Frontrunner's Fall, Part two - The result was crystal clear: 56 percent of Iowans took our view on the war, and only 35 percent agreed with Gephardt. The ad Steve McMahon and Mark Squier produced the following week had just the right tone to be deadly effective: as the screen showed a picture of Gephardt in the White House Rose Garden with Bush and other congressional leaders, a female announcer declared, "October 2002—Dick Gephardt agrees to co-author the Iraq War resolution, giving George Bush the authority to go to war"; the spot switched soon after to Dean's saying "I opposed the war in Iraq and I'm against spending another $87 billion there." We didn't need a focus group to tell us this would be a devastating ad. But we needed to wait before running it, because the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines was slated for the upcoming weekend, with Hillary Clinton as the emcee. We didn't want to strike the first negative blow of the campaign before such a high-profile event.
Our ad began to air the week following that dinner, on Monday, November 17. For several days Gephardt's campaign didn't respond, and when it did, its ad was confusing. It tried to allege that Dean had actually supported Bush's recent funding request—and that he had promised not to attack other candidates for backing it. This kind of debate about the war was just what the doctor had ordered. We shot back into the lead. In this poll nearly 60 percent of Iowans said Dean was the candidate who could best be described as opposing the war, and 40 percent fingered Gephardt as the candidate who could best be described as favoring it.
Once again, we thought we had learned an important lesson: the war could bail us out of trouble. But we failed to notice a big problem with our singling out Gephardt as the pro-war candidate: almost no Iowans were thinking of Kerry and Edwards as candidates who had supported the war, even though both had supported the original resolution.
Tapping The Egg
ll of us involved in the Dean campaign made mistakes, for sure. But to be fair, our candidate's erratic judgment, loose tongue, and overall stubbornness wore our spirits down. He refused to be scripted, to be disciplined, or to discipline himself, in his remarks about everything from the Red Sox and the Yankees to Middle Eastern diplomacy. I later likened it all to repeatedly tapping an egg against the edge of a kitchen counter: eventually the egg would break. That's what happened in Iowa.
Several times during the campaign we had attempted to change the cast of characters accompanying Dean, so someone could help shield him from increasingly tough or persistent media questioning or, at least, recognize and fix problems on the spot. We desperately needed an "adult" (preferably one the candidate knew and respected) to help provide some stability around him, or simply to take him to the woodshed when he did screw up, to reduce the chances of its happening again. Such a person didn't exist in Howard Dean's personal orbit, and the campaign never found one for the job.
But the bigger problem was Dean himself—the enemies he had made and the process that had made him a target. The other campaigns' responses to our success intensified in the fall. At one point Gephardt's campaign created a Web site, Deanfacts.com, reserved for attacks on Dean's record. John Kerry chafed at all the media attention we were getting and once muttered in frustration, "Dean. Dean. Dean. Dean. Dean," not realizing he was near a live mike.
What did we expect? Our candidate was the front-runner. But then we made ourselves more vulnerable with our handling of his gubernatorial records.
Before his run for President, Dean had decided to seal some of his records for ten years, and when he was asked about it in Vermont, in January of 2003, he made a curious statement. Although he later claimed that he had been speaking in jest, he basically admitted that he had wanted to avoid potential embarrassment in some future race. This campaign prided itself on trying to make American politics more transparent and accessible, and Dean had railed at the secret energy commission chaired by Dick Cheney—and yet had sealed his records, seemingly for the sake of personal ambition.
By early December the press was ready to pounce. Dean had changed his tactic, basically trying to go mano a mano with another former governor. "I'll unseal mine," he said, "if he will unseal his." The problem was that technically Bush's Texas gubernatorial records were "open," even though in practice getting access to them would be time-consuming. Within a day the campaign staff realized that our position was untenable. We tried to talk a reluctant Dean into authorizing a full release, hopeful that any damaging revelations might still be months away. We were hoping, at any rate, that they would come out after Iowa and New Hampshire.
At first Dean seemed receptive, and even seemed to suggest a forthcoming full disclosure to the media, but he first wanted to discuss the issue with us in person. On Wednesday, December 3, in the campaign's ratty Burlington conference room, Dean met with about fifteen of his senior campaign staffers and top consultants. I felt that failing to release the records would be more damaging than anything the records might contain. It would fly in the face of the campaign's whole message of openness and change, and would reveal Dean as just another politician. But others, who had known him longer, were more circumspect. They were particularly concerned about the weekly memos Dean was given as governor, on which he would write comments. Nobody could remember a precise example, but all, including Dean himself, thought that he had probably insulted many major political players in Vermont in those comments, including Democrats and Democratic-leaning interest groups.
Dean was increasingly uncomfortable with the discussion, and I felt some regret for pressing so hard when, in the end, he lowered his head and said to us all, but mostly to himself, "I'd rather end the campaign than have the world see everything." Seldom have I heard a candidate so open about his feelings (one of Dean's refreshing qualities); more seldom still have I seen someone on the brink of political success be so conflicted about it. To this day I am convinced that no "smoking gun" exists in those records. What is probably there is an accumulation of cuts from a man who routinely made acidic or even profane comments to all around him, in conversation and in writing.
I felt worse half an hour later, when—after Dean had left the headquarters having decided not to release the records—Trippi called McMahon, Squier, and me into his office. He shut the door and said in a compassionate voice, rare for him, "He just lost it in here. He basically told me that he never thought he'd be in this position. Never thought he could ever win. Never thought it would come to all this. He was just about in tears, and for once, I really feel for him. He said, 'I don't know why I say the things I do.' He ain't gonna release the records, even if it costs us everything."
Saddam Hussein And Al Gore
On December 9 Al Gore endorsed Howard Dean. The next Saturday, December 13, Saddam Hussein was captured near Tikrit. The former seemed like a huge boost for Dean's prospects: a day later Dean rose to a double-digit lead in Iowa. But ultimately both events were setbacks.
Dean was already scheduled to give a foreign-policy address in Los Angeles the Monday after Saddam's capture. In a rare moment when he, the policy staff, Trippi, and the consultants agreed that playing "front-runner" was smart, he had planned to give a reassuring speech. He would not back down from his opposition to the war in Iraq, but he would remind the media and the foreign-policy establishment that he had supported the 1991 Gulf War, the war in Kosovo, and the war in Afghanistan. The implied message was that although his view of the world differed greatly from Bush's, he was very much in the mainstream of foreign-policy thinking. A brief section was added to address the news of the day. Then, as he was being driven to the speech, Dean inserted an entirely new line: "The capture of Saddam Hussein has not made America safer."
The best thing about Howard Dean is his willingness to say what he thinks and stand his ground. There is no question in my mind—and, as it turns out, most Democrats' minds—that his statement was dead on. But to hear our opponents and the press tell it, Dean had just told the American people that two plus two equals sixty-seven. The reaction hurt us immediately in Iowa.
We polled previous caucus attendees just after the endorsement, and three days after Saddam's capture we polled again. I was stunned to find that our lead had been sliced to just three points, with Kerry now in second place. Dean's favorability rating had also taken a hit for the first time in the campaign.
Favorability Ratings (1-100 scale)
Candidate Dec. 9-10 Dec. 16-18
Dean 69.4 63.7
Gephardt 64.3 66.0
Kerry 63.4 66.5
Edwards 59.2 59.8
In one week Dean's rating had dropped from No. 1 among the four major candidates to No. 3. Nearly six points may not seem like much, but it was the single biggest weekly drop we ever found for any candidate in this race. And for the first time John Kerry's rating was now the highest, by a slim margin. Perhaps most ominous, we had measured Al Gore's favorability rating at the time of the endorsement and a week later; it fell from 61.4 to 58.9. Was there a backlash against Gore himself, perhaps because the media were giving full attention to his failure to make even a heads-up call to Lieberman, his former running mate? Probably so. But there was something else afoot—something that, it is now clear, was a portent.
In the eyes of the media Gore's endorsement had branded Dean as the man to beat. Indeed, from that point on a majority of likely caucus-goers felt that Dean would probably win the caucuses and go on to capture the nomination. But in one important subgroup of Iowans a plurality said that Gore's endorsement made them less likely to support Dean. This group was made up of Gore's own supporters in the 2000 caucuses. I did a double take when I saw those results, as did everyone I told about them. They were entirely counterintuitive, but further review revealed their supporting logic.
Al Gore's 2000 voters were party regulars, as much committed to Bill Clinton as to Gore. Some probably blamed Gore for the 2000 defeat.
Gore's 2000 voters were older and more blue-collar than the supporters of his opponent, the former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley. That didn't fit the Dean-voter profile in Iowa.
Gore's 2000 voters were classic Iowa caucus-goers: proud of their role in the process, and not about to let anyone tell them what to do—not the media, and not even the party's former standard-bearer.
So a week after Gore's endorsement—the most stunning event in a consistently surprising campaign, and an event that seemed to many to lock up the nomination for Dean—we were faced with the realization that it had little if any value.
Black Sunday
On Thursday, January 8, the Dean campaign was rocked by the news that NBC was airing a videotape of its candidate, as a guest commentator on a Canadian public-affairs program several years earlier, criticizing the Iowa caucuses. The tape dominated Iowa news coverage through the following weekend, even overshadowing Dean's endorsement by the popular Tom Harkin. Then, that Sunday, January 11, came three negative developments: the state's dominant newspaper, The Des Moines Register, endorsed John Edwards; Dean shouted down a Republican heckler at a campaign event; and, exhausted and unbriefed, Dean was forced to admit, under fire from Al Sharpton, that he had never hired an African-American to a cabinet post during his time as the governor of Vermont.
ur poll that Sunday night, a week before the caucuses, showed the expected results: Dean had now fallen into a virtual three-way tie with Kerry and Gephardt, and Edwards was riding close on our heels. Our favorability rating had plummeted to a new low, just as those of Kerry and Edwards had started to rise, in part because they were liberally borrowing our message of populism and empowerment. I had seen this movie before: after weeks of declining support, Paul Simon had received the Register's endorsement and surged in the final week before the 1988 Iowa caucuses, and had nearly caught Gephardt. I began to think that Edwards might win and Dean might finish third.
Dean, Trippi, and our strategic team huddled on the telephone early the next morning and made a quick decision: we needed to put out a negative ad about Gephardt and Iraq again, this time with pictures of Kerry and Edwards tacked on, in an attempt to associate them with a pro-war position. We never tested this ad. We never even had an extensive discussion about the pros and cons of running it. It was the biggest mistake we could have made, and it kept me up at night for weeks afterward. Someone—and why not I?—should have thought through the precise implications of the ad copy and its likely impact on the entire field.
When we ran the ad, it barely brushed the intended targets—Kerry and Edwards—but delivered a devastating blow to Gephardt. Quite naturally, he fought back—with a "kitchen sink" negative ad on us, which ran midweek. That ad, which attacked Dean's views on Medicare and Social Security, snuffed out what little chance we had left at victory—Dean and Gephardt were both increasingly seen by Iowans as running negative campaigns. The exchange, called off within days by both sides, nevertheless sent us hurtling to a crushing defeat instead of a narrow loss that we should have been able to endure. Had the vote been closer, I believe, there would have been no "I have a scream" speech on caucus night. All the habits we had learned so early in this race—work fast, use Iraq, be aggressive—were coming back to haunt us.
The Perfect Storm
Once the Dean campaign opted out of public financing and was free to spend as much as it chose in Iowa, Joe Trippi endorsed a "flood the zone" strategy. The campaign would keep up its expensive TV-advertising schedule. But flooding the zone also meant unleashing paid staff members, volunteers, and every other possible organizational tool to rouse the likely caucus-goers in Iowa. A final stage of this effort brought in thousands of out-of-state volunteers to make phone calls, stand on street corners, and go door-to-door across the state.
've long felt that campaigns are akin to high-altitude climbing. You make your plans in the fresh, oxygen-filled air of sea level. You gradually journey up, working as a team, dealing with each challenge as it presents itself. But in a campaign's final days, when the key decisions must be made, you're in the equivalent of the death zone, harried and short of time and breath. If you do the wrong thing, the consequences are fatal. Our team was a good one, and we generally worked well together. Howard Dean had the right temperament to make truly tough decisions. He listened carefully, asked questions, and was decisive when he needed to be. But the experience of the climb had worn us all down by the time of the Iowa vote. The summit was receding into the clouds.
Thirty-five hundred mostly young out-of-state Dean supporters descended on Iowa for what the Iowa campaign staff had billed as the "Perfect Storm." Iowans had applauded Dean throughout the campaign for his ability to bring new energy and volunteers to the political process—and the Stormers, as we called them, seemed like a perfect example. People we'd polled had told us that they'd been impressed by the letters out-of-staters had written them about Dean. But now things seemed to be changing.
The Stormers ventured out into the bitter cold of that last weekend, wearing their trademark orange hats, and the Iowans politely said no, thank you. One can certainly speculate that we went deep into overkill. A woman in a focus group had told us that she was sick of being called again and again by Deaniacs; multiply her by thousands. One can also assume that Iowans, stubborn to the end, were tired of being told it "must" be Dean—whether by the news media or Al Gore or Tom Harkin or a bunch of kids in orange hats. Surely many voters had simply turned the wheel beyond Dean to somebody they considered a more solid possible President.
The entrance polls on caucus night were harsh and decisive: we would finish a poor third to Kerry and Edwards. We met Dean at his new campaign bus to discuss the events to follow. Dean was in no mood to linger in Iowa. A late flight awaited to what he hoped would be a more welcoming venue, in New Hampshire, but first he had to endure the necessary parade of network interviewers, all wanting him to tell them what went wrong.
We tried hard to cheer him up, and we explained the importance of seeming confident in those interviews. He did beautifully in each of them. But nobody had bothered to write up a concession speech or even a few lines to use when he faced the crowd waiting in the Val Air Ballroom, many of them Stormers. It was as if we were all in shock, and didn't even consider the importance of his first election-night appearance in front of a national television audience. A week later, in New Hampshire, we and he wouldn't make that mistake. But by then it was too late. Dean needed an immediate release that night in Iowa—a release from the pounding, the pressure, and the poor finish.
It came in the form of that famous speech—and somehow it was fitting that in this roller-coaster ride of a campaign, which Joe Trippi and Howard Dean had both bragged was a fifty-state campaign, the candidate's doom would consist simply of the shouted words "South Carolina" ... "Arizona" ... "New Mexico" ... "Michigan," ending with The Scream.
A few weeks after Iowa, Dean went to Madison, Wisconsin, my home town, for a last-ditch effort in the Wisconsin primary. On the day he arrived, he was surprisingly upbeat, almost jovial—in part because his wife, Judy, accompanied him, and in part because he had returned to Vermont the night before to watch his son's high school hockey team win 5-0. I felt, though, that his mood stemmed more from his coming to terms with the extraordinary experience of his extraordinary campaign, despite its quick and brutal demise. As he left his final event to head to the airport, we spotted a kid with an orange hat. "Do you think it could be ...?" I wondered out loud—and sure enough, as the kid turned toward us we saw the words THE PERFECT STORM emblazoned on his hat.
I thought Dean might have the van stop so he could greet his supporter. But he just looked at him for a few seconds and then turned back to us and said, "They may have fucked up Iowa, but they sure changed America." We all laughed, particularly Dean himself, still happy from his day with Judy. But I immediately realized, as I think he did too, that he could just as easily have said "we" instead of "they."
The URL for this page is theatlantic.com. |
