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
Dean's hard-core supporters, however, were the least likely people to care about gaffes, slips, and controversial statements by the candidate. They liked his plain talk and his penchant for saying what nobody else would say. And they certainly didn't care about the "gotcha" game of the old politics where a candidate's every utterance was examined under a microscope by a salivating press corps. But that was the attitude of his backers out of state, where his level of support was greater and his crowds bigger than they were in Iowa. To Iowans, Dean made one gaffe that was hard to overlook: Four years earlier, on a Canadian TV show, Dean had said, "If you look at the caucuses system, they are dominated by the special interests of both parties. . . . They represent the extremes." NBC, which unearthed the tape, broadcast it on January 8, just 11 days before the caucuses, and the network's Des Moines affiliate reportedly devoted an incredible 20 minutes of its 30-minute broadcast to it. The next day, Dean's Iowa poll numbers dropped 10 points. Why the big reaction? Why was this "gaffe" different from the others?
In Iowa, the caucuses mean a great deal and not just to the few who bother to attend them. The caucuses make the people of Iowa feel important. They bring attention to a state that would otherwise not get much attention. It is not as if Iowa is famous for nothing else: John Wayne was born there, and Cary Grant died there. The state has produced one president (Herbert Hoover, from West Branch) and one first lady (Mamie Eisenhower, from Boone). And it is the only state whose first two letters are vowels. But the caucuses make Iowa special. There are a lot of states with greater claims to fame, but in those other states, can you look up from your biscuits and gravy at the breakfast buffet in Des Moines's downtown Marriott to see Tom Brokaw, Tim Russert, Dan Rather, or George Stephanopoulos waiting for a table? And in those other states can you drive to a neighbor's house for a gathering of 10 or 15 people and get to ask a question directly of Kerry or Dean or Gephardt or Edwards? You can in Iowa, even if it is only every four years. That makes Iowans feel big time; it makes them feel as if they matter; it makes them feel as if the eyes of the nation are upon them. Which they are. Heck, let's face it: Without the caucuses, Iowa would be Nebraska.
And Howard Dean had seemingly attacked the Iowa caucuses. "To the extent that people felt that this was a juggernaut marching to victory," Tom Vilsack observed, "it essentially created a chink in the armor that allowed people to think, 'Well, it's OK to think about another candidate.' " It also caused Iowans to ask themselves how much they really knew about Howard Dean as a person, which, as it turned out, was darn little. More than any other candidate, Dean resisted emphasizing his "story," his human dimension. Bill Clinton had shown the power of having a story--abusive father, high-stepping mother, drug-addicted half-brother--so that people could have something to identify with. By 2004, the telling of a human story had become an essential part of almost every stump speech: Gephardt talked about how he had grown up poor in St. Louis, Edwards talked about working in the textile mills with people who had "lint in their hair and grease on their faces," and Kerry, of course, talked about Vietnam. But Howard Dean often failed even to tell crowds that he had been a practicing physician. ("You should tell people you are a doctor," a supporter in South Carolina upbraided him after one of his speeches. "In the South, we like our doctors.") After the caucuses, the New York Times quoted a major supporter of Dean as saying, "Howard never built a relationship with the voters on a fundamental gut level. When Howard needed to make the sale, I believe that required him to be more human, more self-revelatory, more personal with people, and Howard is a very private person." After his campaign was over, Dean admitted that his failure to make a more human connection with voters hurt him. When his opponents raised questions about his temperament, he said, the voters didn't have a positive image to counterbalance that. "I think the temperament issue, which also was untrue, did hurt because people didn't know me that well," Dean told U.S. News. "It was written about so much that, you know, some people came to believe it."
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