NOTE: If this isn't the longest diary entry ever uploaded to Daily KOS, it's damn sure close. I've been writing this up for the last few days, and just put it up on my weblog, Idaho for Dean. See what you think of it.
I'm sure the headline of this post is a question many of you were asking yourself after the votes came in from the Iowa caucus -- I know I was. John Kerry won first place with 38%, John Edwards took second with 32%, and our candidate Howard Dean came in a far third with 18%. Dick Gephardt fell back even more to a dismal 11%, and officially ended his campaign on Tuesday.
A few weeks ago, Governor Dean was in the lead, and conventional wisdom was that he could walk away with the whole enchelada. How did he go from 1st to 3rd in two weeks? A lot of reasons, actually. Let's go through some of them. (I have no doubt I'll miss some, but these are what come to mind.)
* Hacked, Attacked, and Slashing Back: As the presumed frontrunner, Dean has had to try to fend off attack after attack after attack, literally coming in waves. He was constantly attacked by the other Democratic presidential candidates (with the exception of Carole Moseley-Braun, who dropped out of the race last week and endorsed Dean). He's had to battle much of the old-line Democratic machine and Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) minions, who choose to continue their failed policy of appeasing the right-wing of the Republican party rather than stand up against their destructive ideology. He has had to contend with a national media that, as shown by a study from the Center for Media and Public Affairs, has been significantly more critical of him and his campaign than the other Democratic presidential contenders, who were given more favorable coverage.
Then there was Rep. Gephardt's ads attacking Dr. Dean, and Dean's unwise decision to fire back with his own TV ads, going after Gephardt, Kerry and Edwards on their vote for the Iraq war. Kerry and Edwards took themselves out of the main fray, leaving Dean and Gephardt to bloody each other, which seems to have turned off many Iowa voters, swinging them to Kerry and Edwards. It also appears, from news reports, that the Kerry campaign was running push-polls against Dean, and Edwards authorized his precinct captains to pass derogatory information about the other candidates, including Dean, to caucus-goers. So much for staying clean.
* Hoist On His Own Petard: Dean made more than his fair share of gaffes in the last month. The problem is, a lot of these gaffes weren't gaffes at all, but the other candidates, the media and the mighty Republican Wurlitzer would wail to the skies and rend their garments when the Governor would speak anything more than "good morning." Still, Dean does tend to shoot from the lip at times, and with the relentless scrutiny, it came back to bite him more than once. NBC News also dug up old videotapes of Governor Dean from the late 1990's when he appeared regularly on a Canadian talk show. In one of the episodes, he spoke about how the Iowa caucus was unfairly controlled by special interests and wasn't truly representative of the average Iowa voter. I don't think that comment was a deal-breaker for Iowans, but with the so-called-liberal media flogging it on the air, it didn't help.
In the last debate before the caucus, Dean looked tired and was off his game. He rambled a bit on a few softball questions, and when the Rev. Al Sharpton all but accused him of being a racist for not hiring more minorities while Governor of Vermont (a small state with a population that is 97% caucasian), it stunned him.
About this time, Iowa democrats finally started paying real attention to the caucus race, and they noticed something: Dean wasn't really talking about the issues, and how they affected the lives of everyday Iowans, but was instead telling them what a great campaign he had, how it was bringing in new and disaffected voters to the process, and trumpeting all the endorsements he was receiving. It appears Iowans began asking themselves, "OK, but what's this guy going to do for me? And can he beat Bush?" Not getting the answers they wanted from Dean, they began looking at other candidates.
Dean, who had spent a great deal of his time over the length of the campaign promoting himself as a Washington outsider, began trotting out endorsement after endorsement from the very group he seemed to be railing against. The difficult fact is, the Dean campaign, struggling to cope with an organization that had grown exponentially in less than a year, lost its focus at the precise moment when it should have been nailing down the election. In business, growing too slowly, or not at all, can kill you. Conversely, growing too fast can do the same -- things get out of control, problems that could easily be solved if handled early multiply over time into intractable situations, and communication, the lifeblood of a political campaign, breaks down.
As a friend of mine in Iowa wrote me the day after the caucus, "Many of us saw the handwriting on the wall back last fall, but you could not convince the Iowa [Dean] staff that something was amiss. No matter how hard we tried, no one would listen to us, since we were not privy to their so called master plan." The Dean campaign, with its bottom-up strategy of allowing supporters to promote the organization on their own initiative (thanks in large part to the instant communication and community afforded by the Internet), rather than the top-down scenario where orders flow down and are specific, is truly a paradigm-shift in the way elections are run. But the reason top-down campaigning has been around so long is because, through Darwinian selection, it tends to function better than anything else tried. That doesn't mean bottom-up campaigning can't be made to work as well, or better, than top-down, but as with any new machine, there are a lot of bugs in the system that have to be weeded out, and what looks good on paper (or on a website) doesn't always function the way you need it to in real life.
Dean's television ads, from what I've read from other supporters and the few I've seen, were very poor. Low production quality and lack of a clear and positive message, especially compared to what Kerry and Edwards were running, didn't help the campaign, and probably hurt it. I've read arguments on different weblogs that whichever ad agency made the spots should be fired, but there's a problem with that idea: the ads were created by a company co-owned by Dean's campaign manager, Joe Trippi. The new ads running in New Hampshire right now are much better in terms of message and production, but it wouldn't hurt for Trippi to bring in a few other agencies and pump some fresh energy into the advertising. People see and hear television and radio spots a hell of a lot more than they read about a candidate in the newspaper or see on TV. Rallies and town hall meetings will only take you so far.
Caught in the Storm: It seemed like the perfect idea -- have volunteers come to Iowa from all over the country (and beyond; some traveled from as far away as Japan), set them up with locations to canvass, doors to knock on and numbers to call, flood the zone, and pull most of the undecideds into the Dean camp come caucus day. And when people came to the caucus locations, Dean volunteers would use their skills and training to cajole and horsetrade folks to throw their support to the Doctor. What could go wrong?
Everything, apparently.
For months now, Iowans have been bombarded with TV and radio commercials, newspaper ads, flyers, letters, handouts, email and, for all I know, messages in bottles washing up onto riverbanks. They got phone calls -- man, did they get phone calls. Polling organizations called, candidate volunteers called, friends and family called asking if they had gotten calls about being called and, damn, wasn't that just too many freaking calls? In the months leading up to the caucus, Dean for America asked the volunteer base if they would handwrite letters to uncommitted Iowa Democrats, talk to them about Dean, and ask for their support. As the caucus got closer, Deaners were asked to phone Iowans and get them to pledge their support for Dean. If they said they definitely were going to support the Doctor, they were rated as a "1," if they were leaning towards Dean, there were rated a "2," and so on. All the people classified as a 1 were put into a category called the "hard count." These were the caucus-goers the Dean campaign considered most likely to go out into the cold on caucus night, show up and vote for Howard. For a few days before the caucus, numbers were bandied about that Dean has somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 people in his hard count, and if voter turnout came in between 100,000 and 125,000, he'd win easily. Attendance came in at around 110,000, not as large as in 1988 but better than expected.
So after enduring months of phone calls and mail, a new element was added to the mix: the Perfect Stormers. And instead of being icing on the cake, it may have been the straw that broke the camel's back. From what I've heard and read, during that last weekend before caucus, folks in Iowa were barraged with calls and visits from Dean volunteers, and many may have just grown tired of it. I've read reports that some Iowans who had already committed to Dean received 5, 6, 7 or more phone calls within the span of a few days, and that some of the calls from Dean's campaign were automated, or robo-calls, infuriating voters even more. I've also read that some Iowans took offense at the idea of out-of-staters coming in and telling them how to vote. Not being on the ground there myself, I can't say for sure, but Julie Fanselow from Twin Falls and Chris Struble from Boise were there, and I'm sure we'll get the real skinny on the situation in a few days. The end effect was, from a potential base of 50,000 votes for Dean, a little more than 18,000 actually came out to support him. Where did the other 32,000 go? From entrance polling results, a lot went to Kerry and Edwards. Others just didn't bother to show up.
I've also heard that, once the caucus began, Dean volunteers who were sent to oversee and work them were hampered by lack of communication between themselves and the main organization, between themselves in the field, and weren't given the training beforehand to deal with the situation as it occurred. Kerry and Edwards had experienced precinct captains who had been through caucuses in the past, and who knew how to play the game. While Deaniacs were trying to learn the rules, the other campaigns were sweeping the chips off the table.
Were the Stormers to blame for the low Dean turnout? Not at all -- I believe they conducted themselves magnificently. They took their own time, spent their own money, braved the frigid temperatures and hardships, and put every ounce of themselves on the line to get the good word out about Howard Dean. From what I've been able to find, what they did has never been done on such a scale before in the history of U.S. political primaries. The Dean campaign made a lot of mistakes, and were unable (or, in some cases, unwilling) to anticipate the pitfalls that were before them, but that doesn't diminish the effort in the least. The time left in this campaign season is short, but I'm sure Howard Dean and his team are taking the lessons learned in Iowa and, at this moment, applying them to the upcoming caucuses and primaries.
The Barbaric Yawp: Ah, yes, the speech. As of today, that speech, at least part of it, up to the "YEEEEEAAAAAHHH," has probably been played, literally, a million times. Heck, it's already been re-mixed into songs and music videos, such is its primal power. I watched it, live on TV, as it happened, and I admit, I was dumbfounded. After I had a little while to let it sink in, I wrote this diary account and posted it to Daily KOS:
Tonight, after the caucus results, Dean gave his speech to the troops. Yes, he was over the top, but he wasn't speaking to America, he was speaking to us, the Deaniacs, and especially to the Stormers who worked their hearts out for Governor Dean. He was letting them and us know he's not giving up, not giving in, he's ready to keep on fighting for us all. I'm glad he shouted that out to us.
Having said that, I feel I must say this: I've been a Dean supporter since last June. I run the Idaho for Dean weblog and host our local Meetup. I say this as a supporter and a guy who truly believes in Dr. Dean --
He should never broadcast a speech like that again. Never. Ever. Again.
It's time to modulate the bombast and bluster, and show that side of him that we true supporters have seen, that we need the rest of America to see -- he must show his Presidential side. He must talk to America and explain to them why his policies will best benefit them. It's not enough to be against something, he must show our country why his ideas are the best for all our citizens. He needs to speak directly to the issues. I can't emphasize that enough -- voters are finally starting to pay attention, and they want clear, easy to understand specifics on how Governor Dean can best address the problems they deal with in their lives every day.
The kind of speech I watched tonight, where he shouts out all the states we will win in the future, works for us, the faithful. But, and I say this as a loyal supporter, he has to look beyond us to the rest of the voting public. You already have us, but you need more than that to win the White House. Iowa is by no means a death-knell, but it is certainly a wake-up call.
Howard Dean is the best man to be President of the United States. I believe in you, Governor Dean. You no longer need to shout the reasons why -- just talk to America. Those of us who have supported you over the last year have heard you, and now you must speak to the rest. Once they hear you, they will come around. I know you know you can't win this without us, your Dean Teamers, your Deaniacs. But we can't win it without you. You don't have to completely change, but you do have to rearrange. Throw out what doesn't work, amplify what does.
It's not enough to just want to be President. It's critical to measure your words -- the power is in what you say, not how loudly you say it. Show America that you have what it takes to conduct yourself as a United States President.
Say what you believe.
Believe what you say.
Speak strong and steady and clear.
Keep fighting, and we'll keep fighting with you.
Was Governor Dean wrong to behave as he did, rallying his troop's morale after a disappointing defeat? No, he was not. Hindsight, as we all know, has perfect vision -- had he, at first, stepped up to the podium, given a thoughtful and humble speech congratulating Kerry and Edwards, thanking the Iowa voters who had chosen him, talking about his vision for the future, and only after that, turned to the Stormers and given them the rallying speech that brought the house down, I don't think he would have had to suffer the slings and mortar shells of outrageous fortune he has these last few days.
But Fate has nothing if not a sense of humor, and rather than marking the beginning of the end of Howard Dean's presidential campaign, it could mark the start of a new candidacy -- one which is better, stronger, and wiser. One where a presidential candidate can take his newfound experience, tempered with no small amount of pain and humility, and mold himself into a President truly worthy of a country as great as the United States of America.
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me...he complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed...I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
-- Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself