Candidates Cast Kerry as Insider

With personal appearances across three states and television ads in many more, the Democrats running for president searched Thursday for a locale where they could stop frontrunner John F. Kerry’s momentum.

Most focused on the seven caucuses and primaries that will be contested Tuesday, but Howard Dean made clear that he plans to make a stand in contests a few days later.

With the candidates leaving small and mostly white New Hampshire, the campaign has taken on a new regional inflection and turned sharply toward domestic issues, which voters have said were more on their minds than the war in Iraq.

Reporters traveling with Wesley K. Clark noticed that, at stops in Oklahoma and South Carolina, the general adopted more of the inflection of his Arkansas home. And in New Mexico late Wednesday he greeted a heavily Latino crowd in Albuquerque with “Gracias por su bienvenida” --”Thank you for your welcome.”

Kerry, the Massachusetts senator, greeted New Mexicans en Espanol as well, with a Spanish-language television ad introducing himself to voters, who will participate in caucuses Tuesday.

It was not only the accent that shifted Thursday on the campaign trail, as several candidates moved aggressively to distinguish themselves as outsiders, better able to make changes in Washington than Kerry, a 20-year Senate veteran.

In East Lansing, Mich., Dean told an excited crowd at Michigan State University that he stood as the real alternative to Washington politicians who had “cut deals” with special interests.

At the airport in Rock Hill, S.C., Clark said: “I’m not a politician. I’m an outsider. I’m not part of the problem, I’m part of the solution.”

The retired general punched home that message with a 30-second ad in the state in which a narrator asks: “Special interest deals. Promises unkept. Do we really need another Washington politician?”

A politician won’t change the way Washington works,” the narrator says, “Wes Clark will.”

Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina continued his own outsider pitch, a theme he has used for weeks.

Edwards contends that his single term in the Senate has left him untainted by Washington’s insider politics.

“When you remember where you came from,” says an Edwards television ad set to go on the air in Missouri, “you’ll always know where you’re going.”

Kerry, meanwhile, sought to stay above the fray with a new ad focusing on his experience as a Navy lieutenant in Vietnam and how it made him more determined to use his time for important causes -- ranging from healthcare to education.

The 30-second ad, airing in St. Louis, was apparently the first broadcast in Missouri, which has the most delegates -- 74 -- at stake on Tuesday.

Hours before a televised evening debate in Greenville, S.C., among all the candidates, Kerry toured the noisy machine floor at a technical college in Columbia with Rep. James E. Clyburn, a leader in South Carolina’s large black community.

Kerry also denied suggestions that he would write off the South if he became the Democratic nominee. Past comments about the feasibility of winning the White House without carrying a single Southern state were “a comment about mathematical counting, not about my strategy,” Kerry said at a stop at Midlands Technical College.

“I intend to wage a vigorous race in the South,” he said.

As the frontrunner, Kerry is expected to win at least some of Tuesday’s contests, which take place in Missouri, South Carolina, Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Delaware and North Dakota.

Edwards has said he would win in South Carolina, where he was born. Standing in the aisle of a chartered plane Thursday, Clark vowed “we are going to win” at least some of the states on Tuesday.

Only Dean has declined to raise expectations for the day. His presence in Michigan on Thursday indicates he may already be setting his sights farther down the road.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, the only African American in the race, drew half a dozen standing ovations at a forum Thursday in Greenville that preceded the debate. The response far outshone those given to Edwards and representatives for three other candidates -- Clark, Kerry and Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich -- at Allen Temple AME Church.

Sharpton stressed he would repeal President Bush’s tax cuts, advocate a national single-payer healthcare plan and increase federal aid to education.

The New York minister and social activist said he was much quicker than other Democrats to doubt claims that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

“I didn’t have inside information,” Sharpton said. “I have common sense.”

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Rainey reported from Los Angeles and Slater from Greenville, S.C. Times staff writers Robin Abcarian, Nick Anderson, Mark Z. Barabak and Scott Martelle also contributed to this report.