Washington Wrap

Dotty Lynch, Douglas Kiker, Beth Lester, Clothilde Ewing, Sean Sharifi and Jamie English of the CBS News Political Unit have the latest from the nation's capital.

Thursday's Headlines

* Poll Watch: Kerry Looks Strong in Michigan

* Dean Says It's Do or Die in Wisconsin

* Ad War Heads South

* Bush Campaign And GOP Try to Morph Kerry Into Dukakis

* Hastert Plays Tobacco Politics in Kentucky

Poll Watch: Kerry Looking For a Rout in Michigan? With 128 delegates up for grabs in Saturday's Michigan primary, the Kerry camp looks headed for a major win. Two new polls show Kerry with a major lead. Today's Detroit News/Mitchell poll (conducted Feb. 2-4; margin of error 5 percent) shows Kerry with a 45 percent lead and that's not a typo. No other candidate breaks into double digits. And the poll is not a fluke. The newest Reuters/MSNBC/Zogby tracking poll (conducted Feb. 3-4; margin of error 4.1 percent) also has Kerry up by a large margin, 37 percent.

The lopsided nature of the race has some in Michigan slightly let down. As the Detroit News reports, the state Democratic Party moved its primary up by one month in hopes of raising the primary's profile. With Kerry's huge momentum, however, that hope has fizzled. Only one candidate – Richard Gephardt – ran ads in the state and those were pulled after he dropped out last month. Indeed, the Kerry campaign is so confident in its standing that it has declined to run ads in the state and other campaigns have followed suit.

Kerry will visit Michigan on Friday but it is hardly the laser focus on Michigan issues that many were anticipating. As Bill Ballenger, editor of the influential newsletter Inside Michigan Politics, told USA Today, "In terms of what the party leaders were hoping to achieve, it's a bust." For Team Kerry, however, one suspects that an easy path to the lion's share of the 128 delegates suits them just fine.

John Edwards has not yet made a decision about a visit to the state, despite endorsements today from former House Minority Whip David Bonoir, D-Mich., and the University of Michigan's student newspaper, the Michigan Daily.

Detroit News/Mitchell Poll 2/2-5 (450 interviews)
Kerry 56
Dean 9
Edwards 7
Clark 3
Undecided 19

Reuters/MSNBC/Zogby 2/3-4 (601 interviews)
Kerry 47
Dean 10
Edwards 8
Clark 4
Undecided 23

Wisconsin Or Bust: CBS News has a copy of an e-mail sent to Dean supporters saying he must win the Wisconsin primary on Feb. 17, or else leave the race. While the campaign has shifted its focus from this weekends contest to Wisconsin, this was the campaign's first explicit acknowledgement that future failure would end his campaign. The e-mail asks supporters to help raise $700,000 by Sunday in order to launch a new television advertisement on Monday in Wisconsin's major markets.

"All that you have worked for these past months is on the line on a single day in a single state. We have come so far to change our political process and restore our democracy. We can't stop now," the e-mail read.

So far, the supporters are heeding the call. According to the Dean blog, they gave $226,273 as of 11 a.m. Thursday morning, $53,998 of which was raised between 10 and 11 a.m., breaking the single best fundraising hour of 2004, according to the campaign. The "bat" went up late Wednesday.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports that Dean's disappointing showing in the last nine contests is starting to wear on some of his congressional supporters. "It's looking pretty dismal, isn't it?" said Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Calif., a Dean backer. "It's going to be extraordinarily difficult," said Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii. "Unless he wins and shortly, we have to face up to the fact" that a long fight could hurt the larger goal of beating President Bush. But both Abercrombie and Sanchez promised to stick with Dean, at least through Wisconsin. So far, none of Dean's 37 congressional supporters have left him, but according to the Washington Post, a few have privately warned they are about to jump ship.

The Ad Wars Move South: Although the biggest delegate pot of the week is up for grabs in Michigan this Saturday, John Kerry's major lead has moved the next big showdown into the Southern contests of Virginia and Tennessee on Tuesday. With Howard Dean essentially conceding the states (although he'll appear at Saturday night's JJ Dinner in Richmond), it appears to be a battle among Kerry, Wesley Clark, and John Edwards.

The Kerry camp is putting up its highly successful "Del" and "Alston" ads, which both feature Vietnam crewmates touting Kerry's leadership skills under fire. The Kerry camp says its ad buy is "comparable to the Edwards buys" and running statewide in Virginia and Tennessee.

The Edwards campaign is running "Better Life" and "Two Americas" in both Virginia and Tennessee, and the candidate will be spending almost every day until Tuesday in one of the two states.

"Better Life" touts Edwards' humble background and concludes with his message: "I approve this message because I believe that when you remember where you came from, you'll always know where you're going and what you need to fight for."

In his signature "Two Americas" ad, Edwards focuses on what he sees as unequal systems in America, concluding that there are "two governments: one for powerful interests and lobbyists, the other for the rest of us." The ad echoes Edwards' stump speech and plays into his populist rhetoric on the campaign trail. The size of the buy? The Edwards camp tells CBS News only that it will be "substantial."

Over at the Clark campaign, CBS News' Bonney Kapp reports that Little Rock staffers have volunteered to forego about $240,000 in salaries for a week to have more cash on hand so Clark ads can continue to air in Tennessee. (He's spent $1 million on the air there so far.) The money will pay to air "Secretary," which talks about Clark's early childhood and the importance of jobs. With staff salaries to pay for airtime in Tennessee, it looks like the campaign may now have enough to continue running ads in Virginia; he's already spent $1.25 million on ads there. Spokesman Bill Buck tells CBS News that the Clark campaign "is looking at buys in Virginia in light of our big fundraising day yesterday." According to Buck, the campaign raised $250,000 yesterday and could be on the air in Virginia as early as Friday. No word on how much of that will be spent on ads just yet.

The next ad war: Wisconsin. Dean is making his last stand there. Edwards goes up on the air today with "Two Americas." No word from the hush-hush Kerry camp on whether/when it will start advertising, but according to CBS News' Alison Schwartz, who is traveling with the Edwards camp, his aides "acknowledge that Wisconsin will be the next big showdown." We'll have to wait and see what ads fly.

Dukakis, Dukakis, Dukakis!: The New York Times reports that if John Kerry emerges as the Democratic presidential nominee, look for the Republican Party to spend the next ten months attempting to paint the Massachusetts senator as an elitist liberal who is "out of sync" with most voters, "culturally out of step with the rest of America" and a man who votes with "the extreme elements of his party," as Ed Gillespie, the Republican chairman, has said in the last week.

"In short, that he is a Massachusetts liberal. It is a charge that ultimately proved devastating to Michael S. Dukakis, the Democrats' presidential nominee in 1988," The Times reports.

One particularly thorny topic for Kerry, and one that appears to be shaping up as the most contentious political-cultural issue of 2004, is gay marriage. Wednesday's ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Court that gay people have the right not just to civil unions but to marriage will only add fodder to the "Massachusetts liberal" label the GOP is so eager to slap on Kerry.

The Kerry campaign, which includes several veterans of the Dukakis campaign, says it will not make the mistakes of 1988, when Dukakis was widely seen as too passive in the face of the attacks. "We welcome a debate with the likes of Ed Gillespie, Karl Rove and this White House about who's out of sync with Main Street America," said David Wade, a Kerry spokesman.

The Times got another Kerry staffer to go a step further: "This is not the Dukakis campaign. We're not going to take it. And if they're going to come at us with stuff, whatever that stuff may be, if it goes to a place where the '88 campaign did, then everything is on the table. Everything."

Kerry advisers also believe that their candidate's record as a war hero, tough prosecutor and occasional voting maverick – for example, he voted in favor of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit reduction act in the 1980s, much to the dismay of many of his fellow Democrats – will shield him from the dreaded Massachusetts liberal charge.

As Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., tells the Times, "It is hard to demonize as an irresponsible leftist a man who has locked up criminals and shot communists."

In further signs that the campaign season has indeed arrived – as much as President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney said it would – the president held an "official" event in Charleston, S.C., to discuss homeland security. While the event was not billed as a campaign event, the campaign certainly will be happy that taxpayers picked up the tab for a visit to a state that Bush won by 16 points in 2000, but in which he's trailing an unnamed Democrat 46 percent to 43 percent in a recent CBS News poll.

Bush also hits the airwaves this weekend on NBC's "Meet The Press."

Tobacco Politics: The Lexington Herald-Leader reports that House Speaker Dennis Hastert pledged for the first time yesterday that he would push a tobacco buyout plan to the House floor, but only if Republican Alice Forgy Kerr is elected to Congress in Kentucky's Feb. 17 special election to fill the 6th District seat of Gov. Ernie Fletcher, who was sworn into office in January.

Kerr is running against Ben Chandler, the Kentucky attorney general who lost to Fletcher in the gubernatorial race in November. Chandler has been leading Kerr in the polls, the latest showing him up by 10 points.

Chandler has long backed the tobacco buyout plan, which has been a huge issue in the state, with growers in favor of it and business lobbies fighting against it.

The paper reports that Hastert, speaking at a Lexington fundraising lunch for Kerr, told reporters before the luncheon that he has spoken with Kerr about the issue.

"I made a commitment to her that I will move this through the (agriculture) committee and we will move it to the House floor. We think we can bring a good bill," said Hastert. Asked if he would still push the bill if Chandler were elected, Hastert responded: "I made a commitment to Alice. I certainly hope that she would be there to see the fruition of it."

Later, the paper reports, speaking to about 200 people, Hastert said he and the Congressional leadership would work with Kerr but that he couldn't say the same thing about Chandler.

Quote of the Day: "Lady, that's one ugly baby." -- John Edwards on The Late Show with David Letterman reading the "Top Ten Things Never Before Said by a Presidential Candidate." (CBS)