Dean's Rise and Fall...

[Finch]

Found this account of the Dean campaign by his pollster Paul Maslin, thought it was really quite good...proably the best one I've read so far... here's the link...


http://carlwithak.com/archives/000148.html

[Lexingtonian]

1. ok, I'll bite

Didn't want to be the first to respond but after 45 min. the fan club really should have made its first appearance.

This article makes Joe Trippi seem a bit less Machiavellian to me and Howard Dean quite a bit stranger than I'd though. What was the deal with his Governor records that he didn't want to stomach- it certainly doesn't sound sinister, just suggests a wierd vulnerability to certain kinds of personal-level criticism.

I'm not sure this attempt to build a story from polling numbers catches the story of the campaign; it's certainly half the story, and a half that hasn't been told, but it certainly doesn't catch onto the Believer aspect and the imagination-catching part of the thing.

The somewhat cruel thing to say in final assessment is that Maslin admits to and reveals the campaign as a bunch of second-raters who found themselves running in first place. Trippi certainly was seen that way by the Democratic campaigns and office staffs he worked with. Maslin here sees the numbers but has no real grasp for why the numbers he works are volatile, or not, let alone what kinds of people all the specific campaign moves are about- he seems to have no strong instincts about the electorate. There's the Trippi/Vermonter faction fight within the campaign. And then there's the candidate himself, who didn't quite seem to understand the alliances he needed to make and the ones that weren't worth much, and not atune to the particular kind of talking required by it all.

[WI_DEM]

2. Not a bad article

and doesn't paint Dean or anyone else as villians. They did what they thought was best. They underestimated Kerry and didn't spend enough time on Iowa. In retrospect, Dean should never have spent that million bucks on a media buy in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, SC, NM, SC, ect in the summer of 2003--if they knew it came down to Iowa--they should have really hit Iowa. Kerry got that right and the strategy that winning Iowa would bring about a domino effect was borne out. The worst thing to happen to Dean was becoming front-runner and getting all those high level endorsements, imo. But he did and they ran with it. Who would turn down the endorsement of Al Gore?

I still think that Dean was the best candidate and the one I trust best on issues closest to me. He did a great deal to prepare John Kerry for an electorate who is willing to look for an alternative to George W. Bush. He awakened people and brought new people into the process and his criticisms of Bush and the war have been borne out and may in fact be the reason Kerry will win in November.

[Finch]

4. If he had not been frontrunner...

.... I doubt he would have been lambasted as a liberal he might have come across as a bit feisty but he might well have been the centerist...fullfilling a similar if perhaps more consequential role to that which Edwards eventually did...

[tishaLA]

3. Really good article

The biggest shock to me was the revelation about the sealed records and that Dean was willing to take whatever heat he would take--in retrospect, it looks small, but it would have gotten bigger had he stayed around--to keep them private. Trippi's conversation with him after the meeting, told to us third hand, is fascinating.

I also liked the idea of campaigning as high-altitude climbing--a very apt metaphor. I think there must have been some breathlessness when Dean seemed like such a sure thing in the media (and on the DU boards) and it had to create an overwhelming sense of anxiety, especially when the campaign, according to the article, had a hard time keeping Dean on message.

I leave more intrigued by Trippi than ever before. The mixture of his tirades and his not speaking to Dean directly most of the time is fascinating. I also wonder why Dean didn't have what Maslin calls an "adult" in his orbit to keep him on message and to contain him.

While this is a partial portrait of the campaign, as all portraits inevitably are, it's a good one.

[Larkspur]

5. I thought that it was a fair assesment of the Dean Campaign

It treated all of them as humans and having to make tough and quick decisions under pressure. It certainly shows that campaigning is an ongoing gambling enterprise, but I equate the pace of campaigning closer to sailing the dangerous but beautiful high seas than to mountain climbing.

[madfloridian]

6. Ordinary people trying something extraordinary.

I thought it was a good article.