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
But couldn't Dean have fought that by telling a more personal story, by selling himself to voters as a human being?
"It's true, it's true," Dean replied. "You know, maybe I should have done that."
Trippi disagrees. He's proud of Dean for talking about empowering the people rather than about himself. There are, however, two important issues the two men do agree on: The first is the Dean/Gephardt "murder-suicide" theory, which the press eagerly seized on to explain how the two campaigns with supposedly the best organizations could come in third and fourth. The theory: Dean and Gephardt traded negative ads in the last weeks of the campaign; the voters were turned off and went with other candidates, which is a neat little theory, but it doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. "In January in Iowa, nobody is watching TV commercials anymore," said Glantz, who ran Bill Bradley's campaign in Iowa in 2000. And if the two leading candidates had been destroyed by dueling ads, it would have made them the most influential ads in political history. There is another problem. "I think that theory is demonstrably not true," Mark Mellman, the pollster for Kerry, said in an interview. "I mean, if you look at when we really started to move into first place in our polling, it was before those ads happened. And there's nothing about the pattern of our movement after that that suggests they had a particularly accelerating effect."
The second thing that Trippi and Dean agree on is that Al Gore's endorsement of Dean made Dean the front-runner and "put a target" on Dean's back, making him the subject of intense scrutiny by the media and starting his downfall. But Gore's endorsement didn't make Dean the front-runner. Gore endorsed Dean because Dean already was the front-runner. Dean had received the endorsement of AFSCME and SEIU, with their 3 million members, three weeks before Gore endorsed Dean. To many in the media, it was that and not the endorsement of a losing presidential candidate that cemented Dean's front-runner status. Trippi disagrees. "We became the front-runner campaign, but we weren't built for that," Trippi said in an interview after the campaign. But what was the campaign built for? Failure? True, people may have had different expectations of Dean after he became the front-runner. He wasn't just a protest candidate anymore. Now he had to demonstrate that he could broaden his base, be presidential, and beat George Bush. He needed a Plan B. But the Dean campaign had no Plan B, because it could barely execute Plan A. Plan A--building an insurgent campaign based on a message of empowerment, opposition to the war in Iraq, and a considerable amount of Bush bashing--had, coupled with a truly impressive use of the Internet to raise funds, gotten Dean further than he had ever hoped to get. But Dean could not move beyond that point. He could not pivot from being an insurgent to being something broader. The Internet did not fail Dean--it got him as far as he got--but as Mike Ford pointed out, the Internet built a base of 600,000 people while Dean was going to need 54 million people to win the presidency.
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