Dean-o-phobe Jonathan Chait got an e-mail from an ex-Deaniac:
"Last night, I officially 'unsubscribed' from blogforamerica.com and instead, sent John Edwards $50. Dean's speech, was well, freaky. Less mentioned, but just as weird, was his incredibly testy interviews on both MSNBC and Larry King during the night's TV coverage. He just looked like he had a pole up his -- ."
The Note provides a public service by tapping into Dean's cyberfans:
"From ABC News Dean blog obsessor Marc Ambinder: The Dean bloggers are not happy. They:
-- uniformly seemed to dislike the ads that Dean was running. ('Spend money: hire a professional ad firm') -- hated the speech Monday night -- they want more Judy and more biography -- believe the campaign needs to focus less on the "campaign" and the process and more on health care, education, etc.
-- saw too much pessimism coming from the campaign's pronouncements Dean people in Iowa report a "bombardment" of contacts from youthful volunteers, which annoyed them. And the big Dean organization turned out to be disorganized -- a bunch of signs and stand-outs, and not enough persuasion.
They do not like the angry Dean. They do not like the tired-looking Dean. 'Get him 6-8 hours of sleep!' -- BUT -- they believe in Dean, they believe in his message, and they want to move on and win.
"Here's a sampling of comments:
"I think your concession speech last night hurt us much more than our loss in Iowa. The message was good but the delivery was awful. The shucking of the coat and rolling up the shirtsleeves, screaming at us and America was dreadful, What you need to shuck is that image we saw last night. Not very Presidential.'"
"'No more crazy jaunts to visit folks like Carter who are no longer active politicians and aren't actually endorsing us.'"
"'The press has harped for months about 'anger' and 'cynicism' surrounding this campaign, and the last few weeks did nothing but confirm Iowans views about that. Negative press didn't help, but it's time to start countering that press with the positive parts of Dean's vision that are out there. In particular, I believe Dean's concession speech last night was a colossal failure to try to recover from Iowa's loss.'" |
