I'm not sure we need yet another Dean post-mortem, but please indulge me. Thanks to a poster here, I came across a solid
USA Today piece from about a week ago which I'm sure many of you have read. One issue which comes up throughout the piece is the Dean campaign's utterly incompetent internal research - what I like to call "self oppo".
Though I first mentioned this problem in a post here at the very end of last year, it's something that had troubled me for a long time.
Excerpts from the article:
His disorganized campaign lacked solid information about how much money it had and did not do adequate research on his past.
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Among the most serious problems:
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* NBC's report Jan. 8 on old tapes of The Editors, a Canadian public affairs program that regularly featured Dean. Dean was shown saying in one program that caucuses in the Midwest are "dominated by special interests" and "represent the extremes." An internal poll showed Dean sank 12 percentage points in a day. [Emphasis added.] Campaign spokeswoman Tricia Enright says tapes of The Editors were reviewed, but that tape from Jan. 15, 2000, was not among them.
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Other critical matters fell through cracks. Canadian TV said it gave Dean a complete set of tapes of The Editors. Yet no one caught Dean's damaging words on the caucus system, nor did he bring up having said them.
So instead of discussing his new appreciation for Iowa's caucuses back in July, he was caught unaware in January -- the most damaging moment possible. One adviser called that oversight "unforgivable." [Emphasis added.]
Dean and his team also appeared blindsided when news organizations and rivals dredged up his past support for corporate tax breaks, the North American Free Trade Agreement and changes to Medicare. "Every campaign running against them had more opposition research (on Dean) than they did," says Anita Dunn, a party strategist. [Emphasis added.]
This just echoes a lot of stuff I had been complaining about for a long time. "Unforgiveable" is right - if the internal polling is correct, that one blunder essentially cost Dean everything. (Dean doing 12 points better in Iowa could have definitely given him a victory.)
But lets not focus too heavily on just the Iowa tapes, because there were numerous other similar occasions where the Dean campaign failed to research itself properly.
This kind of stuff makes me so, so angry because it was so easily avoidable. Yeah, we can complain about unfair media coverage all we want (and I do), but the Dean campaign had complete control over these sorts of things.
Why did this state of affairs come to pass? I think the disorganization at the top (as described in the USAT piece) was a major reason. Someone should simply have created an Internal Research Department no later than last summer, devoted to digging up everything every word every written or spoken about or by Dean. Yet no one bothered to do this.
And I can't blame this problem on inexperience - I'm not exactly a veteran politico, and I was aware of this problem early on. I think part of it was also, as the article suggests, Dean's feeling that the ordinary rules of politics just didn't apply to him. Combined with a staff that was utterly disorganized and incapable of over-ruling him, it made the creation of something like my Internal Research Department utterly impossible.
And again, that was unforgiveable. You know the proverb - for want of a horseshoe nail, the kingdom was lost. Well, I don't think it's a stretch to say that for want of a videotape, the nomination was lost. And that is just an enormous shame.