  
Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry tops recent polls of likely Iowa caucus-goers. Because liberal Internet media darling Howard Dean doesn't top the Iowa polls like he's supposed to, the liberal Internet media dismiss the polls (they love to deride the phrase "likely caucus-goers") and continue to give Dean the disproportionate amount of coverage that they've always given him. (Note that the Magic 8 Ball also says that Kerry is going to take Iowa.)
Iowa polls and beyond the Iowa polls
The mantra of the liberal Internet media (that's redundant, isn't it?) is that the polls coming out of Iowa, which holds its caucuses for the Democratic presidential nomination on Monday night, don't matter.
(For the record, I consider polls to be an indicator of how an election is likely to turn out. They aren't crystal balls, but they're better than Magic 8 Balls. They are better than nothing.)
Of course, most of the liberal Internet media explicitly or tacitly endorse Howard Dean; reading their election coverage, you'd think that he were the only candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Even though John Kerry is on top in the Iowa polls and his surge is quite newsworthy -- it has long been considered a given that Dean would handily win Iowa and that Kerry would be lucky to come in second -- I see little coverage in the liberal Internet media of Kerry's surge to the top of the polls in Iowa.
About all I see in the liberal Internet media is that the Iowa polls don't matter. (Of course, if Dean were topping the polls, as he is supposed to be, suddenly they'd matter.)
Even if Kerry wins Iowa, which he certainly might, I don't expect to see much coverage of it in the liberal Internet media, because their guy was supposed to win but didn't. They'll grudgingly report Kerry's win, but they certainly won't gush about it, not the way they certainly would have gushed if their guy had won, like he was supposed to.
I've covered the Iowa polls enough, so let me just say quickly that Kerry is on top of the Des Moines Register's Jan. 13-16 poll, with 26 percent (see the graph above), and now I'll address the topic about which the liberal Internet media are abuzz: The ability of the candidates to get their Iowan supporters to go to the caucuses. Conventional wisdom has it that Dean and Richard Gephardt have the best-organized "ground troops" (volunteers) in Iowa. Perhaps they do.
But it looks like Kerry has tapped into a group of Iowans that could deliver the state to him.
Reports Salon (one of the liberal Internet media that explicitly or tacitly endorse Dean):
Kerry hopes to receive a boost from his fellow veterans, and they're likely to constitute a sizable chunk of Monday's caucus-goers.
At 10:30 last Thursday night at Kerry campaign headquarters on Locust Street, as a few dozen staff and volunteers were clearing out space amid the scattered papers and half-empty pizza boxes for another meeting, state communications director Laura Capps described the final push. She said that through phone banks, the Kerry campaign had built up enough core supporters -- "definite caucus-goers" -- among Iowa's veterans to surpass anything seen in past Democratic caucuses. "We're going to have 10,000 veterans caucusing for us," she said.
In a four-way race in which the highest estimates for turnout hover around 150,000, that would be a significant achievement. And the campaign is hoping to get more mileage out of Kerry's military credentials starting tonight, when former U.S. Sen. Max Cleland, a veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam, begins a statewide tour of Kerry's "Veteran's Brigade."
In addition, Kerry has the endorsement of 27 Iowa state representatives, more than any other candidate. While the local legislators don't exactly have the star power of some of the other political endorsements in the race, they could have an outsized impact in a caucus system by spreading out to different sites on caucus night to work the room for Kerry.
While I read so much about Dean's and Gephardt's organizations in Iowa, it sounds like Kerry has his own competitive game plan.
And I can't help but wonder whether Dean's strategy in Iowa is going to backfire. According to Salon, Dean has unleashed upon Iowa some 3,500 volunteers from out of state who are wearing orange knit caps (which they probably think is pretty cool but I think is pretty stupid). Dean's oranged-capped lemmings aren't just trying to get Dean's already-converted to go to the caucuses on Monday night; they're trying to win new converts, too.
A thousand oranged-capped lemmings for Dean probably aren't going to convince an Iowan who has already made up his mind to support, say, Kerry or Gephardt, to switch his support to Dean. (Recent polls of likely Iowa caucus-goers indicate that no more than about 15 percent of them are undecided.)
In fact, if a flood of people, the majority of them from other states and easily identifiable by their tacky orange caps, converged upon my state to tell me to vote for their candidate, I'd be pretty turned off by the presumptuous, pushy outsiders and would be less likely to vote for their candidate.
I would see their convergence upon my state for what it is: An attempt to win by sheer saturation, rather than by substance, and I'd be more likely to vote for an underdog.
Which, by the way, appears to be exactly what is happening in Iowa: Iowans, who know fully well that they are "supposed" to support Dean or Gephardt, are throwing their new support to former underdog Kerry and to underdog John Edwards, while support for Dean and Gephardt drops or remains flat. (Iowa's largest newspapers seem to like an underdog, too; they have been endorsing Kerry and Edwards, not Dean and Gephardt. Whether the newspapers' endorsements reflect the opinions of their readers or whether the newspapers' endorsements carry a lot of weight with their readers I'm not sure.)
At any rate, if I were an Iowan, an Iowan veteran asking me to support John Kerry would carry a lot more weight than would a bunch of oranged-capped, pierced and tatted hipsters transported en masse from out of state asking me to support Howard Dean.
In Iowa, Team Dean might learn the lesson that in some states, substance still matters more than sheer numbers and hype.
1:23:07 AM 
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