Question about Iowa 2004....

[nickshepDEM]

Um, let me start off by saying this isnt a thread geared towards slamming Howard Dean or any of his fans. I really didnt get into politics untill 6 months ago, so Im not really sure what happend in Iowa 2004.

Anyway, In Howard Deans "scream" speach. He says, "If you told us 1 year ago we would have come in 3rd in Iowa we would have given anything for that."

After I did some reasearch and talked to a couple people I found out that if you had told them (Deans supporters) a week before Iowa they were going to come in 3rd they would have looked at you like you were crazy. What happend that made Dean drop out of the top slot so quick when he was the front runner for so long?

[GetTheRightVote]

1. I believe that some Dems did not want him in office as Pres

Now they realize that he is the reason they got so many funds in the Democratic coffers. You just never know who are your friends and who are your enemies ??? I am glad they let him back in to be DNC, the grassroots wanted him and pushed for him.

:kick:

[CoffeeCat]

2. I live in Iowa...

...and I can give you some general observations--which may shed some light.

A few weeks before the caucus, three things happened that hurt Dean and helped Kerry and Edwards:

1.) Gephardt and Dean began attacking each other in political ads and during speeches, etc. I think this "attack mode" made Dean lose some support. Those attacks sparked people into taking another look at Kerry and Edwards--who were talking issues--whereas Dean was constantly on the defensive, attempting to stave off Gephardts' attacks.

2.) Dean was not playing well--at all--in the Iowa media. He was frequently shown snapping at reporters and making combative statements. I remember he lost his temper with a group of journalists and also with a protester who pressed him on Social Security issues. Dean's tone--combined with the Gephardt squabbling--weren't positive.

3.) Our governor, a popular guy with Iowa Dems endorsed Kerry. The Des Moines Register endorsed Edwards. These endorsements shifted many toward Kerry and Edwards.

I was a huge Dean supporter. I caucused for him, and when no one else was standing in the Dean corner, during my caucus--I held out and stood alone for Dean. Hence, my vote didn't count--but I refused to defect to another camp.

I was stunned the night of the caucus that Dean had little support. I visited many other caucus sites, hoping that others would tell me my experience was a fluke. Not so. Every caucus site reported very little support for Dean.

I think Dean's "If you told us..." remark was spin. He must have been devastated. We all were.

[LittleClarkie]

3. Do you think the RW was spinning him as frontrunner in a way

because they were hoping he'd be the one, in much the same way they seem to be pushing Hillary? Did the RW see him as beatable? Or am I way off the mark.

Sometimes I think Dean as frontrunner was an illusion that only lasted until someone cast a vote.

Some have said that those Dean supporters who were being opinion polled just didn't vote, but I know now that this impression could be the illusion.

Thanks for your perspective, anyway. It's good to hear from someone who was there.

[blm]

6. The media was always over-reporting Dean's support and diminishing Kerry's

which resulted in drying up Kerry's national fundraising towards the end of 2003.

In Nov. 2003, the reports on the ground from Iowa were that Kerry's supporters were undercounted and ignored by the national press.

I think the media definitely manipulated Dems and the public in every deceitful way they could, but, not just against Dean. They were quite likely aware of Kerry's real numbers and USING Dean and his supporters to promote a case against Kerry while they virtually had Edwards, Clark, and Kucinich on ignore.

[elsiesummers]

4. I was in Iowa volunteering for Edwards.

When I arrived a week before it was a generally dejected camp glad to have the infusion of a few new volunteers to try to keep spirits up.

Meanwhile Dean had tons of people.

By the end of the week everyone was amazed and thrilled and excited. The atmosphere at Edwards' headquarters did a 180.

My take: - I think Dean peaked too early because of overexposure to media - too much hype - so as a product he was sort of "over" and people were looking at his flaws rather than his merits, which were sort of yesterday's news.

I also think the quantity of his support by Iowa voters (not his national support) was always overestimated (it was softer than made for a good media storyline) so easy to melt away.

I do think that the party powers that be were frustrated that Dean had pulled the race to the left. I think his positioning to the left was a smart strategy for him to win the primary, but it probably frustrated many DNCers because he really had not governed to the left, meanwhile his run pulled all the candidates to the left, making repositioning of the winning candidate for the GE that much more difficult.

I also talked at length with a Dean supporter as we all went to the airport day after caucuses. She said you could feel the momentum draining away in the last three days at the Dean camp.

[nickshepDEM]

5. one more time...

[kentuck]

7. A consensus was developing within the Party...

that we needed a "hero" to counter the militarism of Bush and the Repubs and the voters in Iowa decided on Kerry and the Democrats across the nation followed, in my opinion.

[eridani]

8. The following analysis really nails it, IMO

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/archive/040719/20040719045256_brief.php

Very long article--some excerpts.

The foundation of any statewide campaign, Whouley believes, is to build a strong network of precinct captains who know their communities and know their neighbors and are extremely disciplined in the counting of Ones and Twos. Whouley emphasized over and over to the members of the field staff that if they fooled around with the counting of supporters, they were fooling only themselves.

And it wasn't as if Norris had been sitting on his hands. A native of Red Oak, Iowa, he knew the state and how to run a campaign there, having run the Jesse Jackson campaign in Iowa in 1988. As a former chairman and executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party, a former candidate for Congress, and a former chief of staff for Vilsack, Norris was a major catch for Kerry. From the beginning, Norris was convinced, even when nobody else was, that Kerry could win Iowa. "I was convinced Iowa would not give the nod to Gephardt," he said. Norris didn't worry about hard counts for months. Instead, he went after leadership: county chairpersons, state legislators, environmental activists, education activists.

By summer, Norris had started collecting his hard counts, but the rules were strict. If a person responded to a phone call by saying, "I'm supporting John Kerry," that was not good enough for a One. To be a One, you had to sign a pledge card or have your support for Kerry validated by a volunteer or staffer.

If you can tap into the 89 percent of people who don't vote, you can ride that wave to victory. And most major candidates had a plan for doing this in 2004: Dick Gephardt targeted family farmers; Howard Dean went after the young and disenchanted; Kerry pursued veterans. This strategy has only one drawback, however: It almost never works. And that is because the Iowa caucuses are not designed to attract large numbers of voters. They are designed to keep large numbers of voters away. The party does not say this, of course. But if the party really wanted wider participation, it could have made voting much easier years ago. Instead, the Iowa caucuses are an extremely daunting process in part because party activists want to keep the process in the control of the party activists. If you make the process difficult and complicated, then only those who are truly motivated and who really understand the process will turn out.

"You can't bring people in from outside to start knocking on doors. It don't work that way."

The Dean volunteers were often passionate, dedicated, and enthusiastic. But for the most part, they were not talking to their neighbors, and Kerry's volunteers were. John Mauro had coached Little League in his neighborhood, he had lived in Christ the King parish for 27 years, and he had known most members of La Macchina, which was also a civic organization doing charitable work, since they were 7 years old and going to St. Anthony's Catholic elementary school together.

"Dean had a grand plan to expand the universe, but it was too amorphous. Mauro knew his universe, and that is how you get beyond traditional attendees."

John Kerry pursued large constituencies in Iowa like veterans and women, and he pursued smaller constituencies like environmentalists and political activists. But the constituency he pursued most relentlessly (and largely in secret) was a constituency of one: Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack.

The Cass County meet up was supposed to be at a restaurant called the Farmer's Kitchen, and it was supposed to be hosted by Dean admirer Forrest Teig. Nobody showed up. The Tribune tracked down Teig, who was sitting at home. He said he knew nothing about the event. Then he said of the Dean organization:"It's a group of amateur people working on the campaign." McRoberts and Zeleny wrote: "The gap between the campaign's organizational boasts and the reality . . . illustrates the central challenge facing Dean less than seven weeks before the January 19 caucuses." Their report also pointed out that enthusiastic supporters were one thing and "organizational know-how" was quite another.

Harkin went to Dean and told him that things were not looking good--no matter how many Ones he thought he had. "But he had no seasoned political people around him to feed him ideas," Harkin said. "You can't know everything yourself. And something is very wrong when someone's campaign manager is getting more publicity than the candidate. I went to Governor Dean, and I told him, 'I have an uneasy feeling and not just about Trippi but about everything.' He thanked me and that was it." In the end, Harkin managed to get a second-place finish in his precinct for Dean behind Kerry. "But I had to talk to two or three friends real hard," Harkin recalled, "to get Dean that."

"I'll tell you the one thing you don't want to do is you don't want to bring folks in from outside the state to tell Iowans what to do. It's great that people were that enthusiastic and that passionate, but they were not Iowans. If they had had 3,500 Iowans with caps, it might have been a different deal, you know, and if you're going to have caps, you either have to have black and gold (the University of Iowa's colors) or cardinal and gold (Iowa State University's colors) in this state or both."

It was clearly a burden to the staff on a day-to-day basis," Ford said, "but it was even worse than that: When Howard came to the state, he was expected to deal with the Stormers, talk to the Stormers, spend time with the Stormers as their reward for coming here. But that meant Howard wasn't talking to Iowans ."

Rose Levine wrote: "Our volunteers were a tight-knit group--too much so. Many voters, instead of feeling welcomed into our clan, felt like outsiders and may have been insulted by out-of-staters rushing in to tell them how to vote."

Then there are those who say, yes, the campaign was awful, but it was awful because of the "insurgent/empowerment" philosophy that Dean and Trippi stubbornly clung to, even at the expense of building an efficient campaign organization. "We were supposed to be insurgents, outsiders, free-form," Ochs said. "Experience was seen somehow as a negative. It was hubris, the hubris of believing that anything new and different was good. Mundane, traditional campaign tasks were not valued. The campaign often operated in a head-scratching, mind-numbingly ridiculous manner."

[lojasmo]

9. media/democratic/republican assasination tactics.

There was a quote from seven months earlier about southern guys being best represented by the Democratic party that got spun and played a few hundred times on the air, and in the debates.

Then there was a TWO YEAR OLD quote about the caucus system and it's shortcomings that got spun and played as if he had been talking about iowa....it got played a few hundred times on local news programs.

Then the Osama/Dean ad paid for by "americans for jobs and health care" (a shadow org. run by former Kerry and Gephardt staffers) Of course this had lots of play in iowa.

Also, Dean had support from lots of independents, republicans, and nontraditional voters. If you live in a caucus state, you'll understand what a pain in the ass caucusing is. I caucussed for the first time in this cycle, it took FOUR HOURS, and nearly all the people there were democratic party stalwarts.

Also there was a meme about Kerry being the most "electable"....How did that work out, again?