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
The rain eventually stopped, the loudspeakers blared Sister Sledge's "We Are Family," the candidates held hands for the photographers, and Clinton went off to work a rope line that dipped and rose over the wet fields as people shouted, "We miss you!" He clearly missed them, too, and he didn't leave until he had shaken every hand and the daylight had faded into inky blackness. The Dean buses departed with the damp but happy faithful.
Doom, Trippi said to himself. Doom, doom, doom. Trippi was an Iowa expert. He had run tiny Jones County for Ted Kennedy in 1980, where he first met Mike Ford and the others who would become his heroes. Kennedy lost, but in 1984 Trippi ran the entire state for Walter Mondale and won easily. In 1988, he was deputy campaign manager in charge of media and message for Dick Gephardt and again worked with Mike Ford and again won Iowa. He would go on to other campaigns in other places, but Iowa would always be his specialty, the place whose mood he could sense in his gut. And now his gut told him that Iowa could not be won by Howard Dean. Trippi went back to Dean headquarters in Burlington, Vt., with his gut still in turmoil but an idea hatching in his head. Iowa was going to be a disaster? Then forget Iowa. Abandon Iowa and just go to New Hampshire! Trippi would hold a news conference and say, "We are not going to spend $6 million in Iowa just to prove we can beat Dick Gephardt. So the real fight's now in New Hampshire. Dick, God bless you, go take Iowa; it's yours, baby!" (Trippi's special insight did not extend to foreseeing the eventual winner of Iowa: Gephardt would come in fourth.) Trippi revealed his plans to Paul Maslin, the campaign's pollster, who pointed out that Dean was leading in the polls in Iowa and suggested that maybe Trippi's plan was a little extreme. After the campaign, when asked if he ever told Howard Dean of his plan, Trippi said he could not remember. In fact, Dean first learned of it from U.S. News in an interview for this article and was shocked. "I can assure you he never said that," Dean said. "I never heard that. Nobody ever said that in this campaign."
Trippi eventually abandoned his abandon-Iowa plan. In his new book, he repeats his contention that he knew Dean couldn't win Iowa and bemoans the fact that at the time he was the only one who could see it. But the worst part, Trippi writes, is that there was "nothing more" he could do.
Virtually everyone in the leadership of the Dean campaign disagreed. September is still very, very early in terms of the Iowa caucuses, which were held on January 19 of this year, and no matter how screwed up the campaign was at the time of the Harkin steak fry, there was still plenty of time to set it right. Almost everybody on the campaign, including Dean, knew exactly what Trippi could do: He could go to Iowa. But the battle to get Trippi to go to Iowa threatened to tear the campaign apart.
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