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| Monday, January 19, 2004 |
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Letters 
| | I'm not for Dean, not against him. Edwards has a lot going for him although more mileage wouldn't hurt and the Democrats (read Teddy Kennedy) are for Kerry but I'm not against him, either, although he looks and acts like a taxidermist's experiment sometimes. |
| | Because once more the other 49 states sit in stunned silence while less than 100,000 folks in one of the most undiversified states pick a candidate like a school ground at recess picks a team captain. America has to wonder: |
| | "When will we really be able to have a national election in this country?" |
| | The primary system, the caucuses, the electoral college...they were never about the autonomy of the states. That is what congress represents. No, they are about making sure there are no grass roots. They were established to ensure that the unpropertied and undereducated masses would never be able to take control from the moneyed and privileged. |
| | It is archaic. And a laughing stock. But since it is a system so many pundits understand, they worship it. To hell with issues - all the media wants to talk about is polls and numbers. |
| | May the sanity of a New England town meeting prevail. |
| | How is this for a theory? (I'm serious about this.) The Dean volunteers and troops contacted and nagged and pushed the same potential caucus-goers so repeatedly that people just looked for a way to "punish" them by voting for someone else. I honestly think that's how I would have felt...so sick of upbeat, orange-hatted people calling, knocking, etc. |
| | Now you got two in the upcoming 2004 Super Bowls. |
| | That last one makes the point, which I had missed, that the two winners in Iowa are from Carolina and New England. |
Stats
The roots speak
| | One scorched blade, and one green as ever. Both at Daily Kos. |
| | My faith is shaken. Process is very important to me, and the process broke down tonight in circumstances that should have been ideal for Dean campaign. There's no way around it. |
| | I'm talking about all the promise of the Dean campaign. New voters. An energized electorate. Rebuilding the party. |
| | None of that materialized tonight in Iowa. Granted, it's just Iowa. But Dean didn't just lose tonight - he didn't even compete. |
| | Maybe I was overoptimistic. Maybe Dean's chances are as good as ever and I was being unrealistic, but tonight has hit me hard. |
| | It's not difficult to see rationally how things might turn around, but at this point I find I'm left to hope. And as the old saying goes, hope is not a plan. |
| | Okay. So I'm a little disappointed. I was hoping Dean would win or place second. He didn't. This makes our job in NH that much tougher. But I wasn't freaking out. Like my mom was... |
| | I'm still a little in shock I guess but from here it doesn't look all that bad. Our biggest pain in the ass, Dick Gephardt is dropping out. The left is going to have to consolidate around Dean or else a centrist like Edwards or Kerry or a Republican like Clark is going to drive this party over a cliff. Back when I first got into Dean, I didn't think he'd be able to pull 3rd in Iowa. It looks like what happened between Gephardt and Dean in Iowa is going to happen to Kerry and Clark in NH. Dean's in position to become the comeback kid. Kerry'll gloat about his Mo' and won't be able to afford any other states. Howard's at his best when he's in the underdog slot. We're at our best when we feel the media fucked us over. They've already done the studies, the results are in: the media has been fucking us over. |
| | Note to Dean's Meetup Guru: Maybe sending letters to states is a total goddamn waste of time. |
| | Note to Dennis Kucinich: Go fuck yourself. |
| | Note to John Kerry: That was cute how you flyered Grimace in our own parking lot. I will take you down you slimy shithead. |
| | Note to my mom: deep breaths. Chill on the CNN for a while. Get down to Delaware and start organizing. |
| | Note to Howard: You have the power to take this race back. I'm coming to see you tonight at 2am in Portsmouth. |
Organics
| | ...the big sea change I am noticing at the moment is a good number of the a list news information blogs are getting clobbered. Can't get into command post or instapundit. And the amazing thing is Dave is on to something. When an RSS feed beats the major nets that tells me something... |
| | Losing is hard. Losing the first race is harder. Losing when you thought you were going to win is hardest. How did it happen? Some Tuesday morning theories: 1. Turnout. With 1601 of 1993 precincts reporting attendance was 96476. The final number looks to be under 120,000. That's not a very big number. Dean's pre-caucus "hard count" was 40,000, that is, we expected to get at least 40,000 people into the caucuses. We got about 25,000. 2. Iowa Democrats bought the "Dean is not electable" meme. Sorry, they did. Kerry successfully spun his pro-war vote as candor, Edwards spun his good looks and positive outlook as winning, and the media relentlessly spun our passion as anger. Everything Dean tried in the last few days -- the Carter visit, Judy's visit to Davenport -- came off as desperate. 3. Iowans like outsiders, to a point. The meme that went out about the orange-hatted "Perfect Storm" volunteers was that they were "Perfect Stormtroopers." That's harsh, mean, false, but many of the people who caucused believed it. 4. Iowa eliminates people, but it doesn't select a nominee. A lot of Iowa Democrats wanted to make John Edwards and John Kerry viable. In the end I think our huge effort showed many Dean didn't need them, and they rejected Dick Gephardt. This week we must find a way to beat the "Dean can't win" meme. The press is not going to let up. And, thanks to Iowa, Republicans will sleep well tonight, figuring the "circular firing squad" will destroy whoever the Democrats nominate. All that said, remember that primaries are easier to participate in than caucuses. People have all day to vote. They can vote privately. We've got to get our people out, there and in the 7 states that vote a week later. Just remember the stakes. Edwards and Clark have unilaterally disarmed against the Bush $200 million. Kerry is going to fight back with ketchup. This is the only campaign that can go toe-to-toe with the GOP through the summer. That's how you beat the electability meme... |
| | 1. Turnout wins caucuses. About 90,000 wound up going to the Iowa caucuses. The Dean "hard count" (the minimum he thought would turn out for him) was 40,000. He got 18,000. |
| | 2. Broadcast still trumps the Internet. While the Dean "Perfect Storm" was raging in the streets, everyone was spinning for Kerry and Edwards in the studios. The studios won. |
| | 3. Iowa is not definitive. Just ask Presidents Robertson, Harkin, and Forbes, Iowa winners all. It does thin the herd, of course. Dick Gephardt has been thinned-out. |
| | 4. Caucuses are an insider's game. Political insiders are easier to spin than other people. |
| | 5. You can deliver online results in a statewide race. The Iowa Democratic Party'sCaucus2004 board was fair, balanced and accurate. |
Lookers
| | I just saw Howard Dean concede Iowa to Kerry and Edwards (currently at 37% and 33%, with Dean at 18%) on CNN. Impressive. |
| | Not sure what to make of it. The Dean folks have to be disappointed. After hanging out at Dean HQ the last two days (as a reporter, not as an advisor — I need to be clear about that), I feel for them. To have worked so hard, for so long, and to have invested so much hope and faith in their organization, their messages, their candidate ... and to come in a distant third to a pair of guys everybody was writing off until a few weeks ago... ouch. It's hard for me — as it is for Bob Dole, who just said the same thing a few minutes ago on CNN — to believe that a large and committed grass roots organization would obtain such disappointing results. |
| | But how disappointing is it, really? As Dole just said on one of the channels, he came in third in Iowa the year he won the nomination. Jeff Greenfield on CNN just ran down a long roster of Iowa losers who went on to win the party nomination. |
| | My take is that the Iowa story comes down to looks. Kerry and Edwards present themselves very well. They're attractive on TV. Media-friendly. Telegenic. Watching Edwards right now, he sounds so much like Bill Clinton, talking about "hope and optimism," it's like some kind of re-run. New stars, same ball game. |
| | Dean is the only star of a whole new ball game: one that's all-grass-roots, no special interests. Great game, but not one that's playing on TV. And most of us still watch hours and hours of TV every single night. |
| | Jeff Greenfield on CNN: "They dated Dean, they married Kerry." |
| | A reporter from Dean Headquarters: "Kerry and Edwards stole Dean's message and drove it up the middle." Not quite verbatim, but close enough. |
| | What a disaster for the new politics. Dean could play in the new world, but as JFK showed in 1960, it wasn't enough to be great on TV. He had to win the machines first. Dean won the internet in July, but lost Iowa in February. |
| | What happened? In simple terms, Dean's rivals all focussed on bashing the front-runner. His gaffes were broadcast far and wide; and his record examined in such excruciating detail that many began to fear he was too much of a liability to be elected. |
| | You've also seen something else -- a complete, desperate, onslaught on Dean and you to do everything they can to stop you. Those of you who've lived in Iowa have seen and heard negative spin about Dean regularly -- nitpicking, angry-calling, a sense that the others have joined forces to resist the change that you are serious about making happen. |
| | You've seen other candidates effectively move here, throwing everything at a single state campaign to stop you while you've continued to build a national campaign. |
| | Its painful that it has an effect, but it does have an effect... |
| | But we learn much more from failure than from success, don't we? For the Dean folks, I sure hope so. |
Vast from the past
| | That's a photo I took a couple years back of a quote by Martin Luther King etched into glass at his memorial fountain at Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco. Glad I found a place to use it. Sorry to say we still need it. |
Handicapping
Syndication Nation
| | I knew something was up when I saw Dave hanging at Dean HQ the last couple days. I've already dragged and dropped it into my agregator. Works very nicely. Here's the story. |
Making the least of a good thing
| | NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe announced today that the Space Hubble Telescope, the pride of astronomers everywhere, will be re-tasked with a new mission: homeland security. In order to carry out its new mission, the next shuttle team will fly up to the satellite and turn it around so it can face the earth. |
| | "While a sad day for science, it is a great day for our nation's security," O'Keefe said. "With Hubble, we'll not only be able to track the license plates of terrorist cars, but be able to count the hairs on terrorists heads, and read the second hand on terrorists' watches. We'll be able to zoom in in real time to observe the movements of any man, woman, child, dog, cat, or flea anywhere on the earth. |
The most important form of union support
| | Today it isn't a matter of being tall, not too dark, and handsome; it's all about gender presentation... |
| | Dean is the only major Democratic candidate to evade the sissifying barbs of the GOP's shock-jock surrogates. |
| | something about the President's swagger lends itself to parody. It looks as forced and fragile as it is. Molly Ivins, an acute student of Bush's persona, says it combines three strands of Texas culture: "religiosity, anti-intellectualism, and machismo. The machismo is what I think is fake." If conditions grow grim, the doubts about his masculinity that have haunted Bush throughout his political life will reappear. One reason Dean smells blood in Iraq is that a quagmire there will resonate with what Texans used to say about Dubya: "All hat and no cattle." In the macho imagination, nothing is worse than a belligerent claim that can't be supported. This is why the slogan of Bush's warship visitation — "Mission Accomplished" — is a potential liability for him and a gift to Dean. |
| | I think all this stuff is a bit of a stretch, but astute and close to a point that didn't dawn on me until last night, in the middle of a conversation over dinner with Dean campaign staffers and volunteers. As they told war stories about the history of the campaign it became clear that, of all the bold things Dean has done, the one with the most importance may not be his stand against the war, but his actions as governor on behalf of civil unions. |
| | This is a true civil rights issue, and Dean's early support for those rights will be a growing advantage as time goes on. |
discuss
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