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 an interview, Trippi compared Iowa to two cars rushing headlong into each other. "When the cars were far apart, they didn't ask me to go to Iowa," Trippi said. "But now that the cars are about to crash, they said, 'Trippi, go to Iowa, and step in between them.'" But the cars were still far apart in September, when Trippi says he felt Iowa was going to be a disaster. Even by late 2003, Kerry was still very far down in the polls, his campaign was considered pretty much a national joke, and his ability to raise money was dropping to near zero. "Our strategy worked," Trippi said. "Kerry's face was in the mud. He was broke and out of it. Then he writes himself a check for $6.4 million and he's back in." Not quite: Kerry writes himself a check for $6.4 million and puts a lot of it into Iowa, where he has a strategy, a skilled local staff, and Michael Whouley. In the end, the Dean campaign did assemble what experienced Iowa hands were available, but they got to Iowa pretty late. Tim Dickson, who ended up managing the Dean field operations in Iowa, was proud of the team but was under no illusions. "I'm local to Iowa," he said, "but this is my 19th year of not receiving mail in the state. You know, I just had been away for a long time." One of the first things Dickson's team did was take a look at the Ones, which numbered about 23,000 at the time. Then they tried to apply a more disciplined definition of what a One was. They also ran into the Vietnam body-count problem. Some Ones didn't appear to exist. After Dickson's first check, he slashed the number of Ones by 50 percent. It was necessary but depressing. Overnight, half of Dean's support in Iowa had disappeared.
Trippi knew the situation was critical, but he points out that, unlike Whouley, Trippi was the manager of the entire campaign and had to think past Iowa to other states. "Yeah, I could have gone to Iowa and eked things out," Trippi said. "But then we would have been dead." It was a stunning miscalculation. Without a victory in Iowa, the Dean campaign was dead. Worrying about what came after Iowa was not worth worrying about. In 2004, it was win Iowa or go home. Kerry understood it, shifted the focus of his campaign, mortgaged his house, and staked everything on one state. Dean understood it, too. He just couldn't get it done.
Meet the Machine
When you think of Iowa--if you ever think of Iowa--you think of farmers on tractors, cornstalks in the field, and hogs in their pens. You do not think of John Mauro. Mauro, 63, is a small, solidly built man with curly gray hair, a firm handshake, and a ready smile. He wears a gold watch with a thin gold band and dresses very, very well (though he gives full credit to his wife of 41 years, since he is colorblind). He is the unlikeliest of things in this bucolic farm state: a political boss. He does not use that term, though when it came time for him to name his Italian-American political organization, he had a name handy: La Macchina, which is Italian for The Machine. It was his way of saying maybe we really don't have political machines and political bosses in Iowa, but you don't want to mess with me and find out. Mauro, a Polk County supervisor in a state where county supervisors are powerful figures, controls thousands of votes on the sprawling Italian South Side of Des Moines, almost all of them through absentee ballots. Decades ago, it occurred to Mauro that people didn't really like to go out and vote and that if you could make it easy for them, if you could get a ballot mailed to their home and then pick it up from them, that was a guaranteed vote. In the old days, absentee ballots had to be notarized (which meant that few people bothered with the process), but Mauro hadn't built up a successful insurance business by being dumb or lazy. He had an idea, and he and about 25 of his boyhood friends (who would become the nucleus of La Macchina) became notaries and carried the heavy seals around in their pockets as they went door to door collecting absentee ballots. You wanted service? John Mauro would give you service. You could vote without ever getting off your couch. Today in Iowa, getting an absentee ballot notarized is no longer required, which makes Mauro's job even easier.
advertisement
