Matthew Dowd Interview by Tex Mon'lyEvan Smith (Dean better than Kerry?)

[papau]

http://www.texasmonthly.com/csc/talks_dowd.php
Matthew Dowd
Interview by Evan Smith

<snip>
DOWD: Which means every group grew. Yeah. I mean, Democrats do a good job with turnout. They did a good job in 2000. But, and we made a concerted effort in the aftermath of 2000 to figure out what we did right, what we did wrong. And then we spent a lot of time on that. We tested things in 2002. What kinds of in-person contacts can you make? What kind of phone calls? What kind of, uh, direct mail. A lot of things. How you do, how you buy your media. We fundamentally changed how you buy advertising in this race.In 2000, we spent zero dollars on cable advertising. Or, $200,000....in 2000 we spent probably 1% of our budget, less than a million dollars, on radio. This time we spent, mmm, 35, 40 million dollars on cable and radio....every time you had Hardball or Joe Scarbrough or somebody on on cable, there was a George Bush ad right there in the middle.... it’s not only a reflection of 100 different channels, it’s also a reflection of trust now. People trust the national and the affiliate networks less than they did in years past... Especially Republicans trust the national nets less. And so if you’re gonna reach Republicans or people who may not vote that would vote for George Bush, you have to go about it in much different ways. And a bit part of that is radio and cable --


<snip>
DOWD: Counselor to the President. You’d have meetings and sort of speculate or sort of forecast things, and you know, of the field at the time, there was a discussion of who we thought would be the better one to run against, or who we thought would ultimately win the thing. I, I, you know, ultimately, I didn’t know who was gonna win this thing. And we’d get these ups and downs. Howard Dean came on and then dropped. My feeling all along – and everyone had different -- is that John Kerry would be the one I’d want to run against, for a couple of reasons. One, I’d met him years ago -- he wouldn’t know it – when I worked for Lloyd Bentsen. I met him, and I noted at the time, I thought, an inability to sort of connect with people at a gut level. And that’s very important in a Presidential race, as Al Gore found out.
<snip>

DOWD: Well, you are lucky, because we knew this was a problem for him as we started mapping out the campaign, that we were gonna sort of make out the argument that this guy’s, whether you call him a flip flopper or you can’t trust him. But the best thing for a campaign is for the candidate to do it himself. And John Kerry did it himself and became a symbolic, became a very symbolic, an exclamation point on who he was. They could say, “Well, that’s the guy that said, ‘I voted for it before I voted against it.’”
<snip>

DOWD: I don’t know who their nominee is going to be. But I think they’re in some serious difficulty right now, because their entire operating principle since Clinton left office has been all anti-. It’s all been organized around “Not Bush.” Not about, “I’m for this person,” or “I’m for this set of principles.” And so I think there’s a, there’s some serious soul searching, not only for they need to have someone to represent the party --<snip>