Dave Cullen: deanstoryoftheday

Learning from The Dean Experience

Sat, 07 Feb 2004 20:06:52 GMT

God, what to say?

I have been struggling with this conflict ever since New Hampshire. I knew I was going to get into trouble blurring the lines between participant and observer on Dean.

Here's the deal. My first priority here is the truth, best I can call it at any given moment. Obviously I'm going to be wrong about a lot of things, most especially the future, but I'm at least committed to giving you my best shot.

But the Dean thing, that was a movement. It was all about excitement, momentum and energy. Proselytizing? Scary, scary word, but that's what movements are all about right?

So I got on board as a discliple, because I really believed in the cause. And God knows, those despicable media whores were eye-rolling Dean needed all the help he could get on the electability front. (I had no idea just how much damage they were doing at the time, or how badly it would cost him in the end. Fucking bastards.)

It was fun, it was exciting, and most of all it seemed like the right thing to do.

But it was always one foot in, one foot out until Christmas week, because I didn't ever want to run the risk of losing credibility. I posted much more good news than bad news--partly because it was nearly all good news in those days, except for the nauseating harping of the media. And partly because I enjoyed being a cheerleader. Why not? When anything really bothered me--like a couple early flipflops--I ripped him a new one for it, both here and on his own blog. And I definitely tried to stay objective on the poll reports, telling the good news along with the bad.

Just before Christmas, I took the full plunge, coming all the way out to "endorse" him, kind of a ridiculous term for a nobody like me, but such as it was, that's what I did.

Still, I was committed to reporting on the race objectively when called for--no way I was going to spin for him or act like a mindless mouthpiece.

It didn't present much of a dilemma for me when things were first going badly. The trouble arose as the campaign approached the fuzzy territory of "hopeless." This is the moment the Dean troops needed to keep morale up--worst thing in the world would be inside defections: supporters suddenly tossing their arms up and suggesting--explixitly or implicitly--that supporters scurry fast to find their #2.

I was kind of pissed when Kos did it, a bit prematurely in my mind, though he retracted a bit the next morning. But I understood his position. His first responsibility was to his readers--all of them--secondarily to other Dean supporters. Writer came ahead of Advocate.

I felt the same way, but I just didn't have the heart--or inclination--to through sand in the faces of all those amazing diehard supporters still out there plugging away for Dean. I wasn't about to lie about my feelings, but I didn't necessarily have to comment on it.

So I decided for awhile just to mainly keep my mouth shut.

Still haven't decided whether I regret that, but I do think it's time for it to end. There are a gazillion other places to get your dose of political news and commentary, so it's not like anyone out there needs any more of it from me . . . but still, it's what I do, it's why some people come here, so . . .

I'm sorry guys. But "hopeless" is just about the word for it. I never give up hope completely--and who knows, Kerry may self-destruct tomorrow and Dean, Clark and especially Edwards may be right back in the middle of it. You may win the lottery tonight also.

Here's the deal: It was looking really bad for Howard Dean right after New Hampshire, though he was fighting back, did have a certain amount of momentum, and a few other big things going for him, like a continuing stream of cash coming in, an unflinching band of hardcore supporters, and, in my opinion, the best record to run on, ironically the best argument for the crucial electability issue if he could just figure out how to make it. (And if he couldn't then he and/or the team he assembled obviously did not have what it would take to make the case against Bush in the fall.)

That was the moment of truth, really. He had to do two things really fast: 1) Enunciate a clear message on why he was most electable, and drive it home relentlessly. 2) Drop the 50-state strategy immediately, and replace it with a plan that could keep him in the race through the next round. It's anybody's guess what #2 should have been, but I don't see much rationalle for anything but the course Edwards and Clark took: pick a state or two, focus all your resources there and outflank Kerry competing in all seven. Win a state or two to stay alive and prove to voters in the next round that you were a viable candidate to invest their vote in.

Dean and his team failed miserably on both counts. Two days after Iowa, it was clear that this race was over, because Dean failed to step out and do #1, and on #2 he replaced the 50-state strategy with a suicidal zero-state strategy. I sat in on a couple conference calls with Dean in the days following Iowa, and I knew from the first one that it was over. His grassroots team had served him well in building the movement, but revealed their rank amateur status in the crucial heat of battle. If my heart wasn't invested so dearly, it would have been comical to watch their attempts. They had absolutely no clue. They had the completely wrong team in place, and had no idea what they were doing.

They put all their money on Michigan and Wisconsin, oblivious to the fact that primary campaigns in America don't work that way. Once a candidate looks like a loser, he is. First off, Americans just love a winner and will flock to whoever appears to be out ahead. But even more devastating is the taint of hopelessness. Once a campaign starts to lose credibility, voters in a multi-candidate race wisely conserve their votes. Why on earth would a Michigan voter in love with Dean but disgusted by Kerry spend his vote on his man if they believe his race is over for Dean but alive for Edwards or Clark?

Michigan finally holds it caucuses today and Kerry stands a staggering 50 points ahead. In a state where Dean threw most of his post-Iowa resources.

It got bad enough several days ago that Dean and Clark and Edwards all gave up, and Dean pinned his last remaining hopes on Wisconsin. What? After more humiliations in Michigan, Washington, Maine and a host of others, Wisconsin voters are suddenly going to follow the reverse logic and suddenly stand up for their man?

Hardly. The latest ARG poll this morning (courtesy Kos, thanks), shows Dean all the way back in fourth, 27 points behind. That's before he gets trounced several more times and goes from hopeless-looking to ridiculous.

The time for a last stand is not ten days from now in Wisconsin. It was four days ago in seven states his team just didn't have the basic political sense to choose from.

Am I beating it into the ground too hard now? Sorry, but it's over. It's nearly over for Clark as well, and getting very close for Edwards as well. All Kerry has to do now is avoid a major screwup and he's our next nominee. Ugh. Nine months to learn to live with that windbag. There's still a little hope he'll screw up though. Maybe Edwards can still grab the thing from him if he does. We can only hope.

Update:

I was really happy with the note I ended on there, but a few minutes later I got to posting on the Kos comments, and once I got going, I think I found what I was looking for. The conclusion of my thoughts there:

I admire the hell out of the diehards fighting on and donating for Dean, but he does not have the team in place to win this thing.

So I'm finally admitting the Dean fails on the electability factor--not unelectable as a candidate, but certainly unelectable with this team.

They did a tremendous job getting Howard Dean to the top, and deserve enormous credit for it. But they're in way over their heads, and you have to fault Dean for not bringing in enough professionals for a healthy mix of grassroots and experience. It was a highly naive team, that kept driving on faith when political acumen was called for. They're still driving that way.

In the end, I think Dean gave us a great new model--as well as a reinvigorated party--but it was only part of the model. It was a model for building a base, it was a tremendously innovative model, but in the end, it was also terribly incomplete. The results speak for themselves.

Right candidate, wrong approach.

Best we can do is learn from this for next time. I have learned a great deal from the experience. And I love the guy, love the campaign, but I'm ready to let go, and look ahead to other ways to defeat George Bush.

Deaniacs refuse to surrender

Sat, 07 Feb 2004 17:12:10 GMT

I'm kinda proud of those guys.

Check out this Reuters story:

MILWAUKEE (Reuters) - Democratic White House hopeful Howard Dean scrambled on Friday to avoid a knockout punch in the Feb. 17 Wisconsin primary as his campaign reported raising nearly $1 million to finance what could be his final stand.
The money, far more than what Dean had sought in an e-mail plea the day before, will pay for campaign advertisements in Wisconsin where state Democrats are set to have their say on who challenges Republican President Bush. . . .
Late on Friday, the campaign said it had taken in $986,232 from 14,519 contributors since Dean's appeal, making it one of the best two-day periods ever for the former Vermont governor's fund-raising operation. . . .
In his fund-raising plea, Dean, who spent $40 million on a gamble that he could wrap up the Democratic presidential nomination with early victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, asked supporters for $50 contributions so he could raise $700,000 by Sunday to pay for advertising in Wisconsin.
The success of the drive, using the technique of Internet fund-raising that the campaign pioneered, prompted Dean's aides to double their target to $1.4 million.

I'm really not sure what to make of all the Dean supporters who refuse to give up. I've never actually seen anything like this in my lifetime. At first, I thought they were a little naive to be keeping the faith so fervently, but after a week of mostly letting go of the dream myself--still holding onto to the miracle possibility, but only as a miracle--I'm starting to feel a little envious.

How else to feel about people who refuse to give up, ready to fight to the last man, the last ounce of energy, last hour of disposable time, the last dollar of disposable income unearned or contributed. Seriously. I have a lot of respect for those people. I kinda wish I was one of them. I have been one of them.

I have been one of them, that's the scary part. Old man disease. I've still got it for my struggling writing career, but I've kinda got my hands full with that one already, no last-stand battles available for the doctor. Kinda makes me sad. For myself. Happy for them. Go get 'em guys.

My other reaction to Joe Trippi's sacking

Thu, 29 Jan 2004 05:51:44 GMT

That last post was a bit too cold and calculated. Because you only saw phase two. I didn't have time to write about it till I finished work, and then I was over the emotional part.

I cried when I heard the news. Still haven't figured out who it was for. Mostly Joe, I think. We had all come to love him, but I also knew he had stayed longer than he should have, helped bring the house down, figured he knew it and felt really bad for him.

It didn't last long. Right now I'm pretty excited. I actually felt some of the excitement almost immediately, but the sadness was stronger, but we have no time to look anywhere but forward so it brushed away almost immediately. Maybe that's why I felt so bad for Joe. I already sensed he'd be forgotten within twenty minutes. Not for good, but for now. We will all move on quickly, and he will be standing in the dust watching us ride away on the wagon he built with his own hands.

Poor Joe. I'm getting sad for him all over again. Just for a minute, then I gotta run.

Dean replaces Joe Trippi (his campaign manager)

Thu, 29 Jan 2004 03:41:15 GMT

This is several hours old now, but I could not break away from work.

Howard Dean went back to Burlington today for a round of satellite interviews and a round of meetings to decide what to change.

And decided to change the biggest thing he could change. He replaced Joe Trippi, the mastermind of his early strategy. He did the polite thing of asking Joe to stay on in another capacity, but of course Trippi bowed out gracefully.

You can read Trippi's statement and Dean's statement on the Dean blog.

The new campaign CEO (are they calling them that now?) will be Roy Neel, who AP describes as "a former Washington lobbyist tied to Al Gore"--or in an earlier version, "a longtime associate of former Vice President Al Gore." (The latest version was penned by the infamous Nedra Pickler, that discredited AP propogandist who seizes every opportunity to slime Dean.)

I am really sad for Joe, but it had to be done. It was definitely necessary for media-image purposes, but as far as I can tell, the campaign needed some new direction.

Trippi will go down as one of the brilliant political strategists of the century for revolutionizing the race the way he did. But ever since I got back from Iowa I've been trying to find time to write a long piece on how the revolution failed to adapt. Trippi was still fighting the battle to raise the army and build the war chest. What he did there was extraordinary--I've never seen anything like it. But he never quite figured out what to do with the army or the warchest once he built them. Nor did he seem to realize that money and troops were only two pieces of the puzzle--key peices, but not the only key pieces.

This is an image age, and the image has been problematic from the get-go. Yes, the media slimed Dean with the McGovern Liberal and unelectable labels from the get go, but he never figured out how to combat them when there was still time--never seemed to realize that he had to, how badly they would hurt Dean if they stuck. They stuck solid and they destroyed him in Iowa, which led directly to New Hampshire.

And there were other key image problems. The first time I saw a Dean TV ad, I commented here on how unimpressive it was. I did not see all of them, or even the majority, but I saw quite a few over the last seven months, and I never saw a good one until last week. And all the reports I heard out of every state he was running in was they were awful.

Bad TV commercials? In the age where campaigns are won and lost on TV? That's not a minor problem.

And as I commented here when I got back from Iowa, it was stunning to see the two separate operations there, in two side-by-side buildings which might as well have been a continent apart. There was the DFA (staff) building, and the Iowa Storm (volunteers) building--generals in the former, privates in the latter, and God knows what the generals were doing, but they sure didn't seem to have any connection to us privates. I was stunned. They recruited this incredible army, and they had no idea what to do with us.

They also failed miserably in Iowa at all the nuts and bolts precinct-level organizing. I witnessed the opening of a dozen different caucuses inside a single big high school in Ankeny, and they were already melting down because we had no precinct captains set up to lead. We had a table with their stuff for them to pick up on the way in, assuming they were all set, and only one came to get them. Other friends sat through caucuses and watched the entire horror unfold.

The other unnerving aspect I saw came from new friends who have been highly active volunteering in the campaign. They actually made several trips to Iowa before last week, done lots of field organizing in Texas, and they were bright guys, they should have been put in charge of something important. But they're not big web guys, they've never been on the blog, and they were treated like outsiders--like if you aren't on the blog, you're nothing. That's when I really started to worry. This whole internet recruitment thing is incredible, but it is just one means to recruit people. And what you ultimately need is foot soldiers out in the field doing the work. If those two were never connected the way they needed to be . . .

No one seemed to have a handle on any of the nuts and bolts of campaigning.

In the end, Trippi seems like a brilliant innovator who got Dean the lead and kept him there right up to show-time, but then had little idea how to actually make the show come off.

And then there's that bold 50-state strategy. Up to a point, I think it was a great idea, but it they got too ambitious, took too much for granted, and it backfired horribly. And they have not seemed prepared to regroup quickly and abandon it. They still have several big trips lined up this week for the primaries after next Tuesday. They don't seem to get how big a momentum game this is--that there won't be any contests for them after next Tuesday if they don't win a couple.

What a horrible price, to abandon all those operations out there you spent so much money and effort on, but that's what good generals do. They understand when a manuever is not working, they cut their losses and charge in from another angle.

All in all, Trippi seems very reminiscent of the brilliant revolutionary who can overturn the old order, but then has no idea what to do with it once he gets hold.

He may have learned enough to put the two together and drive someone all the way to the white house next time, but it's way too late for that today.

This guy Neel better turn some things around fast. And hopefully the fire-the-coach move will buy him a few media days. If the new guy plays the media right, it will play like a new burst of momentum to the campaign, a new hope that with a new direction Dean can come from behind, start winning some primaries and put John Kerry back on the defensive.

But he's only got six days left to win a primary or two.

Format Changes -- Good or Bad?

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 18:42:37 GMT

Or unnoticable?

I cleaned up the sidebars a bit, cleared out some old junk (sorry Wes Clark), and moved my blogroll and featured sites to the right side, so you can get to them more easily.

Let me know if you like the change better or worse, or it's too trivial to notice. And while I'm at it, I'm open to suggestions for other changes.

This change will also allow me to add more sites to my blogroll, so I'm soliciting nominations now. (And an offer to exchange links never hurts, folks.)

And what do you think: should the blogroll be above the featured sites on the right or below? Which do you use more? Or does anyone actually ever use any of those links?

(And I was just kidding about Wes Clark being old junk--I just couldn't resist the chuckle. He did have to go. I actually intended to take his picture down after I got off the Dean/Clark fence and swore my full allegience to Dean last month. But I can only make these changes from my main PC in Denver, and I haven't been here much. The truth is, I still love Wes Clark and admire him something fierce, and hope to God if Dean or Kerry get the nomination they choose him for Veep. And if Dean can't get the nom, he's still my second choice as well, though it's starting to look a little iffy for him. Farewell General Clark. You're a good man, and I'll miss seeing your smiling face on my homepage every day.)

Comic relief: Republican Senators try to spin the Kay fiasco

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 16:26:49 GMT

Well, after all that New Hampshire heartbreak, it's nice to wake up to a reminder of what we're all fighting about and fighting for:

David Kay is beginning his testimony to a Senate committee right now. That little Administration employee is going to blast a giant whole right through his boss' re-election prospects. (Not all by himself, but Iraq is going to bring this boy down, and Kay's humiliating resignation looks like the first big stone in the avalance.)

Committee Chair and staunch Republican John Warner gets to preface the testimony with his own remarks and he is pedalling as furiously as you can imagine trying to spin this thing.

What a joke. And what a waste of time. The public didn't pay any attention to the details before the war, they just lined right up behind the pres to rush blindly in there, and they sure as hell aren't going to quibble over the details of the disgrace.

Bush fed us a pack of lies to justify going in, and a blue-sky scenario for getting out.

Now we're mired in a hellish situation the Brits took decades to extricate themselves from last century--before the oil complicated everything a thousandfold--and his own man reveals we didn't need to go in to begin with.

That's enough for this public. And that is going to bring this president DOWN!

The crap they're going to feed us tonight

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 00:23:16 GMT

So the late-breaking exit polls indicate Howard Dean actually has an outside chance of winning this thing tonight.

And if he does, he'll be The Comeback Kid (thought he'll need a new title--I imagine his people have already focus-tested several, and the nets prolly have a slew of them lined up as well). And suddenly the media will lather him with glory again, which will be ridiculous, though no more ridiculous to the drubbing they gave him last week.

(At least they better anoint him again if he wins it. That's standard treatment in a situation like this. Much as I detest their retarded rules, they better stay consistent.)

More likely he will finish a strong second, coming way back from a distant second or third just a week ago, to nearly catching Kerry in a brilliant comeback. At least I think that's how they'll pitch it, if Dean does come in very close.

That will also be kind of ridiculous.

Yes, I am using this opportunity when my own man is likely to profit from the moronic media to call this preposterous "bounce" BS for exactly the load of crap it is.

So what if Howard Dean was down badly three or four days ago and nearly closed the gap? Or if he had been razor close last night and suddenly plummeted to third?

What are we covering here, timing? We're interested less in who won, placed or showed than the timing of their frequent movement? If someone gains or loses a lot of undecideds at the last minute, that's somehow more important?

No. No more or less important. Much more dramatic. And that's all the media really cares about.

This is not a sporting event. But they cover it that way. Fourth quarter, seconds ticking off the clock, hail mary pass to send it into overtime . . .

That's all they care about. The drama.

It's not a sports competition, it's not a movie, it's not freaking entertainment! At least it's not to me. It's not to most of the country, though that's all it really is to them.

Wait, that's not entirely true. I do enjoy it as entertainment. I admit it, I can't help watching it with one eye as a sporting event. So do most of the political junkies in the country, that's why the coverage works.

But I say "with one eye," because I never lose sight of the fact that while I can enjoy watching the ups and downs as a spectator sport, I never lose sight of the fact that the spectating is secondary. A distant second. It's just a fun sideshow created by the main event, it's not what the damn thing is about.

Somewhere along the line, the press got so sucked into the entertainment aspect of it, that's about all they have left. They are going to make the most preposterous pronouncements tonight about who "won" and who "lost" by how they did against expectations--meaning no more than how much they gained or lost in the last day or two.

It will be one of the most asinine spectacles you can imagine. Try not to swallow a word of it. Even if it benefits my guy.

Dead heat in New Hampshire?

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 00:02:45 GMT

The polls all agreed on a big Kerry victory this morning, but the exit polling shows a different story. From Kos:

The 1 p.m. tracking polls had the LA Times exit polling operation giving Dean the slight lead, while the media consortium gave Kerry the lead. The 4 p.m. results supposedly show similar numbers.

Wow. I may just pop out of my sullen mood after all.

Of course it's still just polling, but exit-polling is a whole different story from pre-polling. The main challenge with pre-polling is figuring out who's actually going to vote. Not a problem catching people on the way out.

Fasten your seatbelts . . .

Field Report from New Hampshire

Tue, 27 Jan 2004 14:34:56 GMT

No, I didn't hop on a plane over the weekend, but I did check in with Chris & Dee Jay, too great new friends from Ft. Worth that I met last week in Iowa. Very bright guys, and we shared the same candid assessments about the mess of the ground organization we experienced in Iowa.

Good news. They confirm what I had been told by a friend inside the campaign: It has a whole different story in New Hampshire. Very organized, very well run. Complete contrast to what we saw a week ago. Thank God. Things looking good for the GOTV drive. That will be crucial.

(And on a related note, I just got an email from the campaign saying they distributed 100,000 copies of the Diane Sawyer interview this weekend. Nice move! Wish I had thought of that. That could really help. And people might actually find it interesting enough to pop in. It's really hard to conceive of just how saturated the voters in Iowa and New Hampshire get, how utterly sick of all the campaign crap they get, until you get there. My very first house of the day in Des Moines last Monday, I faced an old man screaming at me for all the incessant calling and knocking and pamphleting. He did not want any more of my God damn literature, and I can only imagine how much of that stuff we distribute lands right on the top of the trash can. But a videotape, that might be interesting. And Diane Sawyer is one of the entertainment industry's top celebrity performers. Of course it takes a little more effort to pop the cassette in the VCR, so a lot of people will merely intend to watch it, but the potential payoff for the viewer is much higher--and at least different--so I imagine a lot of those tapes will get seen. And when they do, the effect will be much more powerful than a pamphlet.)

Very different personality to the locals, too, so hopefully the Zogby numbers showing undecideds breaking for Dean this time will bear out. They're liking what they're seeing in the field, hoping for a surprise tonight.

A quick anecdote. I really enjoyed this one, and it will give you a little sense of the place, too. (I wasn't taking notes on the call, or planning to commit it to print at the time, so I probably flubbed a detail or two. All the main points should be solid, and nearly all of the details):

They're out canvassing with lists of potential Dean supporters sorted by address, but the address numbering scheme can be really screwy (they're in a small town--the state is essentially a collection of small towns--near Dover). Apparently in the past, addresses were just assigned sequentially 2, 4, 6 . . . rather than 100s for one block, 200s for the next, etc. Then when the land was subdivided, if a house was built between 2 and 4, they just gave it any available number, say, 16. They may or may not have sorted out the actual history, but the fact on the ground is that addresses are not even in order. So canvassing gets really complicated. (If you've ever done it, you know how time-intensive it is to begin with. Just all the walking makes it an hourlong job just to reach a few dozen houses, and most will not be home.)

The followed the standard approach of driving to the precinct, and then walking from house to house. But things were so confusing and the weather so cold--five degrees and torrential winds--that they went back to the car to sort things out, and pulled into a driveway to turn around.

Just as they were pulling out, the guy living there came home. Rather than approach him immediately, Chris and Dee Jay decided to give him a chance to get settled, and they would come back as they left the area a bit later, when they returned to the car. When they got back, Chris hopped into the car and got things ready to go there, while Dee Jay knocked on the door. The guy answered with a rifle.

Dee Jay opened with his terrified Texan drawl: "Ha. Ah'm sure hoping you won't shoot me, but we're just here from Texas asking you to support Howard Dean . . ." He handed the guy some literature and got out as fast as he could. The door closed and he zipped back toward the car, but then the door swung back open, and the ran out waving the rifle and shouting: "Hey!"

Dee Jay practically soiled himself, until the guy explained his excitement. "How does this Dean guy feel about guns?"

"Oh, you're going to like this one," Dee Jay said. "He's the only candidate against gun control."

"Really. OK, son, you just got yourself two votes."

---

Thanks guys, for giving up three weeks of paychecks to slog through the tundra. We owe you. And I'm envious, too.

Good news from Zogby. But only Zogby

Mon, 26 Jan 2004 17:13:02 GMT

But can we trust Zogby?

He had a stellar reputation till 2002, then he was way off--but so was just about everyone else.

With that open question firmly in mind . . .

I was feeling kinda down last night, because the tracking polls were showing Howard Dean stabilizing late in the week and rising again after the big TV night on Thursday. Dean was rising and Kerry falling, but at too slow a pace to meet. Here was Kos' assessment yesterday:

What do we see? The expected Dean recovery (too little, too late for NH, but on target for Feb. 3), a strengthening Kerry, and a waning Clark. Edwards seems to be inching up as well, and -- at least in a couple of these polls -- so is Lieberman.

On target for Feb. 3? This is a momentum game. If he doesn't wow the country in New Hampshire, there isn't going to be any Feb. 3 for him. All the other state polls (see Kos for all that) show the crippling power of The Iowa Effect. He's suddenly trailing in nearly all those states, after leading last week. Double-digit losses left and right. That was before New Hampshire. Imagine how much bleaker it will get if Kerry trounces him a second time.

Kos also just posted a roundup of all the latest tracking polls here (while I was typing this, actually). Here's the gist: Kerry is ahead everywhere, with three of the four polls showing a solid lead, anywhere from 11 to 20 percent.

But then there is Zogby. And this is the good news posted also on Kos--what would we do without Kos--about an hour ago. (It is also mentioned again in the latest roundup, linked above, but the post linked in this paragraph has a much longer analysis from the Zogby subscription service). Zogby has begun to factor in undecided voters, and he sees them breaking toward Dean this time. From a Kos entry written by Jerome Armstrong:

Zogby has released 1/23 to 1/25 results this morning, with a cumulative 31% to 28% lead by Kerry over Dean. Notable here is that Zogby (and there are other conflicting top-line results) shows Dean pulling within 1% of Kerry in the Sunday polling, with Zogby beginning to factor in Leaners to reflect how Undecideds might break (Sat, Fri & Thur):
Dean: 38% (25,22,23)
Kerry:39% (26,28,36)
What's happening? According to Zogby, a shift among the undecided began this previous Friday. . . .
Why does Zogby differ from other polls? For one thing, Zogby is not predicting that independent voters will play a 50% turnout role that other polls project. Among Democrats only, Dean leads Kerry by a 33-31 percent margin. Among Independents, Kerry leads Dean by a 31-22 percent margin.

I recommend that you read the whole thing, but there appear to be two differences.

1) Zogby is known for trying to gauge where the undecideds are leaning, and factor in the most likely outcome, instead of just reporting all undecideds as a separate category as if they would vote that way. (In most states, you actually can vote for undecided, though the results for that "candidate" are usually a fraction of what polls showed the day before. Most people finally pick someone once the deadline arrives to get off the fence--or they stay home.)

2) Zogby is accounting for the independents differently. If you're not aware, NH is an "open primary." You don't have to be a registered Democrat to vote, so when the other party has no contest, large numbers often cross over to join them. If Kerry wins, he will apparently have Indies to thank for it, though Zogby doesn't think they're as interested as the other pollsters. Remember, this is not random calling of 100 people and reporting the results, this is trying to figure out who is most likely to vote and assessing how they will vote.

If Zogby is right, Dean is within striking distance, with the momentum heavily on his side and actually appears ready to overtake Kerry. (Though the 60 Minutes interview could reverse that.) Everyone else shows Kerry winning easily.

Stay tuned.

Dean's big TV night starting to show results

Sat, 24 Jan 2004 16:35:21 GMT

I'll just give it to you directly from Kos:

The data is still sketchy and incomplete, but we're starting to get the first hints at the effect of Dean's Thursday debate, Sawyer interview, and Letterman appearance.

American Research Group says:

Today's tracking gives some hints about debate performance on Thursday and the impact of Howard Dean's Primetime interview. The trends suggest that (1) Howard Dean's slide in ballot preference has stopped (Dean's 3-day favorable has increased to 35% from 31% and his unfavorable has decreased to 37% from 42%).

Praise Jesus.

As he says, it's still sketchy, but both he and I were expecting something like this, and here's the first flimsy evidence. Might hold, but might not, but definitely keep your eyes peeled.

There's more at the link to his post.

The big lie of the anger connection

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 04:25:58 GMT

I get that Howard Dean freaked a lot of people out Monday night. I didn't see it that way at first because I saw it in context in the room, and apparently even Tucker Carlson admitted he thought it seemed normal when he first saw it there. The problem is that it was broadcast way beyond the room, and I get that for those of you not in the room it was weird and goofy, over the top and unpresidential.

I get all that, and it was a terrible miscalculation on his part.

And the media has every right to report that, though I think they have gone over the top in repeating it, and it's kind of sad how superficial they are. It's all about image for our media--they would much rather capture one moment of goofiness and obsess over it than actually talk about how the president should be running the country.

All of that, though, I can understand. But here's the big load of pure crap:

Check out this sentence from the lead story on the front page of today's USAToday:

Dean placed a disappointing third in Iowa and then reinforced the perception that he is the "angry" candidate with a frenzied speech to supporters.

[Note: the quotation marks are theirs.]

Look at the crafty sleight of hand there:

The press has been trying to pin this "angry" label on Dean for months, with largely impotent results. It did start to stick in Iowa the final week when things got really ugly and he did seem to lose his temper a bit. (I know this, because I talked to a lot of Iowa voters this weekend who repeated it.) It stuck then in that small but pivotal state at just the wrong moment, but otherwise, the press has been pretty frustrated in the public's rejection of their idiotic angry label.

But they've got the goods on him now. Over and over the clip has been played, and this time the public is buying. The whole country is enjoying laughing at him, so this time he's caught redhanded. This point was not unique to the USAToday piece--I have been hearing it over and over again in the media all week. Dean proved he was angry and everybody agrees, so now it's finally an accepted fact.

Right?

Wroooooooong.

How in the hell are they equating frenzied and angry? How the hell did that horrible newsmodel Diane Sawyer make exactly the same link in her interview tonight when she said:

And, some of the political analysts have said that the real problem is that [the speech] tapped into another concern, it seemed to re-enforce the concern that had been brought up before about your pressure gauge. And, how you control it. And, specifically the whole issue of temper.

The transcript shows nine times she used the word temper. And as she admits, she's just parroting the standard line that "political analysts" have been repeating all week. The whacko speech reinforced the image--notice she says RE-inforced, as if most of the populace already had that image of a bad temper.

Temper? Angry? I have heard that speech ridiculed a hundred times since Monday, but virtually no one has ever called it angry or hot-tempered. And I have stopped people who were ridiculing it and asked if they thought it was angry, and the reaction was always befuddlement: "Angry? No, not angry, just weird. Really weird." Or whacko, unseemly, whatever. Definitely not angry.

The press caught him doing something completely different than angry, yet they are running around presenting it as the final evidence that he is fact what they have been claiming all along: angry. They just slip it in there so effortlessly, as if the premise supports the conclusion--apparently the words share bad enough connotations, viewers/readers/listeners skip right on over the distinction. The monumental distinction. Whackiness has nothing to do with anger whatsoever, aside from both being undesirable.

What is the matter with these newsmodels? Surely they see the yawning hole in their logic. Are they that willing to be that dishonest just because they think we're too stupid to accept their angry characterization so they have to con us into it?

The weakness in his strength

Thu, 22 Jan 2004 05:57:58 GMT

Wonderfully trenchant analysis of how Dean failed in Iowa and what he needs to do fast from a site called The American Street (much thanks to Steeve (sic) for pointing it out in the comments. Twice.)

Excerpts:

In marketing message is everything. . . . It works with candidates, as well. Republicans know how to do this. You decide the message of the candidate, and repeat it over and over, and IT DOES NOT MATTER if it is a truth, or consistent, it becomes what the person IS. Bush said, over and over, that he was going to bring "honor and integrity back to the White House" and said it again, and then again, and pretty soon he was the guy who was going to bring honor and integrity back to the White House. It DID NOT MATTER that Bush had no honor or integrity, because he had a clear message and repeated over and over that he had honor and integrity SO THAT BECAME WHAT HE WAS. And he was able to repeat over and over that Gore was a liar. This is how marketing and repetition works.

. . . I think the Iowa caucuses were all about beating Bush. The only question was, "How is he going to beat Bush?" I think a candidate's positions on jobs, national security, and other issues were relevant only so far as Iowans imagined most American voters responding to the positions, not their OWN response. (And probably mostly in terms of imagining those other voters seeing Bush as = security after 9/11.)

Here are the simple messages, or "brands," that I think people went to the caucuses with:

Kerry = War hero
Edwards = From the South/Nice
Dean = Money & supporters/Fighter
Gephardt = Unions

But Dean allowed himself to be defined/branded by others as "angry," and that, of course, scared Iowa voters. (Previously they tried defining him as "extremist/McGovern," but that didn't stick, so along came "angry.")

Sun Tzu's Art of War says to beat a powerful enemy you must "find the weakness in his strength." If Dean's strength is being a fighter who is ready to get in Bush's face, then "angry" is the weakness in that strength. So Dean got branded as the "angry" candidate and this is Dean's fault. The reason it is Dean's fault is that if Dean is going to go up against Bush, and is ready to fight back, that means that he shouldn't be so easily defined by opponents -- because that is what Republicans DO. He should already have a team in place ready to counter that basic tactic -- defining your opponent!

Nicely put, and that is what the voters went to the polls with. And the data clearly suggests that they were most interested in who could beat Bush, guessing what would appeal to others. He nailed it all. And it is Dean's fault, and the Rs will do this to him in the fall.

I especially liked the part about "finding the weakness in his strength." I disagree to a point about it not mattering whether the message is true. It has to ring true in some way. It does not have to be true, but it requires some kernel of truth or some appearance of truth or it does not stick.

I was just saying in the comments that what some saw as anger, I had always seen as fiestiness, and I liked that. I could see him standing up to Bush, would not have taken any of his BS. But every strenght has a weakness, and if your enemies can surround you, outnumber you and paint it as whacko anger that can't be trusted, viewers start to see it in an entirely different light.

Let's not fall for the ploy, and nominate another inarticulate woos. No wimps against Bush this time.

But I also agree that it is Dean's own fault. He allowed himself to be labelled by failing to do it himself. I have talked to Dean staff enough to hear a message that has begun to disturb me. This is not about the man, or "the cult of personality." This is about a new process, a taking back America, etc.

Wrong. American presidential politics is about a cult of personality. We don't have kings or high priests anymore, but for God's sake we're going to worship our leaders, just like we do our pop stars, movie stars and football stars. It's all personality. Even the NBA figured out a few decades ago that they couldn't sell basketball until they started selling basketball players. Roone Arledge figured that out with the Olympics in the (60s?) and revolutionized everything.

That's America. Get used to it. Of all people, we care about the personality of the president. I love that Dean is changing the process, but that's about future presidents. I love that he is giving us new means to get great new guys into the white house, but that doesn't make him a great guy. Either he is or he isn't, and I think he is, but I'm only going to vote for him if he's the right guy, not just because he invented a process to allow other great guys.

This team seems to have really lost site of what this election is about: him, for God's sake.

All this focus on process and the Iowa voters got less and less feel for who Dean was and what he was about. Gail put it wonderfully in the comments, "It's like the campaign forgot to mention all the reasons why we WANT to take our country back."

When you keep the focus off yourself and leave a blank slate standing there, your opponents and/or lazy reporters can paint anything they want there.

Luckily they seem to have gotten the message now. The new commercial is all about the man, who he is, where he comes from. A character sketch. Plus a few good snippets on key issues--what the man stands for.

Nice combo, hope it works, hope it's not too late. It's going to take a great performance in the debate tomorrow as well. That might be what it comes down to.

Conflicted on Dean's speech last night

Tue, 20 Jan 2004 21:22:52 GMT

Now I'm conflicted. My first response to the press charge of Dean being angry last night (which I posted earlier today on the Dean blog):

Angry?

I don't get the spin all day about the angry speech. And I'm a tough audience, and I was in the audience, and I have thought Dean has come off way too angry way too much--including earlier in the day at the MLK rally.

But the speech. What utter bs. It was an incredibly uplifting and positive speech, that worked perfectly to uplift a pretty demoralized army of volunteers. Pitch perfect. (Except when he kept referring to "your generation," and us being under 30. What?)

The press is just full of crap. They were looking for that story, and saw it earlier in the day, so they needed him to continue it last night, but he came to his senses and came out with a huge beaming smile and a positive speech, but they already had their script.

I am so embarrassed to call myself a journalist when I do it from time to time.

But now I've talked to more people that I trust who watched on TV. An example, from Brett, a trusted friend and good political observer who is backing Dean and posted this comment on an earlier thread on this blog:

Dave--hope you are keeping your spirits up. Give us the deal. Watched the coverage and must say Dean seemed whacked out. What is the take? Thought Kerry and Edwards took full advantage of the air time to get their message out and Dean dropped the ball. Brett

Hmmmm. I may have fallen into the trap of thinking the real audience was the room-audience because I was in it. That was an important audience, because he needed to rally the troops for New Hampshire. But the bigger audience is the general TV audience. Bigger by a factor of a few million, utterly more important.

Much as we needed our general to lead us, he needed to speak to the country first, in a manner they could comprehend, that they were ready to hear. He could have brought the cameras into his hotel room and given a stately statesman speech first, then come down for the pep rally. And then presumably the pep rally would have gotten much less coverage and would have been treated more in context.

So the press characterization is still pretty retarded, but in retrospect, he didn't read the situation well afterall or deliver the big American audience the appropriate message. He sure needs a new media advisory. Hopefully the person repsonsible for all the dreadful TV ads is the same person or will be replaced along with him.

This thing is not over, but they sure have a lot of changes to make. But they also had a big lead in New Hampshire, so hopefully they can turn it around fast, hold the lead and put Kerry back where he belongs a week from now.

What the hell happened? My Iowa field report

Tue, 20 Jan 2004 07:35:01 GMT

This is mainly going to focus on the Dean operation in Iowa, what I saw and felt, and what I learned about why we lost so badly. But first, I'm a human being too, and I have to express my primary reaction:

Al Gore II wins Iowa! God Lord. Of all people. I could see Edwards. But John Kerry? Al Gore the second?

We better all pray his little Iowa surge is a flash in the pan, or it's going to be 2000 all over again.

I was kinda stunned by the outcome, and kinda numb about Howard, but John Kerry. Ugh. I'm still pulling really hard for Howard, but if this process can produce a stronger challenger to Bush, by all means. But John Kerry, that guy just has disaster written all over him.

So. Back to what I learned in Iowa. So much to report. Just getting back to the hotel, got to get some sleep.

A few highlight from my 4 days on the Dean campaign:

- Ultra disorganized.

- Two buildings, separted by a small parking lot: DFA (Dean For America, i.e., staff), and Iowa Storm, i.e., HQ for the Army of hundreds (thousand?) out-of-state volunteers who landed in Des Moines for the long weekend. DFA seemed to be upstairs in the Storm building as well. We never saw them. (DFA.) They seemed to be hard at work doing something, but the stormtroopers there to serve them were largely left to our own devices. Very amateurish. Everything thrown together. Massive wasted effort. No one in charge of so damn many things.

- Don't get me wrong, I had a wonderful time this weekend. But what a mess. And it didn't have to be that way. We had a long debriefing in our group, and everyone had the same impression, and a laudry list of examples. Someone described it as lots of generals, hundreds of privates and no one in between. (And the generals were all in a different building.)

- Lots of assumptions. Like the high school I went to today where 12 different precincts were meeting in different parts of the school. We set up a table at the entrance for all the Dean precinct captains to pick up their materials. One did. I guess they just assumed lots of people were lined up. They were not. Kerry, Edwards, Gephardt all had people running things at their caucuses, making it happen. We had no leaders. All the reports I got from others at caucuses were the same. I did not get to see the whole thing, but friends observed the whole process at others and we were obliterated. No one there to lead. Nothing arranged in advance. We assumed it was all set? Sad.

- What I heard in the field: I was out canvassing each day this weekend (up through two precints we ran, literally ran today, though most people were not home), and what I heard over and over was that people were unsure of Howard Dean. Load and loads of people liked him, but they were getting a lot of negativity from him, and didn't know whether they could really trust him. Trust him to a) beat Bush, or 2) lead the country. Especially #1. Couldn't decide whether he was a serious candidate, whether they could really stake their vote on him, so they were peeling off, looking for someone they could trust. Every day that went, we heard more of it. We came back from caucusing and shared stories, and it was the same over and over. (With the caveat that this was among people almost exclusively in Des Moines and surrounding suburbs.) More and more I was hearing them leaning toward Edwards sometimes, Kerry more times. And there they went.

- The ads. I only saw a few TV ads, but they were bad, and everyone else seemed to think they were bad as well. Lame, poorly produced, and Dean comes across bland or angry.

- I did not see Edwards in person, but word is he's getting much, much better. I spoke to several voters who had been wowed by his recent personal appearances and switched.

- It was freaking cold. We were out at 7:30 waving signs (yes, I was 30 minutes late--sorry), and it was 5 degrees. My toes were numb. My face is still red and glowing. Warmed up nicely during the day (to the teens?--but with the sun out and running from house to house I was fine. Sweating, actually. Sweaty, cold, sweaty, cold. So nice to get to a shower finally at 8:30 p.m., before the "party."

- Nice recovery by Howard, I thought, as far as the troops were concerned. I don't know how it played on TV, but it played great to the army. I was watching to see if he could hit the right notes, and he handled it perfectly. People were a little crushed here, but generally picking themselves up and ready for the next round.

More Tuesday. Much, much more to tell

Iowa endorsements: Still more evidence of media out of touch

Mon, 12 Jan 2004 18:22:56 GMT

Did we need any more evidence of how wildly out of touch the media is?

Yesterday, four Iowa papers announced their endorsements for the Democratic nomination. (The crucial Iowa caucus is now seven days away. And by the way, you can still join me in Iowa this weekend.)

The most important paper by far, The Des Moines Register, picked John Edwards. Big surprise, and kind of puzzling. The press pegged him as the likely frontrunner more than a year ago, but he has not impressed a sizable contingent of voters anywhere. Still, he can be somewhat impressive, and he's growing as a candidate.

The other three papers, that part was truly preposterous. From the AP story:

The Quad-City Times in Davenport, the Iowa City Press-Citizen and the Hawk Eye in Burlington endorsed Kerry, saying his foreign policy experience makes him the best candidate to face President Bush in the fall election.

Good lord. John Kerry? The incredible shrinking candidate? The man putting the entire country to sleep? This is the guy they see as our leader? The bullshitting windbag who couldn't give a straight/straightforward answer without three hundred pointless adjectives to save his life?

The role of a leader is to lead. Not to sport the strongest resume. John Kerry has been a fine senator. After a year on the campaign trail, it's become painfully apparent that the senate is exactly where he belongs. The senate is a deliberative body, and its members are rarely called upon to lead. Thank God. In our entire history, we have only chosen a handful of them to be president. John Kerry sits near the back of the current pack of senators running, because he has displayed no leadership ability whatsoever.

The voters have gotten this. The press? These people just have no clue. No wonder the profession is one of the most despised in the country.

Wilgoren Watch / Adopt a Journalist

Mon, 12 Jan 2004 04:37:36 GMT

I love this idea. I'm not entirely clear on whether it started with an idea from Atrios, or a decision by a dean supporter to take direct action. Possibly both happening separately, fusing and erupting into a little movement.

Here's what I do know. Just before Christmas, Jodi Wilgoren wrote an NYT piece that really pissed off a lot of the Dean supporters. I happened to be messing around on the Dean blog that day, and people were just in an outrage. Not because of the one piece, so much, as because of the endless string of jackass reporting. With so many jackasses writing such crap, a fair number of it was destined to rain down on the Dean camp to begin with. Add the fact that he refuses to pander to him, and that most of them are freaking clueless about his rise to prominence, and you have a pretty ugly situation.

For some reason, tempers ran high enough that day, that a person who posts under the name "Vet 4 Dean" posted this (comment? diary post, I think), at Kos:

Earlier today on DFA [the Dean blog, aka, Dean for America ], there was a good bit of discussion of the latest piece of "journalism" committed by Ms. Jodi Wilgoren in the NYTimes.

Well, I decided it was time to lose my blogging virginity and created The Wilgoren Watch.
Any advice -- up to and including "Geez, what the hell are you thinking?" -- will be appreciated. Please be gentle with me. ;-)

Meanwhile, Atrios was bouncing around the idea of a wider Adopt A Journalist program. I'm going to take the liberty of posting his entire followup post on it from tonight:

There's an idea I put out there in the middle of the holidays. A bunch of people subsequently emailed me, etc..., and I pretty much ignored them. Not because I was being rude but because I was fairly busy and most importantly as I said in the original post I Don't Want To Organize It.

But, look, here's the idea - start a blog, pick a journalist, and follow them. Don't just follow them day to day, but be in depth about it. Archive all of their work, look for inconsistencies across their own writing. It doesn't have to be all nasty criticism. Criticism can be both good and bad - it's important to remember that.

Anyway, some had emailed me about setting up a centralized database/website/etc... I tend to think such a top down approach is a bad idea, at least at first. First we need volunteers - and the best way to do it is just start doing it. Once you've got it going, email me and other bloggers once you have some interesting stuff up. Once people seem to be working it consistently, I'll set up a special section in the blogroll and will encourage others to do the same. If there's duplication of effort - great! Eventually blogs can merge or whatever, it isn't a problem.

As for journalists - mostly what I'm talking about are people covering the '04 campaign, and mostly what I'm talking about are straight journalists and not the pundits. The pundits get plenty of attention - it's fun, but frankly we all overestimate their influence. One lowly scale AP reporter probably has a lot more influence than William Safire.

Jay Rosen of NYU has been following this idea. But, my plea is - Just Do It! I'm happy to support it, but I can't organize it.

Rosen has an interesting semi-chronology of the germination at the link above. My favorite passage:

Jan 6. Reporter Alan Judd of the Atlanta Constitution emails PressThink: "The idea of 'tracking' individual campaign reporters--as on Wilgoren Watch--is absurd. The people behind such efforts would be satisified with nothing other than stories effusively praising Howard Dean and blasting Bush as the great satan. What they advocate isn't press criticism, it's stalking."

What a turd. Journos who spend their careers stalking politicians, movie stars and victims of tragedies tend to have the thinest skins when anyone suggests examining their work.

I love this idea. Only wish I had time to adopt one. But I'll link to it once it gets going, and support it with encouragement any time I can.

Zogby begins Iowa tracking poll

Mon, 12 Jan 2004 00:45:30 GMT

Zogby published its tracking poll of Iowa today, so we'll be able to see how each candidate jockeys in the final eight days--and most importantly, how they're trending. (The tracking poll is taken nightly. After the first three nights, the total of those three nights is reported; then each day, the latest night's numbers are added, and the oldest lopped off. So you always get a three-day total, and they publish how it moves each day.

Starting numbers, courtesy of Kos (who does not link to a direct source):

Dean 25
Gephardt 23
Kerry 15
Edwards 14
Undecided 14
Lieberman 3
Clark 3
Kucinich 2
Sharpton 1
Braun 1

Very, very close at the top. And Kerry's dream of beating Gephardt for second appears to be just that. When did Edwards move up so far, though?

The main thing to keep in mind in watching these numbers all week, is that caucuses are notoriously hard to poll for. Only about 4% of the population is expected to turn out. It can last three hours, usually on a cold winter's night. And it's not a secret ballot: you have to openly declare your vote, and try to convince your friends and neighbors to change.

So no one ever knows who will turn out, and that can mean everything.

Gep would seem to have an advantage there, since other polls have showed his support most solid (those who back him do so most definitively). But Dean supposedly has an army of 2,000 showing up next weekend, for a last-minute blitz. (Me included. Info on how to join us here.) Granted, I'm biased, but I can't help thinking that will do a lot for the final Get Out The Vote push. (Update: The Dean blog is saying they've got 3,500 volunteers coming to Iowa. I have heard conflicting reports.)

Enough to tip the balance? No telling.

Update:

Reuters story on the poll has some good info on internals . . .

Dean led among the very liberal, independents, young voters, the college educated and singles, while Gephardt led among union households, those with less than a college education and lower income voters.

. . . and on the surprising Edwards rise:

The survey also found growth for Edwards, who gained strength during the course of the three days and earned the endorsement of the state's largest newspaper, the Des Moines Register, on Sunday.
"Edwards has picked up a lot of steam each night," Zogby said.

I was stunned by Edwards' increase. Since when did anyone start rallying behind him in any state?

Poor Kerry. More bad news. Not only is he out of the race for second, Edwards appears poised to pass him.

After raising expectations with the beating-Gep for second scenario, a fourth-place finish would sink him even worse. Heading into his humiliation in his homeland the following week. Poor guy. Will anything ever go right for him?

Media Whores: Lisa Myers and Paula Zahn

Sat, 10 Jan 2004 19:32:31 GMT

Great job by Atrios slaying these two revolting whores. (Look under Friday's entries, three separate posts.)

Update: Deliciously fun new reader and Salon Blogger Meg suggest we call them Media Tarts. Not bad.

Dean hanging on to Iowa lead

Fri, 09 Jan 2004 16:02:11 GMT

Finally, some new poll numbers out of Iowa. From SUSA (12/11 results in parenthesis):

Dean 29 (43)
Gephardt 22 (23)
Kerry 21 (15)
Edwards 17 (10)
Other 8 (?)
Undecided 3 (?)

From Research 2000:

Dean 29 (26)
Gephardt 25 (26)
Kerry 18 (15)
Edwards 8 (8)
Clark 3 (3)
Undecided 13 (18)

Dean in a slight lead, with turnout the key factor in a caucus state.

I don't know what those huge Dean numbers in the previous SUSA poll were about. Seem a bit farfetched (and out of whack with the rest of the trendline).

Much more info at Kos. Much more insight on everything at the main Kos page.

'Unelectable, My Ass!'

Thu, 08 Jan 2004 04:49:58 GMT

Incredible piece from Arianna Huffington today.

Consider this opening:

I swear, if I hear one more Democratic honcho say that Howard Dean is not electable, I'm going to do something crazy (maybe that's what happened to Britney in Vegas this weekend).

The contention is nothing short of idiotic.

Consider the source. The folks besmirching the good doctor's Election Day viability are the very people who have driven the Democratic Party into irrelevance; who spearheaded the party's resounding 2002 mid-term defeats; and who kinda, sorta, but not really disagreed with President Bush as he led us down the path of preemptive war with Iraq, irresponsible tax cuts and an unprecedented deficit.

It gets better.

Now if we could just get the rest of the media to quit falling for ridiculous tripe, and then repeating it endlessly.

'Dean the pessimist': Case study in what makes the media so vile

Sun, 28 Dec 2003 20:37:16 GMT

This is two days old, but worth the wait. (And I was sick when I first saw it, and then locked out of my blog for 24 hours).

It started Friday with a revealing piece in the Times:

Bush Advisers, With Eye on Dean, Formulate '04 Plans

President Bush's campaign has settled on a plan to run against Howard Dean that would portray him as reckless, angry and pessimistic, while framing the 2004 election as a referendum on the direction of the nation more than on the president himself, Mr. Bush's aides say.

Interesting reading there--news flash! the Times writes something interesting about the election! (note to Times editors: it was because the piece relied on reporting rather than analyzing, a consistently embarassing task for your team)--but the real story came when a hot blogger named Atrios (aka Eschaton) picked up the ball and ran with it:

It's a short post, so I'm going to take a little liberty and post the whole thing (and advise you to check out the site--really good stuff there on a regular basis):

So, I didn't go all the way back, but doing a check through a Nexis search of news transcripts back through October, the first appearance of a talking head referring to Dean as "pessimistic" or discussing his "pessimism" was Laura Ingraham on the Friday Dec. 19 Hardball, followed by Mary Matalin on the Sunday Dec. 21 Meet the Press.

Look for it to be coming out of every Republican's mouth soon, and then it will increasingly creep into "objective" reporting. The process will go something like this. First, they'll quote Bush campaign sources describing Dean as "pessimistic." Next, they'll move onto Democratic campaign sources, often anonymous, describing Dean as "pessimistic." Next, they'll stop bothering getting the quote and just write things like, "Some have criticized Dean for his unappealing pessimism..." And, then, finally, process complete, campaign analysis pieces in print and the "objective journalists" on the roundtable shows, will just write/say things like "Dean's pessimistic rhetoric..." By the end no discussion or news story about Dean will see the light of day without the word "pessimism."

Man! Talk about nailing the sloppy media, and how they play right into the hands of the evil spinmiesters. That is exactly how it works.

Bad, bad media. Pitiful media. How can they be so self-unaware.

The good news is that Gore was a big wimp, and his campaign was clueless, and the Rove machine just flattened him, but Dean is a different story altogether. Dean fights back, and a fiesty group called the Dean Defense Forces organized as early as last summer to fight back.

Very fiesty group. Often too fiesty. I was begging some of them last summer to tone it down. That was just the embryonic version of the fight-back forces. It will be a very different response this time around.

Also, those labels tend to stick a little better if they're true, or they at least appear true, and the Rove team chose really poorly with the pessimism. Dean inspires exactly the opposite. Dean lights up his supporters with a message of incredible hope. That--and not the Iraq policy the idiotic politic press keeps pointing to--is what has fueled the Dean phenom.

When they were working with a big, bland, blank canvas like Al Gore, they could paint almost any picture they wanted onto the poor sap and make it stick. Dean already has a personality. Recasting him as a pessimist is likely to prove a bridge way too far.

You're overreaching already Karl. First tangible sign I've seen that understimating Dean may really pay off for the man.

Stopping Dean by helping Gephardt in Iowa

Sun, 28 Dec 2003 19:57:49 GMT

DailyKos throws out a fascinating Stop Dean scenario this morning. (And if you're not reading Kos every day, you're missing out. He has emerged as the best politican writer in the country this season, without ever writing for a "real" publication.)

It starts with this quote from a pretty shitty Washington Post story this morning by the highly uneven Dan Balz:

Bill Carrick, one of Gephardt's advisers, said all the other candidates should be rooting for Gephardt to stop Dean in Iowa. "Every one of them needs us to win," he said. "We have to win Iowa. For better or worse this is Dean-Gephardt right now for the other candidates."

Hard not to see a lot of truth in that one, right? So Kos starts thinking: what if the other campaigns grasp the same truth by Iowa--as Dean looks more and more inevitable, and then:

The Iowa Caucuses are a peculiar beast. People cast an initial ballot for their guy. But, if their guy doesn't break the 15 percent barrier, they can change their vote to a more viable candidate. In essence, supporters will work hard to garner the votes of the other caucus goers to get their guy as many votes as possible.
In the past, each caucus was a self-contained election. There was little the candidates could do to sway the votes of their supporters. But we now have a dandy new tool called the cell phone, and the caucuses may never be the same.
In short, campaign organizers can now call each individual caucus and attempt to move their supporters en masse to whatever candidate they choose.

He fleshes out the scenarios quite nicely, and it might only take one campaign doing it--or even lots of caucusers knowing it--to eke out a victory for Gephardt in a close contest.

Scared me for a minute, but I was buoyed by the fact that a group of Dems are about as likely to get that organized and work together that well to defeat a common adversary as the outcasts on Survivor are to topple an alliance. You can watch week after week and scream at the television: "You can stop them! All you have to do is work together--it's so obvious!" until you're blue in the face. (Almost) never happens.

The second problem is that while stopping Dean has to be the #1 priority for every other campaign, they also know that the press is dying to turn this into a two-man race. That will happen eventually, but the real question is whether it will happen to late for any of them. But the only thing worse for them than a delay is to get boxed out as the alternative.

If Gep wins Iowa and the press--stupidly, but just watch them--christens the nom a Dean-Gephardt race, then they're really screwed.

So they might be more afraid of getting squeezed out before they get their shot at Dean than they are at Dean surging ahead a little longer.

Impotent pundits still lined up against Dean

Fri, 26 Dec 2003 19:12:23 GMT

Very interesting piece this week from Eric Alterman:

Washington Goes to War (with Howard Dean)

A bit of a head shaker. He goes down the list of pundits and editorial boards still writing Dean off. Tough to stomach, but illuminating.

Just how do they keep their jobs?

Oh, right. They work for each other. And they're apparently still impressing the hell out of each other.

Speaking of writing for each other, and their incredibly inflated sense of themselves, here is the biggest howler from the piece:

In its self-appointed role as semiofficial punditocracy politburo, the Washington Post editorial board issued what ABC News's The Note properly termed "a button-popping, eye-bugging anti-Dean editorial" that it undoubtedly hoped would serve as Dean's political death sentence. Expressing editorial shock and awe over Dean's unarguably accurate observation that Saddam Hussein's capture left the United States no safer than before, Post editors termed the candidate's views to be "not just unfounded but ludicrous" and complained of his "departure from the Democratic mainstream."

The Note observed that "history might record that this piece stops The Doctor from being his party's nominee" . . .

Kinda sad, isn't it, how they invoke the word history. These are people who live/write/relate entirely for the moment. Miniscule Picture guys, reporting only what's directly in front of their eyes, with virtually no grasp of the past or future. History will record nothing about them, except perhaps a comic anecdote now and then about the court jesters howling in constantly from the sidelines, prognosticating incessantly in the gravest and earnestnest tones, almost never getting anything right, including the events right in front of them. Because they never noticed anything going on to either side.

That's the only explanation I can find. I think they really do sense how petty a role they play, how historically insignificant they are, and how at odds it is from the role they envisioned for themselves. So they squawk and quake and rant about how they're making history, in the sad silent hope they can somehow make it so.

So which is funnier: the idea that a Washington Post editorial would stop the Dean phenomenon dead in its tracks and derail his nomination, or that history would be paying attention to their petty sniping?

I guess it comes down to the same thing, huh? History might begin to notice, if the Post editorial board were suddenly elevated to kingmaker. But the Post and the Times and the networks and all the rest of the newsjesters had nothing to do with creating this Dean wave, and they're not about to stop it with a single silly editorial.

They have been doing their best to stop him for six months now, and he only keeps getting stronger. And the frustration at their impotence is really getting comical.

Howard Dean for president -- I finally get off the fence!

Wed, 24 Dec 2003 19:11:13 GMT

This is an awkward moment for me. In a whole lotta ways.

First off, the idea of a blog(ger) endorsing a candidate kinda makes me snicker. Or at least me doing it. If I were dailykos, different story. But I'm not, am I? He's topping a million readers a month and he's a real force in the political scene. Maybe more so than a lot of idiotic but widely-read newspaper pundits.

I'm doing OK. I seem to have hit a steady stream of 15,000 vists, 30,000 page-views a month. I'm happy with that, but it's not like I've got any business in the endorsement business.

So that rules out that word. But I've felt kinda bad the past several months that I'm not all the way on board with Dean. ("On board," sounds like I'm going with that.) I ruled out eight other candidates back in June, but I always held out the possibility of backing Clark if he ever got around to jumping in.

And then he did jump in, and I made it plain that I was supporting both of them. That was the second problem (I'm still coming to the first.) Some of the Deaniacs got mad at me for refusing to join them fully in The Deanquest, but it made no sense to me, for me. I was all about attending meetups, writing letters to Iowa and New Hampshire, sending in contributions and recruiting friends. But there were two really good men in the race, and both were still unproven, what sense did it make to commit before they fought it out and proved which better candidate would win?

I'm not a politician looking for political payback by endorsing early. I'm a writer observing the scene, reflecting on what transpires. I have more of an obligation to let them tear it up a bit first.

(That obligation ends with evil forces like the Bush administration. I'll stop just short of calling George Bush evil personally, but in his retarded lingo, he sure as hell been an evildoer much of the past three years. So I'm ready to get on board early with any drive to remove that blight on our history.)

And I still think it would be in Dean's best interest to fight it out a bit harder in the primaries. I guess he's taking on a bit of that now, with some of the vicious attacks from some of his fellow Dems (and that is charitably counting Lieberman among the Dems). I would have preferred a single strong challenger to take him on one-on-one, much the way Bush will in the fall, but it's not looking like that will happen.

Eventually, the press will narrow it down to a two-man contest, and it's looking pretty clearly already that the second man will be Wes Clark, but it could be too little too late, when that happens.

Maybe not. We still may get a good Dean-Clark battle, and I strongly think that will be a healthy thing for both men if it happens. I have been dreaming about that battle for six months, and planning to back whoever comes out stronger, but I'm ready now to pick Dean ahead of time, for a reason I never really considered back in the summer.

First, though, the main thing still troubling me. Because it's really troubling me.

Just as I was ready to hop off the fence half a week ago, Frank Rich published one of the best pieces ever written on Dean (so far) in the Sunday Times, which happened to outline the very ideas finally tipping me in favor of "endorsing," but lead with the very idea holding me back: "I am not a partisan of Dr. Dean or any other Democratic candidate."

Same here. Not until this post. That's a very powerful statement Frank made, because it changes the lens with which all the ensuing ideas are consumed. It means: I'm not outlining this case for how Dean has altered the process as a sneaky backhanded way to hype my candidate, I'm presenting it to you because I beleive it's true.

Everything I write here is because I beleive it's true. That's the whole point, and I really afraid of tainting that. Because that is not why a lot of people write. It's not why most of the bozos out there in the punditocracy open their mouths or pick up their pens. They've got something to sell.

I'm not here to sell you Howard Dean, and I never will be. I'm still a journalist and I'm still a writer with an independent voice. That's my primary mission.

I'd love to seen Dean elected, and sometimes I wistfully wonder what it would be like to be in Burlington at the heart of the whole thing making it happened. An acquaintance of mine, a guy named Bobby Clark, did that nearly a year ago, and I talk to him about it occasionally, and I wonder if I made the right decision. It's a hell of an exciting place to be right now. I wish I could be a bigger part of it.

But that's not my calling. I could never join Dean's payroll, because that would compromise everything else I want to do. I never want to be beholden to him, that's not what I'm here for. About three times now since I restarted this blog in June, Howard Dean has does something to piss me off, and I've said so here, loud and clear. And I intend to keep doing it.

I never want anyone to write my opinions off as just the hot air of a deanspinner. When I praise something Dean does, it has been and will continue to be because I think it's praiseworthy, not because I want the guy to win, so I'm hyping whatever crap he shits out as manna from heaven.

Let me give you an example. There's this salon blogger named Robert. Great heart, true believer, but I think the guy went way over the edge for John Kerry a long, long time ago. I have no doubt that the guy (Robert) has a strong, sincere affection for Kerry and what he stood for, and really thought the guy could win. So far, so good. But he let his Kerry dream get hold of his better judgement. Every sagging poll number somehow revealed that hidden kernel of great news. The campaign kept disintegrating, but as long as I kept reading, he just kept on reporting sunshine.

I don't expect Dean's campaign to disintegrate anytime soon, but who knows about the fall. I expect him to make mincemeat of George Bush, but never underestimate the power of incumbency. It's going to be a tough fight, and I intend to reflect on it honestly. Same with the ups and downs still ahead of us in the primaries.

There are plenty of spinmeisters out there already. I hate that shit. What's the point of reading something when you already know what they're going to say. That's what makes all that nonsense on the shouter shows like Hardball worthless.

So I'm formally backing Dean here, but I flatly refuse to spin for him.

Yes, I'm formally backing him, using the silly endorsement word if you like. (In an early, mental composition of this post about a week ago, I presented it as endorsing Wes Clark for Veep. I figured that had enough ironic distance to protect me from looking pretentious, but fuck protection. If I'm coming out all the way for Dean, I want to gush.)

Boy, do I want to gush. I said I never wanted to stifle my voice when it came time to criticizing Dean, but I'm stifling it just as badly when I hold back every week about how excited I am that the man keeps striding his way toward the white house.

Not holding back a lot, maybe. Last time I brought this up, in the early fall, somebody wrote incredulously in the comments "I had no idea you were going for objectivity." Not objectivity. Just independence. I'll say whatever I want, even if it hurts the guy I want to get elected.

But holding back enough to bug me.

So here goes:

Howard Dean should be the next president of the United States.
Howard Dean deserves the Democratic nomination for president.
I still think Wesley Clark would make a great candidate, but not as a strong a candidate as Howard Dean.
I'm formally coming out in favor of Howard Dean over Wes Clark. (And of course over all those other dwarves. Dick Gephardt? Get serious.)

I was in like with the first idea for the past 18 months (2 years) or so, ever since whenever it was he started traveling the country exploring the possibility, and I saw a bit of him and liked him.

I've been in love with the idea since the spring, when I met him in person and was tremendously impressed. He really does feel like a different kind of politician than we're used to, and I really am enthralled with the idea of getting him into the white house. And that was also the first sense I had that he might actually be a force capable of beating that shrub.

And now. Right now I am just in heaven for the guy.

But I still didn't explain the full reason that turned me around. All that handwringing on why I'm getting all the way on board the train. Jeez.

Well, it may not be that important to you, but it's really important to me.

I'll try to get back here in the next day or two on what finally hurtled me over the top.