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
'Steady As You Go'
As Howard Dean's field operations manager in Iowa, Tim Dickson lived both in a high-tech world of computer projections and multicolored voter maps and a low-tech world of door-knocking and phone-calling. Because the trial by endurance that is caucus voting makes good organization a necessity, the field operations staffs were often looked upon as the critical element that would make or break a campaign. But Dickson now believes there is something even more important: the candidate. "Votes don't come from phone calls and door-knocks alone," he said. "All of us have mystical ideas about the caucuses and the role of organization and, yes, you have to get your Ones to polls, but you have to give them a reason to go." And after its loss in Iowa, the big question for the Dean campaign became: Did Howard Dean give people a reason to vote for him, or did he drive people into the arms of the other candidates? Many on the Dean campaign now believe Dean's gaffes in Iowa did him in, that his verbal blunders turned people off, made him look unpresidential and lacking in temperament and, therefore, unable to beat George W. Bush. And while this theory is popular among staffers because it absolves them of blame, Dean seemingly had an incredible series of missteps in a short amount of time:
In early November, he told the Des Moines Register: "I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks."
In early December, he said on National Public Radio that he had heard an "interesting theory" that Bush was "warned ahead of time by the Saudis" about the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Also in early December, it was revealed that Dean had sealed for 10 years more than half of his gubernatorial records, because, as he had told Vermont Public Radio, "we didn't want anything embarrassing appearing in the papers at a critical time for a future endeavor."
In mid-December, when Saddam Hussein was caught, Dean said "the capture of Saddam has not made America safer."
And in late December, he said, "I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely guilty, we should do our best not to . . . prejudge jury trials."
After the campaign was over, Dean told U.S. News , "There's almost nothing I said that wasn't true. It goes back to that old quote, 'A gaffe in Washington is when you tell the truth, and nobody thinks you should have.' And I actually don't think it hurt very much either." During the campaign, Dean not only defended his gaffes but reveled in them. "Some people call it slips of the tongue, and other people call it straight talk," he told a crowd in Waterloo, Iowa. And in Marion, Iowa, he told the crowd he was going to say, "all those things those pollsters tell me not to say!" He drew applause each time, but his opponents were quick to exploit what they saw as an opening. "His problems are self-made," Gephardt said of Dean while campaigning in Dallas Center, Iowa. "A lot of statements he's made don't give people confidence that he can take on George Bush."
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