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 Kerry campaign would get calls from reporters who had just been spun by Trippi, and they would say, "Dean has 50,000 Ones. Do you have 50,000 Ones?" Even cool heads in the Kerry campaign grew a little worried as the press ran with stories about the Dean juggernaut and how it had the best organization in the state. Whouley could tell his colleagues only what he knew. "If they have 50,000 Ones, they are going to win this thing," he said. "But it is not showing up on our phone banks; it is not showing up in our polling." Whouley didn't believe they had them, and he didn't believe they believed they had them. "They must have known," Whouley said afterward. " Somebody must have known."
Just what it is that Whouley does that is so magical is not easy to explain, and if left to his own devices he would rather not explain it at all. Essentially, it has to do with the allocation and coordination of resources, which is not as dull as it sounds but comes close. Whouley is the guy who puts the "organize" in organizer. When Whouley got to Iowa in late November, Kerry already had a sound campaign in place, but it was treading water. It had been built in large part by Kerry's Iowa director, John Norris, a political operative and Iowa native of considerable reputation within the state, and Jonathan Epstein, the Iowa field director. Month after month, Norris had to fight for every penny from Kerry headquarters. It wasn't that Kerry's staff was unaware of the importance of Iowa, but the campaign was, in the words of one aide, "New Hampshire-centric." Many of Kerry's top people had grown up in Boston, a 35-minute drive from New Hampshire, and they considered it a second home. The national chairman of the Kerry campaign was Jean Shaheen, a former governor of New Hampshire, which was an indication of how important Kerry considered the Granite State. And as to the Hawkeye State, well, Kerry had been doing OK there without spending much, though early on, at least in the media, there had been talk of Kerry's skipping Iowa altogether because nobody could possibly beat Dick Gephardt there.
On Kerry's first real trip to Iowa as a candidate in January 2003, he drew 600 people at a rally in Des Moines on a freezing Sunday where only 50 had been expected. Even Gov. Tom Vilsack had shown up. Kerry, wearing a faded work shirt and wide-wale brown corduroy pants, had said, "As we invade your space here, I thank you for welcoming this refugee from Massachusetts, which is a Wampanoag Indian name meaning 'Land of Many Kennedys.' " Everybody laughed; Kerry talked about domestic and foreign affairs, worked the crowd afterward, and, within weeks, had been crowned by the media as the front-runner. There was an argument within Kerry's top staff as to whether he should embrace the front-runner label. "There really was no basis for it in fact," one aide said. "And I argued that eventually we were going to get in trouble because it was going to become clear that we weren't living up to expectations." That argument lost, however, to those who argued that the label would help with fundraising and endorsements. "That was probably the right decision," the aide said, "but it did set up a horrible dynamic when it became clear that John Kerry wasn't really the front-runner and everything looked like it was turning to garbage."
advertisement
