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
Stormy Weather
The Perfect Storm was a perfect mess. It was the Dean campaign's name for the 3,500 volunteers who would come from across America to work in Iowa in the final days of the campaign. The media ate it up. What a great example of the dedication, the passion, the commitment of the Dean volunteers (which was true) and of the strength, the competence, the near invincibility of the Dean campaign in Iowa (which was not).
The name had first been used by Trippi in May on the DeanNation blog, in which he described the campaign as a "Perfect Storm" that Dean's enemies were trying to stop. He also wrote that "the wind is getting stronger, and the waves are getting higher, the Perfect Storm is building . . . ." The campaign's Iowa spokesperson, Sarah Leonard, thought it was a name that people wouldn't understand and was going to object to it, but when she heard that it was Trippi's idea, she held her tongue. Besides, the idea had bigger problems than just the name. "The idea was to bring 5,000 volunteers--of which we only got 3,500--to come out and live in Girl Scout camps and talk on rented cellphones and drive rented vans," Leonard said. "In the summer, we couldn't afford air conditioning, and now we had boxes of cellphones all over headquarters. I had never seen a campaign spend like this one." Tom Ochs, a senior aide on the field staff, agreed. "We wasted money," he said, "and that stemmed from our ability to raise it. We always thought we would be able to raise more." The Dean campaign had become a modern-day cargo cult, looking to the Internet heavens to provide funds without end. The campaign had to rent a separate building and create a separate staff just to deal with the Stormers, as well as rent 13 "firebases" around the state in which to house them. Trippi thought the Storm was a swell idea--he had poured 1,000 volunteer "Fritz Blitzers" into Iowa in 1984 to work for Walter Mondale. But he hadn't worked in Iowa since the Gephardt campaign of 1988 and was out of touch with some critical events. "The state had just gone through a fierce anti-immigration battle two years before, and the legislature had just passed an English-only law," Leonard, an Iowa native, said, "and I didn't think bringing in 3,500 people from the outside was a positive addition to the mix." Nor was the problem with the Stormers that, as other campaigns claimed, they all had pierced tongues and shaved heads. Actually, they didn't look all that different from Iowans. But while their numbers endlessly impressed the media, some Iowans had a different reaction. If you live in Miami or Los Angeles or Dallas and you pick up a newspaper and read that 3,500 political volunteers are descending on your state, it might not make a big impression. But in Iowa, the population of most towns is smaller than 3,500. Of the 953 communities in Iowa, 800 contain fewer than 1,000 people. So if you lived in one of those small towns and read about how these orange-capped "Stormers" (the name "Storm Troopers" was fortuitously passed over) were soon going to be banging on your door, your reaction might be one of apprehension. Governor Vilsack was pro-immigration as a way of building Iowa's population--he points out that Iowa is the only state in the union that hasn't doubled its population in the past 100 years. But oppposition to his immigration plans had forced him to sign an English-only law to protect his political backside. In an interview, he said this about the Stormers: "I'll tell you the one thing you don't want to do is you don't want to bring folks in from outside the state to tell Iowans what to do. It's great that people were that enthusiastic and that passionate, but they were not Iowans. If they had had 3,500 Iowans with caps, it might have been a different deal, you know, and if you're going to have caps, you either have to have black and gold (the University of Iowa's colors) or cardinal and gold (Iowa State University's colors) in this state or both."
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