We may never know exactly where the nastiest stories came from. There are plenty of possible sources: any of the other Iowa candidates; Chris Lehane; the Clintons; the Republicans.
In a sense it doesn't matter because it wasn't just the asymmetric muckraking of the last two weeks that focused negative attention on Dean, it was the relentlessly negative stories by all the mainstream media -- from the "Doubts About Dean" Newsweek cover on down -- and the comparatively positive ones about Kerry and Edwards.
There has always been a press bias against Dean, but it really ramped up in the last two weeks. Who queued the band? We'll never know. Maybe it was spontaneous. My guess would be that Karl Rove and Bill Clinton both had a lot of media levers they could pull, and pulled them silently for all they were worth. I would bet neither Kerry nor Edwards, small fry that they are, had the means to do that much of it for themselves. But for Clinton and Bush, it was time to act. A Dean win in Iowa would have meant a certain inevitability, like Carter's in '76, perhaps impossible to reverse. But we'll never know who did what.
The media establishment is both Democratic and Republican. Dean is an insurgent who threatens them both. The question for most of the Democratic-leaning media editors is not whether they like Dean or not -- they don't. It's how to attack him without appearing to be Republicans.
Why is this so? Are editors evil? No. It's Dean's message, which condemned Congress and the media for permitting the war. Condemned. It is hard to admit you were wrong. It is hard to like the guy who keeps saying you were cowardly and wrong -- especially when you know you were cowardly and wrong. Have you seen many members of Congress saying "I was wrong to vote for the war, I regret my vote?" Have you seen many editors saying "we were wrong not to fight the war tooth and nail, we were chickenshit?" It's easier to blame Bush for lying, as if you made the right decision given what you knew at the time.
But the truth us, as Dean angrily insisted, Congress voted to allow the war even though they knew it was wrong. And the media didn't fight it responsibly -- they supported it vociferously, in some cases (like the Washington Post) -- even though they knew they should fight it, because worldwide street protests told them it was wrong.
Kerry and Edwards never took anyone to task for the war except Bush and company. They were convenient rivals to magnify when it came time to stop Dean.
This presidential campaign is just getting started. It was inevitable that Dean would face this kind of opposition. Where Dean supporters got blindsided was in supposing it would come later, from Karl Rove. We should have known that friends are harder to cope with than enemies. That the enemy you attack will resist you openly, but the friend you attack will hate you and fight back covertly.
This year, I will not believe any presumptive Democratic nominee has the nomination sewed up until the final convention vote. That's because Hillary is still in the wings, and Bill Clinton is still the second most influential politician in America. Don't laugh. Remember, you thought you knew what was going down in Iowa. (We all did.) In Democratic politics, Bill is the man, until that final convention vote. And we don't know what he's thinking, or doing. There is absolutely no media visibility on that, and he's smarter than any of us.
For Dean, it isn't just Bill. Dean has taken on them all. That may indeed doom his candidacy. His is a Frodo-like quest. But he has supporters, both his wide-eyed young idealists and some behind the scenes. Even Bill might be one, at some point, unlikely as that might sound. Remember, we don't know what Bill's thinking.
To Dean supporters: Who said this was going to be easy? What we can't know, we can't let stop us. Clinton was in third place in June, and he never, ever let up. Can we get by without as much hope?