http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/05/politics/campaigns/05IOWA.htmlA New Episode of 'Friends'? No, Just Democrats Debating
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
OHNSTON, Iowa, Jan. 4 — For sheer comedic appeal, the Democratic presidential debate on Sunday was short a Sharpton, though it had its moments. As when Howard Dean offhandedly promised to balance the budget "in the sixth or seventh year of my administration."
Someone howled, and the audience, noticeably short of Dean partisans, broke up at the presumptuousness. Dr. Dean seemed not to realize that he was the butt of the joke, and even his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, later said he thought the crowd was laughing with him.
Then there was the moment when Carol Moseley Braun, resplendent in a dark suit (as were all the men on stage) but largely silent as the microphone-hoggers to either side of her went at one another, pleaded for a minute of "personal privilege" to get a word in edgewise.
But this was the first debate in months in which the rivals were permitted to question one another, and it quickly, if briefly, looked something like a schoolyard rumble.
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut flailed away at Howard Dean over tax cuts, Iraq and the sealing of some of his records as governor of Vermont, chewing up so much time in rebuttals and counterrebuttals that the moderator Paul Anger, editor of The Des Moines Register, asked the two to "take it outside, if you need to."
At one point, the all-positive-all-the-time Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, after chastising Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri for negative attacks, himself all but called Mr. Gephardt a liar, though in fairness, he had just caught Mr. Gephardt in a falsehood, for saying that everyone onstage but he and Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio had voted for the North American Free Trade Agreement.
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