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
A person who is a One in June may have slipped to a Three by September and a Five by Election Day, though, so it is critical for the field staffs to call their Ones and Twos on a regular basis to make sure their support is holding. The incessant calling by the four major campaigns drove many Iowans nuts, however. "In our focus groups in Iowa," said Mike Ford, a senior aide in the Dean campaign, "people said, 'I'll do anything to have Dean stop calling me!' " Some people, including Jean Hessburg, the executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party, simply stopped answering their home phones in the last weeks before the caucuses. Others had caller ID and would not pick up if the call came from a campaign or they didn't recognize the number. This was an understandable defense mechanism, but it made it difficult for campaigns to determine their true level of support in the crucial final weeks of the campaign.
The one-to-five counting system is a simple and serviceable one, but it has one big drawback: It requires some human judgment. Inexperienced or ill-trained volunteers will often list as Ones people who are not. This was a huge problem for the Dean campaign. "A lot of our people just didn't know what a One was," Ford said. "An inexperienced volunteer would talk to a voter and come away saying that person is a One, when a more experienced volunteer would know the person was a Three, a leaner."
There's another problem with the system, the "Vietnam body-count" problem. All campaigns give their field staffs quotas of Ones and Twos and apply considerable pressure until those goals are met. Just as in Vietnam, when headquarters in Saigon asked for a body count of enemy soldiers, the numbers were often exaggerated by commanders in the field. Again, the Dean campaign, which exercised poor discipline over its field staff in the beginning, was a victim of the body-count problem. "I don't know anyone in his right mind," said Tom Ochs, another one of Dean's chief field organizers, "who thought we were going to win Iowa."
Unfortunately, the candidate was in that category. "I never considered myself an expert on Iowa," Dean said. "Joe [Trippi, Dean's campaign manager] is an expert on Iowa. So, you know, I never sensed any particular problem. In fact, most of our people told us there wasn't any problem in Iowa."
One of the problems in Iowa, however, was one that extended far beyond the state. While Kerry's campaign emphasized discipline, training, and structure, the Dean campaign was imbued with a philosophy that opposed all three. The Dean campaign was an insurgency, an outsider's campaign that ran in opposition to the normal political rules. That's why it was so popular with people who were disaffected or disengaged from politics. The Dean campaign was about empowering hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, and not about listening to so-called political experts about how to organize a state. The campaign wasn't supposed to follow the old rules, nor was it supposed to come up with new ones. "It was an insurgent campaign, and that is both wonderful and terrible," said field organizer Dickson. "The normal rules don't apply. You can't run it like IBM." Or even like Microsoft. Dean's campaign always had a confusion of goals. Was the goal to make Dean president of the United States or to build a national movement? (Those who wanted to do both soon learned the two goals were often in conflict.) "In the beginning, I said the three things I wanted to do are change the Democratic Party, change the country, and become president of the United States," Dean told U.S. News .
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