I'm still looking into the background on this, but Howard Dean may have just pulled off the most brilliant tactical move of the campaign so far.
Iowa is shaping up as the most important state in the race, and it has only one Democratic rep in Congress--Leonard Boswell--who has apparently been targetted by Karl Rove for defeat.
So today, Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi sent out a message to Dean supporters explaining this and asking for donations for Boswell. A few minutes ago, the Dean blog posted a gracious letter from Boswell saying, "This is one of the most exciting projects I have ever seen!" The entry also reported that the Boswell campaign has tracked over $30,000 in donations from Dean supporters today.
What a clever way to win the undying love of one of the most powerful Dem politicians in the critical state 47 days before the caucus?
And if it doesn't bring an endorsement, it might at least head off one for local boy Gephardt. And/or, it could impress a lot of diehard Iowan Dems (the kind who turn out to caucuses on icy January nights) who are nervous about losing their lone rep. It comes off as a really selfless act, a real show of concern for Iowans . . .
At the very least he's going to get a whole lot of crucial media coverage in Iowa, and probably a whole lot of good will. Sure seems like the kind of thing that will play well in Iowa, no?
They have been working ideas like this for awhile, actually. For months they have had teams of Dean volunteers on do-gooder projects just to earn the love and admiration of the locals. But this is taking it to a big new level.
Has this been tried before? Seems so obvious, why didn't someone think of this years ago? Or did they?
Wednesday Update:
I emailed somebody a little closer to the campaign, inquiring about intentions. Here's the response:
Congressman Boswell has not endorsed Dean, and we didn't do this for his
endorsement. We did this as a demonstration of the fact that this campaign is not just about winning the White House, it is about taking our country back. Congressman Boswell is on a list of Dems to be targeted by the Republicans. I didn't realize we'd be doing anything like this this soon, but I knew it was coming. This won't be the last race that we target. Imagine this: we reach the goal Trippi has laid out of having 2 million Americans give $100 to Dean for America before the convention. And then let's just suppose that for the general election Bush and Dean (if we win) both take the public funding. In that scenario, there won't be any more fundraising after the convention. But we'll still have this huge list of supporters. What do we do then for them? We can give them a list of 10 races (or 20 or whatever) that they can impact. When Joe talks about that, I tear up, and I'm ready to walk through a wall for him and Howard Dean. We can make great change in this election, if we continue to believe.
Powerful vision. I have no doubt this is the long-term goal, which could prove to be slightly revolutionary--and knowing this guy, I don't doubt the tearing up part, which is a truly the mark of the true believers.
Of course Joe Trippi is smart enough to take it a step further. Hmmmm. Why not test it out now, when it can give us a boost when we need it badly in Iowa, too? And demonstrate the power of it early to a few thousand politicians around the country who could see themselves as beneficiaries--the very party insiders we're looking to line up to undermine the expected post-New Hampshire Stop Dean Movement from the old guard.
We've been hearing for months that local pols around the county were salivating over the prospect of getting access to Dean's email address book, and/or the apparatus. Here was a first taste.
Win-win. Smart smart.
The long-term possibilities are pretty breathtaking, too, aren't it? )Once this expands beyond 10-20 races. (Maybe I should say medium-term. I don't see this lasting 30-50 years, but the full life of an eight-year term is easy to conceive, plus dwindling but still strong results for another term or two. That's pretty long in political time.)
The funny part is, this kind of reminds me of what Ross Perot attempted, to pull together a huge, broad, grassroots army of boots across the country, working together for a much larger cause than electing one man to the white house.
Ross never pulled it off, not by a country mile. He fumbled around with the several approaches, but nothing ever took off. Maybe the technology just wasn't there yet, or he failed to find the enabling technology available at the time.
But these guys (the Dean guys) . . . They're starting to make me salivate. I was drawn to Dean because of Dean, but the longer this goes on, the crazier it gets, the more I think it may be one of those amazing marriages of the right man at the right time, coming together with the right band of wiz kids to help make it happen. Karl Rove is good, no doubt about it, but he never introduced any innovations like this team. In my lifetime, I've never seen so many powerful innovations coming out of one campaign. Not even a fraction of them. And it's not even the election year yet.
More and more I'm starting to see the value of nominating Dean as not just Dean, but Trippi and the rest of the team, too. If they can start cranking up the machinery Perot had in mind--the army of volunteers we used to see mobilized by the old parties and the labor unions (the concept is not new, the mechanism to resurrect it in a modern world is)--we could finally make the Dems/Liberals/Progressives vital again.
And of course, it takes the charismatic leader at the top. Did Ross fail to find the right machinery, or did he just freak out too soon, and blow the personal campaign behind the movement? He demonstrated pretty clearly that once you get a movement like this off the ground, but you've got to keep it rolling. You can't leave it idle four years at a time, and you can't run it all from the bottom, with a hopelessly fractured agenda, and no leader to get behind that anyone in the movement believes can win anything. You need the army mobilized all the time, and you need the same strong leader behind it for at least four years, preferably eight, preferably leading from the White House.
Wow, I really got myself into a tizzy there. But it really can happen, and it's already well on its way. Thanks for the little demo guys.
Rants from the hinterland. A Denver writer and pretend anthropologist rips into artistic treason and random acts of ethical violence.
