Turning Point
After nearly everyone had written him off, John Kerry turned a limping campaign into a force that couldn't be beat. Here's How
In the end, he decided that it did not matter. The scream, that is. Howard Dean had delivered what many considered one of the most damaging political speeches in history, but Dean felt it didn't matter at all. "We had just lost Iowa," he said. "And whoever lost Iowa was going to lose the nomination." It was that simple. Though the candidates and their campaigns would stumble on for several weeks, in the end it was all about where it had begun--it was all about Iowa. Steve Elmendorf, who was Dick Gephardt's chief of staff, said, "In my experience, John Kerry winning Iowa was the single most important victory anyone has ever had." The mysterious Michael Whouley, Kerry's secret weapon in Iowa, agreed. "The Iowa caucuses," he said, "won us the nomination."
The political world had been turned upside down. It had been almost universally recognized by the media that Dean and Gephardt had the best organizations in Iowa and that Kerry and John Edwards could barely compete with them. In reality, the opposite was true, but reality in Iowa was often hidden from view. When the dust had settled, the front-runner had been fatally wounded, and the also-ran now ran in front. Yet for all their importance in determining the Democratic nominee, the Iowa caucuses have been the subject of little real scrutiny. An examination by U.S. News, based on dozens of interviews and a review of contemporaneous notes of participants and campaign documents, shows how the caucuses were won--and why they were lost. One conclusion: In Iowa, a friendly little place with an oddball voting system, almost nothing was as it seemed.
Howard Dean had instructed his campaign to build him a "juggernaut" in Iowa, but instead they built him a house of cards on a foundation of sand. Dependent on bogus or incompetent counts of Dean supporters gathered by enthusiastic but inexperienced campaign workers; racked by deep conflicts within the Dean senior staff; lacking coordination between state headquarters in Des Moines and national headquarters in Burlington, Vt.; and with a relationship between campaign manager and candidate that was largely dysfunctional, the Dean campaign devoted much of its time to presenting a supremely confident, and largely false, face to the media. The result was predictable (though few predicted it): Dean came in third in Iowa with 18 percent of the vote. But it was even worse than that. His top aides had told reporters (and Dean) that the former Vermont governor couldn't lose Iowa. In fact, Dean won only two tiny counties, Lyon and Jefferson, out of 99. "Lyon and Jefferson are microscopic counties," said Tim Dickson, one of Dean's top field organizers in Iowa. "In those counties, a family of eight shows up for Dean and they skew the whole thing."
Dean's only two victories, in other words, were flukes. Though Dean tied in two other counties, one could argue that if he had had no field operation, no precinct captains, no 3,500 people in orange hats, and no expenditure of $6 million, he could hardly have done worse.
advertisement
