What happened? Did Kerry win or did Dean lose? Well, it could be both, but it's more the latter than the former. Why?
I attended the Dean party at the Val Air concert hall. As Dean was talking about winning the next seven or eight states, and the crowd was acting as Dean had won by 20 points, the campaign's message folks offered their take.
Their post-Iowa memes are as follows, and were repeated by Tom Harkin, Joe Trippi and communications director Tricia Enright, as I'm sure most if not all of you have heard already:
- There are three tickets punched out of Iowa, and we've got one of them.
- This is the just the first stage, and we have the resources to go long, to not only NH,, SC and AZ, but the rest of the states four and five weeks from now.
- Look where we were a year ago and look where we are now, and who could have predicted we'd be here now given where we were then, and thus it's a victory disguised as a third-place finish.
- The message is change, and Iowans showed they want change.
- Gephardt killed us, and the other two guys got a free pass.
Let's deconstruct some of these right now:
First, even Enright had to concede to me that "sure, we would have liked to have the first or second tickets," even if the third one is still enough. This is an attempt to pull a New Hampshire-like Clinton defeat-is-victory move in 1992.
Tucker Carlson, for one, is not buying it.
"It's a reverse-Clinton," Carlson, who both predicted and rooted for a win on CNN, told me. Carlson says he thinks Dean is now toast, that the Democratic electorate has sobered up.
"Rooting for Dean is fun, it's exciting, but in a way that adultery and drunk driving are fun and exciting - the next day, you're like, `What was I thinking?'," said Carlson.
"This is the end [for Dean], in my view," he added. "And I say that with real sadness as somebody who was pulling for Dean." (Albeit, of course, for the wrong reasons - but the fact that he has no incentive to sandbag Dean, plus the sincerity of his expression, which I watched as he answered, told me know he wasn't just saying that to pile on or be glib.)
I asked Paul Begala, Carlson's Crossfire partner, what he thought went wrong.
"The momentum shifted out from under [Dean], and he lost his insurgent's edge and started to act like a traditional candidate," said Carlson, specifically citing Dean's sudden turn to endorsements and negative campaigning.
Trippi, meanwhile, maintains that Gephardt blew up his own and the Dean campaign at once.
"What happened was Dick Gephardt beat the living daylights out of us, and in the process he eliminated his campaign and almost eliminated ours," Trippi said.
Almost? Still, Trippi insists what happened won't change a thing.
"We are not going to change a lot," he said. "And were not going anywhere, except New Hampshire and beyond. We have the resources [to do it]."
I asked him if he thought they handled the Gephardt assault incorrectly, given Edwards' appeal as the cleanest candidate - a claim to votes, and a solid second place, by merely staying out of the mud-slinging.
"We made a mistake letting [Gephardt]" drag the Dean campaign into the ugly politics, he conceded.
And then there is this whole issue of the hard counts, the supposed organization advantages, all that stuff - most of which everyone, my gullible self included, swallowed nearly whole cloth.
"Processs alone does not explain all of it, only at the margins," said Carlson. "In a tight race, sure, it matters."
So that means that my earlier comments - about the multiplicative effects of message and machine in the caucus format - are either a complete horseshit stretch, or I'm right and it's merely a case of Dean's message quickly downturned toward zero (with Gephardt's help), thereby canceling out whatever machine he brought here.
Actually, for all the buzz about Clark-as-stalking-horse, I think one of the legacies of Iowa 2004 will be that Gephardt and Dean turned out to be Trojan horses for Kerry and Edwards. That is, they brought the bodies and the resources and the logistics to bear, which drove up the turnout. But they couldn't then persuade those turned out to stay with them once they arrived out of the cold and into the school auditoria and community centers.
I mean, just look at Gephardt's numbers. Yeesh! Another week and Kucinich catches him. (Ok, maybe not, but you get my point.) Those 21 unions weren't worth an extra coffee break or a new dental plan. Nobody voted for him.
Aha, but at the same time none of his supporters then recast their support for Dean. The word is that Gephardt people, whenever not viable, told the Dean people to just "talk to the hand" when they tried to make an appeal. I saw this woman in Precinct 63 in Des Moines who, sitting in her chair at the Gephardt table, was literally and metaphorically unmoved by anything the Dean precinct captain had to say. Gephardt turned out to be the anti-Dean movement all by himself.
But let me tell you exactly what I saw in Precinct 63 (I did see our Red Sox fan John, but more on him tomorrow morning). And I'll preface what follows by saying that I know the people reading this site are going to get pissed and shout me down and tell me it ain't so, but it is so, and here it is: Dean was organized, but in a very superficial way.
At Precinct #63, which caucused at the same, East High School as Precinct 37, there were ample Dean signs. The precinct captains had the super-looking yellow T-shirts that with blue lettering that read "Dean Precinct Captain, January 19, 2004." On the back it read "It starts here, it starts now." The Dean campaign had not one, not two, but three observers in the room. Amazingly, Kucinich had two, but neither Kerry nor Edwards nor Gephardt had any. But so what? What counts are the people in the caucuses, not the ones watching from the sidelines.
More damning, the Dean precinct captain on the floor was ineffective and diffident. I watched with amazement as a more-motivated, more-mature Edwards captain named Susan Voss (sans T-shirt, sans sideline coaches) went over to the Gephardt folks in Precinct 63, who at that point had only seven members but needed nine for viability. Susan sat down at their table, looked them in the eye, appealed to them about how Edwards is an "articulate, bright, caring person." You can tell not only that she meant it, but that she could personalize it. She didn't have any training, and it showed - it showed as authentic, that is.
Then, with grace and aplomb, she got up and said she would make room so a guy named Arturo, from the Kucinich group (also non-viable, and hoping to move Gephardt's people to them to achieve viability), could have his turn.
Meanwhile, the Deanies are sitting with their hands folded. They are not even talking to each other. No comity, no motivation. The precinct captain eventually comes over, unsure of what precisely to do with himself or how to speak to people. The Geppies are still sitting at the school library's tables at the far end of the room.
The Dean captain meanders over, stands over the Geppies, providing physical distance that is conveyed in a non-verbally and dismissive way. Worse, his main message is little more than, "C'mon, don't you want to join us?" or "Are there any questions or issues you have about the Governor?" The Geppies are literally staring at his navel, because it's hard to make eye contact with somebody whose head is three feet over your own with craning your neck.
There were six delegates to be assigned by the 60+ people who turned out at Precinct 63. Dean had 16 of the caucus-goers at the start, and ended up with 14. Kerry didn't budge much, but Edwards gained strength. Gephardt managed to cobble together the two defections from Kucinich he needed, and got one delegate, as did Dean and Kerry. But Edwards left with two, and he can thank the dynamism, assertiveness and tact of Susan Voss for that second delegate.
No training, but none needed.
(Sidebar: The whole Edwards-Kucinich horse-swapping deal was for real. There were only five or six caucus-goers supporting Kucinich, but two Kucinich guys with me and the Dean folks and an Italian journalist and some college students doing class research were all watching the action from a second-floor library perch. I asked one of the Kucinich guys if, in fact, they were instructed by higher-ups to made deals. "I like Edwards," he said, almost robotically. "I was told that, if asked, I could tell people that." A great non-denial denial from a fervid, Kucinich kid who wasn't a day over 22.)
Before he had to leave to get on the bus with Dean, Trippi maintained that NH will be different because the target will be off Dean's back, and Gephardt will be finished, and so perhaps the mud-bath will include mostly Clark and Kerry in the tub.
"You've got three tickets out of here, and Clark is waiting in New Hampshire," said Trippi. "There's four guys left. We've got the resources, and this is still the insurgent campaign."
Surely, John Kerry and John Edwards would beg to differ.
But Trippi is correct about one of his talking points: The message is change. But it's Dean now who needs to make some changes.
And quickly.