DURHAM, N.H. (AP) — Eight Democratic presidential
contenders yesterday strongly disputed that Howard Dean was the
party’s best chance for beating President Bush, or that
former Vice President Al Gore’s endorsement of the
front-runner would seal the nomination.

“This race is not over,” declared Sen. John Kerry of
Massachusetts as the candidates gathered in this
first-in-the-nation primary state for the year’s eighth and
final debate. The first votes will be cast in Iowa’s Jan. 19
caucuses and New Hampshire’s Jan. 27 primary.

One after another, the field ganged up on Dean, who holds a
double-digit lead in New Hampshire polls, and Gore in an effort to
take the luster off the newly minted endorsement. They appealed to
the independent streak of voters here, and suggested the
endorsement smacked of old-style party machine politics.

Joe Lieberman, Gore’s spurned 2000 running mate, asserted
that “my chances have actually increased today.” The
Connecticut senator said people had stopped him in the airport to
express outrage over Gore’s backing of Dean.

For his part, Dean told the others: “Attack me.
Don’t attack Al Gore. I don’t think he deserves to be
attacked by anybody up here.”

Clearly Gore’s endorsement overshadowed the debate. In
2000, Gore won the popular vote by half a million votes but
conceded to Republican Bush after a tumultuous 36-day recount in
Florida and a 5-4 Supreme Court vote against him. The endorsement
of Bill Clinton’s No. 2 was a coveted prize for the
Democratic hopefuls.

The response to Gore’s stunning decision was precipitated
when one of the debate’s moderators, ABC’s Ted Koppel,
opened the debate by inviting the field of nine candidates to
“raise your hand if you believe that Gov. Dean can beat
George Bush.”

Only one, Dean, raised his hand.

In endorsing Dean earlier in the day at campaign stops in New
York and Iowa, Gore urged Democrats to unite behind the
front-runner and said, “We don’t have the luxury of
fighting among ourselves.”

That touched off an avalanche of criticism from Dean’s
rivals.

Al Sharpton said Gore’s tactics smacked of
“bossism,” and added, “We’re not going to
have any big name come in now and tell us the field should be
limited. … No Democrat should shut us up today.”

Said Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina: “We’re not
going to have a coronation.”

And Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri declared, “I’m
sure all of us think we have the best chance to beat George
Bush.” But, he said, he stood a better chance than the others
in the battleground states of the Midwest that would likely decide
the election.

Democratic strategists said Gore’s endorsement had an
immediate impact, if only by giving Dean’s rivals something
to complain about other than Dean’s policies and campaign
miscues.

“It was not the pile-on that Dean expected. Dean came with
his best teflon suit, but he didn’t need it,” said
Donna Brazile, a former Gore adviser who is not tied to any of the
candidates.

The nine candidates stood at wooden podiums arranged in a
semicircle on the stage of a theater on the University of New
Hampshire campus. Some Democrats have suggested that the debates
have been unwieldy and should be limited to the major
candidates.

One of the long-shot candidates, Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio,
took exception with Koppel’s questions and used it to
challenge the political status quo.

“I want the American people to see where media takes
politics in this country,” Kucinich said to cheers from the
crowd. “We start talking about endorsements, now we’re
talking about polls and then talking about money. When you do that
you don’t have to talk about what’s important to the
American people.”

As the debate focused on other topics, Dean was asked about
public comments about what Bush might have known before the Sept.
11 terrorist attacks. Several Republicans have criticized him for
mentioning speculation in several broadcast interviews that Bush
may have been tipped off about the attacks, perhaps by the
Saudis.

He insisted he never believed such reports, and was just
mentioning “the most interesting theory that I heard, which I
did not believe, (which) was that the Saudis had tipped him
off.”

Still, Dean said, “We need to know what went wrong before
9-11 … There are going to be a lot of crazy
theories.”