This is an interesting
article from Washington Post on the emerging Iowa battle.
"Tim Connolly, an ex-Army captain, a veteran of Desert Storm and a former Pentagon (news - web sites) official in the Clinton administration, oversees the Dean operation and has put it together with military precision from a windowless, second-floor bunker in downtown Des Moines. One of his deputies is Emmet Regan, a 22-year-old Irishman who came to Iowa in July from his home in Dublin and cannot vote in the United States.
The volunteer headquarters next door is known as the "storm center," with each organizing weekend given a different storm name and with different colored wristbands for volunteers. Next weekend will be, in the hopes of the campaign, the Perfect Storm. Volunteers cover the spectrum of age -- from 14 to 86 among the Texas team that signed up to participate this weekend -- but are decidedly youthful.
Asked how Dean's volunteers can match Gephardt's labor veterans, Regan said, "We bring a freshness to the political scene. We also bring enthusiasm."
The Dean field operatives have purchased mountains of bottled water and granola bars, and cell phones and flashlights by the dozen. They have established 13 "fire bases" around the perimeter of the state to process incoming volunteers, rented eight-passenger vans and 15-passenger vans and secured winterized scout camps and YMCA camps in strategic locations to house the volunteers against Iowa's sometimes brutally cold nights.
Connolly set up "flyaway teams" that can be deployed to fix problems around the state, and military acronyms abound, such as PBIB, for "Phone Bank in a Box," which allows the campaign to set up a temporary phone bank in a county rather than lay costly phone lines. "I organized the state much like you'd send out Special Forces A teams," Connolly said.
The Dean campaign has even begun to set up day-care facilities for caucus night. Dean supporters volunteering for Iowa duty are asked, among other things, whether they are licensed day-care or health care providers. By offering day care, Dean's team has one more way to persuade a wavering voter to give up a few hours to attend a caucus."
"Dean's organizers say the biggest source of new caucus-goers are not nonvoting Iowans but Democrats who vote regularly in primaries but rarely attend the caucuses. "We get significant numbers of people who are active Democrats but who have never caucused," said Jeani Murray, Dean's state director.
The campaigns are also employing technological tools to gather information on caucus attendees, to keep them abreast of the counting on caucus night and to provide instructions to their supporters about how to manage the vagaries of "thresholds" and "viability" and other factors that can affect the ultimate delegate count and the order of finish."
Who's going to win the organizational battle? Will the outcome of Iowa caucases deviate from the recent polls?