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By JODI WILGOREN
ES MOINES, Sept. 14 — The pins have already started to penetrate.
Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, laughed off criticism by his competitors for the Democratic presidential nomination this week by saying that he felt like a pincushion. Then he quietly began making tiny alterations to his standard stump speech, measuring facts and assertions twice before speaking.
President Bush's tax cuts, denounced by Dr. Dean for months as "$3 trillion" or, sometimes, "$3 trillion, including interest," became a $2.4 trillion cut, plus $600 billion in interest, during a rally on Friday in Plymouth, N.H. The 91 percent of new mothers in Vermont who used to get home visits within two or three weeks now get visits "mostly in their homes, some in doctors' offices," within three or four. And when Dr. Dean told supporters at the Bektash Temple in Concord, N.H., on Friday that his campaign had 150,000 donors and the next-best number was 20,000, he slipped in a "that I know of," just in case.
The changes, perceptible perhaps only to the aides and reporters who trail him, show a subtle but significant shift for a candidate who sells himself as unscripted. After a week of accusations that he chooses terms carelessly or says different things at different times, Dr. Dean is now balancing his shoot-from-the-hip instinct with his place in a national spotlight where enemies and observers, armed with Internet research tools and digital video recorders, parse every word...
A Cacophony of Hoofbeats
Some have compared Dr. Dean to Seabiscuit, the thoroughbred who came from nowhere to become the most popular and successful horse to race in the 1930's. But now he is sounding a bit like War Admiral, the Triple Crown winner who for months shunned Seabiscuit's offer for a match race.
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