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 other campaigns were openly contemptuous of the Storm. "This supposed Howard Dean juggernaut is not what it appears to be," Steve Murphy, campaign manager for Dick Gephardt, said at the time. "The Perfect Storm turns out to be a perfect drizzle." The real fear of the other campaigns, however, was not that the Stormers would be effective campaigners but that they would try to vote in the caucuses (presumably after hiding their orange caps). When voters sign in at their precinct caucus, they sign an affidavit swearing that they are residents of the precinct, but in reality nobody checks (though in many Iowa precincts everybody knows everybody else, and massive fraud would be difficult).
Mike Ford, who had come to Iowa because Trippi wouldn't, thought the Storm was a bad idea, but he could do nothing about it. "It was an Internet decision, not an Iowa decision," he said. "It was a fait accompli . The people wanted to come." And on the Dean campaign, you never said no to the Internet, to the movement, even if the idea was a bad one. "What could I do?" Ford asked. He had publicly disagreed with the campaign's plan to get people to drive from California to New Hampshire for the primary--he felt it was senseless for volunteers to drive all the way across the country when there were plenty of states in between where they could be of use--and he was told to stick a cork in it. So, days before the caucuses, a horde of volunteers was going to descend not just on Iowa but on the Dean campaign. "It was clearly a burden to the staff on a day-to-day basis," Ford said, "but it was even worse than that: When Howard came to the state, he was expected to deal with the Stormers, talk to the Stormers, spend time with the Stormers as their reward for coming here. But that meant Howard wasn't talking to Iowans ." What's worse, the Storm arrived just as Dean phone calls and focus groups were indicating that people were tired of being bothered by volunteers calling them and knocking on their doors. "We were like the houseguests who won't leave you alone," Ford said. "There was complaint after complaint about the volume and intensity of our contact. But our organization felt knocking on doors was what an organization was supposed to do. The Iowans didn't."
Which raised a critical question: Just what were the Stormers actually supposed to accomplish, except impress the media? The plan, as it turns out, was to have each Stormer bring 10 voters to the caucuses, which meant that Dean would be assured at least 35,000 votes. Supplemented by the efforts of the field staff and organized labor, that could put him over the top. (In fact, he ended up with only about 22,000 votes.) But the thought of the Stormers getting 35,000 people to accompany them to the polls--if, indeed, the Dean campaign ever actually had 35,000 supporters--was preposterous. "Though the theory behind the Storm was kind of cool," said Ochs, a sen-ior aide, "we had no ability to actually execute it on the ground. So the Storm became a huge distraction and a management failure. They were well meaning but had little training, so all we could use them for was less important stuff than the hard work of door-to-door canvassing. We had them distributing literature and 'visibility' stuff like standing on corners and waving signs."
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