For one thing, Dean landed the endorsements of three more U.S. representatives, all members of ethnic minority groups, allowing him to tout his growing political strength while addressing what had been a perceived limitation of his campaign — especially after comments he made about being the candidate for guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks. He scored political points with an increasingly powerful constituency as the only candidate to show up to speak before a group of Democratic Asian American leaders. And the campaign once again managed to exploit an occasion — in this case, the candidate’s birthday — for fundraising solicitation on a massive scale, from a series of “house parties” across the country to the packed bar event in D.C.

What’s more, the campaign demonstrated a continuing willingness to spend that money aggressively by unveiling a series of ads that criticize Rep. Dick Gephardt — who currently holds a narrow lead over Dean in Iowa — for voting to authorize President Bush to go to war in Iraq.

Earlier in the day, at an event in the ballroom of the Capitol Hilton just off K Street, Dean was addressing a Democratic group called the Asian American Action Fund. He had been late in arriving, but it hardly mattered: With John Kerry and John Edwards each spending the day stumping in Iowa, where they hope to place at least third, Gephardt down in South Carolina, and others in New Hampshire, Dean turned out to be the only candidate who accepted the group’s invitation to come.

Flanked on stage by Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe, and Reps. Mike Honda, D-Calif., and David Wu, D-Ore., he gave his usual stump speech, with his usual big applause lines. He criticized the Bush administration for its handling of Iraq, and for passing tax cuts before it spent money on healthcare, homeland security and education. On the PATRIOT Act and profiling of Arab-Americans after Sept. 11, 2001, an issue of particular importance to this audience, he angrily denounced the administration’s tactics, likening them to America’s internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

“Have we learned nothing?” he asked, as Honda, a former internee, nodded gravely.

Dean was also careful, as always, to qualify his criticisms of the administration on security issues, hoping to insulate himself from criticism that he would be a risk-averse weakling on defense: “I think my job as commander in chief of the United States military, should we be successful in November,” he said, lowering his tone, “will be to send American troops anywhere in the world they’re needed to protect America.” But, he said, he’d never send them anywhere “without first telling them the truth about why they’re going.”

“I don’t think this president understands defense at all,” he continued, criticizing Bush for not spending enough money on terrorism prevention at home, for not securing loose nuclear sticks in the former Soviet Union and for “allowing” North Korea to become a nuclear power by pursuing a foreign policy “based on the petulance of the chief executive of the United States of America.” And when he said that America had a strong military, he added his usual qualifier, “and I think that’s a good thing.”

He also acted like a presumptive primary winner, promising Wu a prime speaking slot at the Democratic convention if he endorsed him “by the end of this program, in which case he can have anything he wants.”

Wu, the head of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, had just given a detailed explanation of why he and Honda had voted with George Bush on his educational reform, “No Child Left Behind,” explaining that the administration subsequently failed to follow through on its promises.

Dean, plowing ahead with his speech, duly castigated “Bush-lite” Democrats who voted for the act. (This was the height of diplomacy compared to an earlier Dean comment in October, when he promised that if he were elected, members of Congress would be “scurrying for shelter, just like a giant flashlight on a bunch of cockroaches.”)

But, typical of how things are going these days for the front-running Dean, what might have become a gaffe for a struggling candidate was politely ignored — after he finished speaking, Wu returned to the microphone, wished Dean a happy birthday, and announced that he was deciding “right now” to endorse Dean. (The host group as a whole isn’t yet ready to make an official endorsement, but their comments afterward may have provided a hint as to their leanings. “It’s hard not to look at the significance of [Dean] coming to our event,” said the group’s executive director, Irene Bueno.)

By the time the night’s event rolled around, Dean had collected another unexpected endorsement, that of Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., who is the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. Standing up on a balcony in the lofty bar-restaurant, Cummings and others of Dean’s endorsers stepped forward one by one to praise him and to excoriate Bush, while on the floor below, the new Dean coalition was in evidence as green-shirted union members of SEIU and red-shirted ones of UNITE, mostly minorities, mingled with the white-collar — and largely white — blogger-geeks, gay activists and post-graduate volunteers who have formed the campaign’s core of support since the beginning.

As Cummings boomed his approval of Dean — “ordinary man, extraordinary vision,” he said — Trippi spoke over the crowd noise to explain the campaign’s efforts to keep up with the support that seems to be pouring in these days.

Talking about the event he had just come from, when Cummings endorsed Dean, Trippi said: “[Cummings] just asked if he could come up and say something and, Ka-Boom! We were like, ‘Could you maybe come to the next event and say that again?’”

The next official to be introduced after Cummings was Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., who became the first member of Congress to endorse Dean. She said that she saw the latest endorsements as the beginning of a flood of support going to the front-running Dean. “Today we started to see the crumblings,” she said. “Today three more members of the House of Representatives said, ‘We don’t care — we’re going to endorse Howard Dean today.’” (Around this point a press aide turned to a reporter and, only half-kidding, asked, “Are you getting all of this excitement? Is there enough room on your pad?”)

Meanwhile the next speaker, Rep. Jim Moran, not to be outdone on the level of Bush criticism, said that Bush’s presidency “just makes you sick to your stomach.”

When it was Dean’s turn to talk, he leaned on the railing, sleeves rolled up to his biceps as usual, like a performer ready to launch into his routine. “You’ve all heard my stump speech before,” he said, grinning broadly. “We’re going to have some fun here at the president’s expense.” The crowd roared.

He went through the familiar litany of angry criticisms of the Bush administration, with the committed Dean-heads in the crowd anticipating every note but cheering like they were hearing it for the first time. “What middle-class tax cut?” Dean asked. “There was no middle-class tax cut! Give us our money back, Mr. President, so we can get our jobs back!” Another roar.

He also did his bit about healthcare — unchanged since he started campaigning nearly a year ago — ending with the now-familiar litany of places that have universal health insurance, running from Britain, Germany and Israel right through to his climax: “Even the Costa Ricans have it!”

At the end of the election, he said, “This time, the person with the most votes is going to the White House,” he said, and talked triumphantly about amassing an army of small donors to “buy George Bush a one-way bus ticket back to Crawford, Texas.” And that drew the biggest roar of the night.

But If Dean’s supporters are already looking past the primary, they at least seem aware that a general election victory won’t come quite as easily. Essentially, said one, beating President Bush would take a leap of faith. “There’s an old native American quote: As you walk through life, you will come to a great divide,” said Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, another of Dean’s congressional supporters. “Jump — it’s not as far as you think. This election is about jumping, because the divide to beat George W. Bush isn’t as wide as we think it is.”

How to explain this mystery? Howard Dean. Since Clark’s official announcement in September, Clark has fallen from his self-proclaimed role as “frontrunner” to back in the pack with everyone else, struggling to stay competitive with Dean. For many of the Democratic insiders who look with horror upon the prospect of a Dean candidacy, which they think would end in defeat against George Bush, Clark has become their last hope.

Hence the endorsements, which continue to come despite Clark’s mediocre reviews in the press and sag in the polls. “Howard Dean, I think, is probably likely at this point to be our nominee, but I am concerned about him on temperament issues, and on how he’ll come across in the day-to-day give and take of a general election campaign,” said Weiner. “He’s going to be very difficult for anyone to beat in the primary, and the feeling in the party has already gone from ‘I wonder who the alternative will be’ to ‘Holy shit — I think this guy is going to win.’

“I think that Clark is a better choice, and would be our best general-election candidate, and I want to be involved, to make sure that he survives the early hiccups in his campaign to stay viable,” he said.

This week seemed to be particularly rough. It started with a critical piece in the New Yorker magazine on Clark’s military record (a piece that was criticized on Slate); his support for a constitutional amendment banning the desecration of the American flag sent his staff into heavy spin mode and seemed at odds with his usual stump speech, which defends dissent as a patriotic right. This followed previous, early stumbles, such as when he first said he would have voted to authorize the war in Iraq had he been in Congress, and then later suggested otherwise.

Donors, too, seem willing to work through those hiccups, with Clark continuing to receive star treatment in Democratic money centers. On Nov. 16, for example, he will be the beneficiary and honored guest at a fundraiser in Hollywood hosted by writer/producer Norman Lear, restaurateur Peter Morton, comedian Larry David and film executive Mike Medavoy, among others, which the campaign expects will net $500,000. They are also planning an event in New York on Dec. 9 (which he’ll attend instead of a Democratic debate in New Hampshire with all the other candidates) that they expect to raise another $1.5 million. Clark has already benefited from strong support in the community of Clinton donors like Alan Patricof, and Victor and Sarah Kovner, and has a number of high-end fundraisers planned for the coming days.

“There are clearly a number of Democratic donors who are still looking for an alternative to Dean and have hit upon Clark,” said Democratic consultant Howard Wolfson.

Kym Spell, a campaign spokesman, said that Clark’s continuing success at raising money and collecting political endorsements was a sign of strength. “We’re in a very nice place right now,” she said. “We’re sending people out to the Feb. 3 states [that hold their primaries after Iowa and New Hampshire] and we can’t keep up with all the requests to help with fundraising.”

Clark’s success in those Feb. 3 primaries will be crucial if he is to remain viable, and he is depending on a strong finish in New Hampshire — where he plans to spend at least three days before the Jan. 27 contest — to give him a boost before he heads on to South Carolina and Oklahoma, key states for him.

Within the Clark camp, there have been ongoing arguments over which scenarios would best position him; for instance, whether it would be better for Clark (who is not even competing in Iowa) if Dean was beaten early by one of the other Democrats, or if Dean swept the first two contests, potentially allowing the general to rally scared anti-Dean voters to him in time for the subsequent round of primaries. “There’s a real division about what outcome they want in Iowa,” said Weiner. “Do they want Richard Gephardt to emerge as winner and slow Dean down, or do they want to have a fever pitch about ‘Oh my God, we have to stop Dean in South Carolina!’?”

But while Clark’s supporters are arguing over the best path forward, some political analysts are asking whether, at this point, Clark isn’t already beyond help. “Clark had the potential because of his bio and because he was the antiwar general who could make up for the one perceived weakness of the Democrats on foreign policy and national security,” said pollster John Zogby. “And when he jumped in, no other Democrats were really dominant and he went straight to the top of the polls. But what I’ve seen [since] then has been unimpressive, so much so that he had to drop out of Iowa.”

And he’s lost ground in New Hampshire, where he was once in third place with about 11 percent. “Now he’s back down to 5 or 6,” Zogby says. “There’s no way you spin a fourth or fifth place finish in New Hampshire as having the legs to continue — the money dries up and voters look at other candidates. You’ve got to win somewhere.”

Kerry hit the Bush administration for having the “one of the dumbest, most inept, most arrogant foreign policies” he’s ever seen. Then he slammed Dean. “I haven’t been flipping and flopping because I’m running for president,” he said, derisively referring to his archrival. He asked for the audience to “judge him on his fights.”

And then, in a private conversation with the event organizer, he quietly pleaded for something else: patience. “Yep,” he said, nodding grimly. “We’ve got to get cranking a little bit.”

But Kerry doesn’t have much more time for patience. Trailing Dean by double digits in New Hampshire with just nine weeks until that crucial primary election, the Massachusetts senator is finally acting with some urgency, shaking up his staff, trimming his garrulous stump style, and launching daily attacks on Dean.

On Sunday Kerry replaced campaign manager Jim Jordan with Massachusetts-based Democratic activist Mary Beth Cahill, who worked for the women’s group Emily’s List and Sen. Edward Kennedy. The move is believed, in part, to be an effort to move the campaign’s center of influence from Washington, where Jordan was based, to Kerry’s hometown of Boston. But Jordan played a central role in building the Kerry campaign, and it’s not yet clear how the staffers who are loyal to him will react to his replacement.

That move came amid major stylistic adjustments, including a punchier stump speech — one that borrows from his Senate colleague John McCain (fighting special interests) and former Gov. Dean (standing up!) — as well as an increasingly direct and personal assault on Dean’s record.

While the Kerry campaign has sought to make its adjustments, though, the Dean campaign has been surging, racking up key labor endorsements and compounding an already sizable fundraising advantage by opting to withdraw from public financing in order to avoid spending caps during the primary. In addition, Dean continues to sign up new volunteers and donors at an extraordinary rate.

During that time, Kerry’s fundraising has slowed, his polls numbers have lagged and his campaign has generally failed to live to its once lofty expectations. Hence the late retooling of the campaign, which will either be remembered by historians as the beginning of the Kerry campaign’s miraculous turnabout, or the death rattle of the most disappointing campaign of the 2004 election.

In an interview between campaign stops on Nov. 7, Kerry described his late-in-the-game improvements. “We’re getting close to the playoffs,” he said, twisting around in the shotgun seat of his campaign van to face his questioner. “It’s the end of the season and you’ve gotta jack your game up. I know crystal clear what my agenda is, and I’m speaking it hard and fast.”

The newer, trimmer version of the Kerry appeal has a more populist theme: combating “special interests,” repealing the high end of the Bush tax cut, and delivering affordable healthcare and lower tuition to the middle class. He is less modulated — gone is the 20-minute explanation of his votes on Iraq. And his criticisms are more direct. But the most noteworthy change is the all-out attack on Dean, from his positions on taxes, healthcare and guns to, yes, his “values.”

Kerry’s backers say they see a changed candidate, and they’re glad. “I think he’s finally shifting into campaign mode and out of senatorial mode,” said Fred Hochberg, a former Clinton administration official and a key Kerry supporter in New York. “He’s a much different campaigner than he was even three months ago.” Hochberg thinks the change in leadership will be significant, and that Cahill, along with the New Hampshire campaign chair, former Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, would make necessary adjustments. “Adults are managing the campaign now who really know how to manage people … And I think now with Mary Beth Cahill managing the campaign, it’s going to be a much better reflection of who John Kerry really is.”

But it was less than two months ago that Kerry shook up his staff the last time, when communications director Chris Lehane left the campaign — he has since signed on with retired Gen. Wesley Clark — and backers said that, too, heralded a new John Kerry. It’s unclear whether this is the big campaign shakeup Kerry needs. The immediate reaction to the shift wasn’t positive: An Associated Press story said that some on Kerry’s staff were angered by the way he made the announcement — on a conference call where he reportedly mispronounced the name of a staff member, talked while he was eating, and downplayed the impact of the change as “a one-day story” — and that some were threatening to leave.

While Kerry’s delivery has clearly improved since the beginning of the campaign — at a New York fundraiser in March he barely coaxed applause from an audience of his own donors — he still isn’t drawing the sorts of crowds attracted regularly by Dean. He’s also attracting little in the way of new donors, who have been discouraged by the faltering position of the campaign.

And even as he’s improved his standing in some public polls since Zogby showed him trailing by a stunning 23 points in New Hampshire, the most recent one still shows him training by 14. That’s a jump, but it could be too little, too late.

The Dean camp, for its part, is taking a dim view of Kerry’s attempted resurgence. “Everything John Kerry is doing reflects one thing only: desperation,” says campaign spokesman Steve McMahon. “Everything he has attempted so far hasn’t had the impact that he hoped it would have. But instead of looking in the mirror, he’s looking to blame other people. That’s the first sign of a failing campaign.”

In particular, he said, the move to replace Jordan was a disaster. “Jim Jordan can change a lot of things,” he said. “The only thing he couldn’t do is make John Kerry a candidate that voters want to embrace. The problem here is simple: The dogs just don’t like the dog food.”

Kerry said he had clarified his message, and his criticisms of Dean in particular, because of the way the field has shaped up. “It’s more clear now how the race is dividing up, and who’s where, and who the competition is,” he said. “Back earlier, it was unclear sort of where you’re heading. But its pretty much a clear race here, and I’ve got to draw the comparisons: what’s he going to do to you, what am I going to do.”

In recent days, Kerry has dispensed with any pretense of subtlety in making those comparisons. At appearance after appearance over several days of campaigning in New Hampshire, Kerry attempted to paint Dean as a panderer and a flip-flopper who was unprepared for office and who planned to bleed working families with a massive tax hike. Take for example, his appearance at a Manchester police station. He’d gone to watch a shift change and to chat with some officers about their jobs. It was a fairly basic retail campaign event, with fairly benign conversation. (“So you wear the turtleneck when it gets cold?” he asked one officer about his uniform).

But the questions afterward from the few reporters who had shown up were, as they often are these days for John Kerry, about Howard Dean. And whereas several months ago, Kerry might have declined the opportunity to engage this subject — before he plummeted in the polls in New Hampshire and nationally — in Manchester he was only too happy to oblige.

Since last week, when Dean responded to a question about his relationship with the NRA from the Des Moines Register by saying, “I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks,” Kerry (among others) criticized Dean for the comment, suggesting that it represented his willingness to pander to the gun lobby. Reacting to a subsequent apology from the former Vermont governor, Kerry took his cue: “The governor moves faster in more different directions, tells more stories, than anyone I’ve met in politics,” he said. “This is not a straight talker. This is a guy looking for the new angle every time he can.”

And on the announcement that he was polling supporters about the issue of public matching campaign funds, Kerry said: “What he’s really trying to do is weasel out of the agreement that he made,” he said.

The next day, at a press conference in front of the Merrimack County Court House in Concord about gun safety — coincidentally, the very issue upon which he had been criticizing Dean for the past two days — the big shots of the national political press showed up expecting to hear more of the same.

Kerry didn’t disappoint them.

“It’s time for us to tell it straight to America,” he said, as though speaking to Dean. “You’ve changed your position on Social Security and you go on Tim Russert and you say you’re not in favor, never were in favor of a 70-year age for retirement and then a week later you have to retract … You say you never supported cutting Medicare, but then it’s clear you did support Newt Gingrich’s position … You go to the NAFTA signing, you thought it was that important to be there, that you wanted to be there to support NAFTA, and now you say NAFTA’s wrong … You say only three months ago that you think the Confederate flag is a states’ rights issue, won’t take a position on where it ought to fly, and then three months later you embrace it, and now you say you’re against it.”

He added that Dean suffered from a “belief system in the making.”

Associated Press veteran Ron Fournier — one of the agenda setters for the national political media — aggressively questioned Kerry on whether or not it was hypocritical for him to criticize Dean for dropping out of the campaign-finance system, when he clearly planned to follow suit.

Kerry was resolute. “If I go out,” he said grimly, pointing toward Fournier, “I’m preparing to take on someone who doesn’t have the principles…” The reporters got what they wanted, and so did Kerry: the attacks dominated the next day’s news cycle. (The lead story in New Hampshire’s Union Leader was simply headlined, “Kerry Blasts Dean.”)

If his death struggle with Dean is all that the media wants to talk to him about, Kerry insists that his conversations with voters are quite different. He says he’s been talking more at his public appearances about healthcare, education, taxes, the environment, because those are the issues that voters want to talk about. He insists that his focus on anti-corporate-establishment themes is nothing new, but merely a rejiggered version of what he’s been saying from the beginning. “I’ve been talking about this stuff all campaign,” he said. “I think I’ve sharpened it a little bit as to where I’m putting it and how much I’m focusing on it, but it’s not a new focus for me.” (For the record, according to ABC News Kerry-watcher Ed O’Keefe, it was precisely on Oct. 28, 2003, when Kerry unveiled his new stump speech at a house party in New Hampshire.)

On those subjects, and others, Kerry continues to be harshly critical of the Bush administration, but less uniformly so than some of his opponents.

Asked about the economy, for example, in light of new numbers indicating upturns in productivity and job creation, Kerry said that some good had come of the Bush tax cut, even if he still believed it was in inequitable and largely ineffective. “Bush already has done some things to remedy [the economy],” he said. “There’s an enormous amount of stimulus in the economy today — you can’t ignore that reality — but it’s not as effectively distributed as it might have been over a period of time. It’s bound to have some effect, but that’s not the measurement of whether it was fair or not.”

Similarly, his criticism of the situation in Iraq was based on the method in which it was being handled without being predicated on failure of the mission. Asked about the president’s chances of succeeding in making Iraq a democracy, Kerry said, “I think he’s on a very difficult road. I mean ‘can you’ is in the less than 50 percent category. It’s not a pretty picture … Whether he does or not he will have risked American lives, put people in greater jeopardy, and spent more money.”

Generally, though, he continued to sound the central theme that the Bush administration’s policies benefit campaign contributors, powerful interests — “big oil, big gas, big pharmaceuticals” –and the wealthiest Americans, at the expense of working families. At a press conference by Arlington Lake in Salem, N.H., which has been contaminated by the gasoline additive MTBE, Kerry used the phrase “special interests” no fewer than 10 times.

The message, at least, is clear, and Kerry predicted that if he continued to talk about these things — the issues that affect voters — then electoral concerns could take care of themselves.

Outside Harvey’s Bakery, an often-visited campaign stop in Dover, Kerry made conversation with some local residents. Robert Forbes, a tattooed World War II veteran in an FDNY sweatshirt, complained about the benefits that people like him were getting from the government, and about how much money was being spent abroad. Kerry sympathized. “A lot of veterans are getting screwed,” he said. Suddenly, he held up a long finger in the man’s face: “Do you know how much money the top 1 percent of Americans got from the Bush tax cut?” he asked. “Ninety billion dollars. OK? That’s our prescription drug plan.” Satisfied, Forbes slapped Kerry on the back and pledged to vote for him.

It was the sort of direct, simple exchange that seemed to belie the elitist Beltway insider caricature Kerry has been saddled with so effectively by Dean, among others. “I think that what I’m doing is what I’ve been doing for 35 years, and Howard Dean just saying something [about his being a Washington insider] doesn’t make it so,” he said. “I’ve been fighting those special interests longer than he has even been governor or involved in politics — and my record speaks for itself and it’s going to speak in the course of this campaign.”

Given Dean’s recent achievements — enough economic resources to pass up public financing, pending endorsements from two of the most influential unions in the country; invaluable lists of supporters compiled over the Internet who continue to donate, volunteer and organize in huge numbers — one might wonder if the adjustments haven’t come too late.

But Kerry says things are back on track. “My campaign is moving,” he said. “We’re very close out in Iowa — we have a terrific ground operation out there — and I think we’re moving here in New Hampshire. We just got up on TV. We’re now there, and I feel very good about it. I’m not as far behind as Gore was behind Bradley [at this point in 1999]. We’re doing very well.”

After the debate, Dean dismissed the criticism as “just political silliness.” It’s true he’d made similar comments previously about white voters and Confederate flags, with no resulting controversy, and he said that he meant it as a call for a broad Democratic constituency.

But his opponents, who view the former Vermont governor as the candidate to beat, seemed disinclined to offer him the benefit of the doubt.

Rev. Al Sharpton, one of two African-American candidates in the race, led the assault, saying Dean’s comments were “more like Stonewall Jackson than Jesse Jackson.” Sharpton added, “Most poor Southern whites don’t wear a Confederate flag, and you ought not to try to stereotype that,” he continued, to hearty applause from the college-age audience.

Dean responded by saying that he too was offended by the flag, but that Democrats needed to appeal to “poor white people” if they were to win a national election.

But Sharpton’s criticism was immediately followed by an angry lecture from Sen. John Edwards, who has been outspokenly critical of Dean’s comments since they were published Nov. 1 in the Des Moines Register. “The last thing we need in the South is someone like you coming down and telling us what to do,” he said, jabbing his finger toward a seated Dean.

“Unless I missed something, Governor Dean still has not said he was wrong,” Edwards said. “Were you wrong, Howard?”

Dean shot back: “No, I wasn’t, John Edwards, because people who vote who fly the Confederate flag, I think they are wrong because I think the Confederate flag is a racist symbol. But I think there are lot of poor people who fly that flag because the Republicans have been dividing us by race since 1968 with their Southern race strategy.”

In the post-debate spin room, Dean seemed almost mournful about the tone of the night’s events.

“I do think the tone of the attacks was unfortunate tonight, because those kinds of personal attacks are not going to achieve the goal that we seek, which is to make sure that George Bush is not reelected to another term,” he told a crush of reporters.

He also singled out Edwards and Kerry for criticism. “I think that for Senator Kerry and Senator Edwards to claim that I’m a racist, which is essentially what they did, is going to hurt their campaigns more than I am. I think people know that I’m not a bigot.”

The attacks on Dean were not entirely unexpected, given his status as the apparent front-runner. He is leading in the polls in New Hampshire, and is in a close race with former House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt in Iowa. (Gephardt, in fact, was the only candidate not to show up at the event, choosing to stay in Iowa and campaign.) And such has been the strength of his Internet-driven fundraising that his campaign is considering an option that until now was the exclusive domain of the Bush campaign: forgoing federal matching funds in exchange for avoiding limits on spending during the primary campaign. According to a report Tuesday night by the Associated Press, the campaign is about to announce a “vote” by supporters on whether to bust the spending caps.

Judging by early reaction on the Dean Web site, the vote will overwhelmingly support spending the extra money. But Dean will no doubt come in for more criticism from his rivals if he ignores the spending limits.

For the rest of the field, by contrast, the “Rock the Vote” event was mostly an opportunity to dress casually (in some cases) and to talk about familiar subjects. John Kerry, in an open collar, talked about his experience in Vietnam and in the antiwar movement. Retired Gen. Wesley Clark, wearing a black mock-turtleneck, criticized the Bush administration’s conduct of military operations in Iraq. Edwards discussed his rural, working-class roots, Rep. Dennis Kucinich talked about his plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, Sen. Joe Lieberman talked about his plans to create jobs, and former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun talked about the need for women to have a higher profile in presidential politics.

Sharpton, dressed in his customary three-piece suit, once again had most of the night’s punch lines. “I come from the [Martin Luther] King movement,” he said. “We believe in dreams. Mr. Bush believes in hallucinations.”

The event did have its lighter moments: The candidates were asked if they smoked marijuana, and Edwards, Dean and Kerry said they had, while Sharpton, retired Gen. Wesley Clark, Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio said they had not. Braun declined to answer. And as a group, the candidates revealed they favored PCs over Macs.

And Dean tried to keep his sense of humor. Reacting to criticism by Kerry over his position on gun control, Dean grinned and said, “I told a group of press people in Iowa, the reason I knew I was the front-runner is that I keep picking buckshot out of my rear end all the time.”

It’s certain Dean is in for more buckshot in the coming days. As the storm over his comments on Southern whites show, the plain-talking style that is so appealing to many frustrated Democrats can be troublesome to his candidacy, especially now that he’s receiving much greater scrutiny than when he was an underdog candidate. Dean made virtually identical comments as far back as the DNC meeting last February, telling the crowd that “white folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals on the back ought to be voting with us because their kids don’t have health insurance either, and their kids need better schools, too.” Back then, he received standing ovations from the crowd and glowing reviews in the media.

He will also be blasted for his apparent desire to withdraw from the public finance system, which — when he was a poor underdog early in 2003 — he said he would abide by, contrasting his poverty with the campaign of President Bush. (The Bush campaign did not abide by the primary spending limits in 2000, and won’t this year.)

But if his recent past is any indication, Dean will try to turn the assaults upon him to his advantage. Back on June 22, after a contentious appearance on “Meet the Press” in which he appeared to stumble under tough questioning, Dean supporters rallied to his defense by pouring in donations on his Web site. Tonight, after CNN host Anderson Cooper asked him about a past comment on gay partnerships, Dean accusingly fired back: “You sound like Tim Russert.”