who exceed expectations in New Hampshire, and both will be in extremely short supply for those who disappoint.

In other words, what happens among those candidates skirmishing for the runner-up spots Tuesday could turn out to be as important as who wins.

“It looks at this point as if we’re going to have at least four if not five candidates continue through Feb. 3,” said Simon Rosenberg, a graduate of the Clinton War Room who now heads the centrist New Democrat Network. “And going into a phase where so much depends on momentum, the second- and third- and fourth-place finishes in New Hampshire will be one of the most critical developments of the campaign.”

Much of the talk since Iowa has focused on Edwards. A lot of this is due to his delivery, which has made him something of a fashionable candidate for the talking heads, starting with James Carville, who declared after Iowa that Edwards has the best stump speech he’s ever heard.

It is an effective speech, and it works in part because Edwards — who, as we all know, was a trial lawyer — has a performer’s knack for delivering the same speech word-for-word as if it’s all something that occurred to him on the spot, and he feels so strongly about it that he wants to share it with everyone in the room. He’s talking, as opposed to speechifying, and he has the dramatic hand gestures and easy smile to go with it.

But after he hits his themes about there being “two Americas,” one for the wealthy and connected and the other for “the rest,” the part that invariably gets the greatest reaction is when Edwards talks about his ability to win. He starts off, as he did in a coffee shop in Laconia Saturday, by talking about how, as a trial lawyer, his better-funded corporate opponents looked down on him. “You know what I did?” he asks. “I beat ‘em, I beat ‘em, I beat ‘em again and I beat ‘em again.” And when he ran against “the Jesse Helms Republican machine” for Senate in North Carolina? “I beat them too.”

He says that he’s the candidate who can win “in the East, in the West, in the Midwest, and talking like this” — he points to his mouth and laughs, as if he’s slightly embarrassed about his drawl — “in the South.”

Outside the Soda Shoppe in Laconia Saturday, where Edwards’ visit turned a modest diner into a too-close-for-comfort swarm of humanity, a number of undecided voters pronounced themselves delighted with what they saw. “I’m really impressed with his experience and delivery,” said Bill Noelte, an auditor for the state of New Hampshire and an independent. “I just really liked what I saw.”

And Sunday in Nashua, outside the rally at the junior high school gym, Edwards received testimony from Phil, who is part of a four-man outfit that follows the candidates around the country for the primaries selling victory buttons (and who asked for business reasons that his last name not be used here). Phil said that he could tell early that Edwards was making a big move in Iowa when his buttons started selling at an exponential rate, while Dean’s sales were steady and Richard Gephardt’s were downright flat. Now, he said, he saw the same thing happening in New Hampshire. “Before we came here, I told the other guys I wanted Edwards,” he said. “He’s a huge seller. It’s impulse buying. It’s just like the people who come out and see him make up their mind right there.”

While Edwards has gained favor with talking heads, Clark has not. He is highly eloquent talking about military affairs, but when he talks about domestic policy he can come off like a tourist who’s taken a Berlitz crash course. This was evident at Thursday’s debate in Manchester, and it’s resulted in a certain amount of confusion about his positions. Another result came Saturday in a less-than-flattering Washington Post story.

At a heathcare candidate forum at Manchester’s Palace Theater, Clark got onstage, stood at a podium and read a speech. Lieberman, who went before him, and Dennis Kucinich, who went afterward, both laid out their own plans without reference to notes, and clearly stopped when they did only because of the imposed time limits.

All this is supposed to have hurt him, and maybe it has among New Hampshire voters. Pollster John Zogby told me he thought Clark was in a “downward spiral.”

Yet none of that explains the crowd at the gym at Daniel Webster College Sunday in Nashua, where enthusiastic locals and students clearly hadn’t gotten the news yet that Clark had collapsed. In fact, most of them seemed to be there for the sole reason that they thought he was a winner.

U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel, a New York Democrat who spoke to the crowd before Clark, pretty much summed up the reasoning: “We need a warrior to get rid of [George Bush].”

Again, the fact that Clark may not have mastered many of the issues he’d have to deal with as leader of the free world seemed immaterial to the Democrats and Independents who flocked to see him. His entire case is premised on the notion that he can beat George Bush, and that because of Clark’s status as a war-hero general and because of his Arkansas upbringing, he can win in the overwhelmingly red-coded South and West.

He’s got a slightly more stern challenge than Edwards, mostly because he skipped Iowa and clearly lost momentum as a result. In recent days, thanks in part to Kerry’s and Edwards’ gains after Iowa, Clark has lowered expectations. On “Meet the Press” Sunday, when Tim Russert asked him if he expected to win in New Hampshire, Clark flat out said no. (“Not here,” to be precise.) But he said he was confident in what would happen after this primary. “We’ve got an incredibly strong base of support, especially in the South, but all across the country,” he said.

The trick for Clark, according to aides, is pretty much to get through New Hampshire without being devastated by a heavier-than-expected defeat.

Even Joe Lieberman, whose campaign has yet to catch on in any demonstrable way, has a scenario that brings his campaign back to life. As his spokesman Jano Cabrera wryly points out, they’ve already “mastered” the game of keeping expectations low. The thinking is that if he creeps up near the end and gets more votes than any one or two of the other four, he’ll be in a position to move on with some strength to the contests that follow.

He’s seen a slight uptick in the polls and received endorsements from a couple of local newspapers. He told party activists at the annual 100 Club Dinner that he felt a surge of “Joe-mentum” throughout the state.

Kucinich, the other candidate campaigning here, has a highly devoted but small following, and polls show him with little chance of making an impact. Al Sharpton is campaigning in South Carolina.

Because of all the permutations that are possible here — who finished where and by how much, and how the media decides to treat everyone’s performance relative to their expectations — no one is quite sure how to proceed as far as laying the groundwork in the states to come.

The jockeying on that front has begun, but it’s hard to follow. The Edwards campaign says it has a bunch of volunteers up and running in South Carolina, a state Edwards is counting on winning, and now has staff and volunteers in New Mexico, North Dakota and Missouri, a state that suddenly went up for grabs when Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt dropped out of the race last week.

The Clark campaign, which raised almost as much money as Dean in the last three months of 2003, has put it to use on ads and staffed offices in Feb. 3 states.

The Lieberman campaign hasn’t spent much, but aides say that they’ve conserved money for a push in Arizona and Oklahoma.

The Dean campaign, which was spending Brewster’s Millions everywhere in running a “real national campaign,” has now yanked its ads outside of New Hampshire to concentrate on winning here.

And the suddenly strong Kerry campaign, which had appropriated few resources outside of Iowa and New Hampshire, is scrambling to put organizations into place in as many Feb. 3 states as possible.

But if those concrete steps will be dependent on Tuesday’s result, so will so many of the things that follow. After all, the lesson from Iowa is that momentum, whether created or merely documented, matters.

Right now it’s John Kerry who has the weight of great expectations on his shoulders. He’s the one with the lead in the polls and the big endorsements, guaranteeing that even a narrow loss here will be written up as a “collapse” on the order of those suffered so frequently by his beloved Red Sox. He’s even shown signs of feeling the pressure — ABC’s Kerry reporter caught him screaming at his press secretary about swarms of reporters that now follow his every move. But with so much going for him — the big hometown embrace, the huge crowds, the huge and much-needed uptick in fundraising — it’s a safe bet that this is a problem he’s happy to have.

If Dean manages to win after the bad week before Iowa and the week since — and it’s possible, depending upon which poll you read — expect to read phrases like “shifted landscape” and “dramatic sea change” about a hundred times more frequently than they appeared after Kerry “turned the race upside down” by winning in Iowa. And writing Dean off makes as little sense as prior assessments that said he was invincible, given the historic difficulty of polling in New Hampshire.

And if he doesn’t win, at least his supporters are already looking forward. “I’m not sure whether the grass roots can turn it around by this Tuesday,” said John Kennedy, a 33-year-old Dean volunteer from North Carolina. “But I think as time moves on and we move to Feb. 3 and Super Tuesday in March, there’s a much better chance for Dean to regain his front-runner status.”