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
And everything looked like garbage for Kerry because of Howard Dean. The former Vermont governor's high-intensity attack on the war in Iraq electrified crowds, and his harsh attacks on George W. Bush made some Democrats proud to be Democrats again. Kerry had voted for the war, and it was a vote Dean hung around his neck like an albatross. Though it took months, it seemed as if it happened overnight: Dean was the front-runner, attracting tons of money through the Internet, the support of major labor unions, and meteoric poll numbers. Kerry sank like a stone, not just in Iowa but also in the state where he was well known, New Hampshire. He was having trouble raising money, trouble drawing crowds. "We had no choice but to switch to Iowa," a top Kerry aide said. "We were in the toilet in New Hampshire."
The Kerry campaign decided that something dramatic was needed if Kerry was ever going to close the gap in New Hampshire. "There were two ways to break through in New Hampshire," said Kerry pollster Mark Mellman at the time. "Either we had to arrange for John Kerry to save a drowning child from the raging Merrimack River, or we had to do very well in Iowa." The campaign opted for Iowa. It was an act not of genius, but desperation. The campaign decided on a strategy and boiled it down to one sentence: "The road to New Hampshire is through Iowa."
But was Iowa realistic? Kerry was doing lousy in the polls there, too, and he had not only Dean to contend with but Gephardt. Something had to be done to bolster Iowa and at least get Kerry a close second there if he was to electrify New Hampshire. So the call was placed to the magical Mr. Whouley. He had known Kerry for 22 years, Kerry had attended Whouley's wedding--and Whouley simply could not say no. Whouley reviewed the situation and pronounced it desperate, but not hopeless. New Hampshire looked unwinnable, but if you dug deeper into the poll numbers, Kerry's favorability rating remained high there, which meant he had the potential to come back. But first came Iowa. Whouley flew out in late November, took a look at the operation, and realized why there was talk that Norris was going to quit: The campaign had been starved of resources. There was no money for mailings, no budget for television, no funds to expand its phone bank.
And it wasn't as if Norris had been sitting on his hands. A native of Red Oak, Iowa, he knew the state and how to run a campaign there, having run the Jesse Jackson campaign in Iowa in 1988. As a former chairman and executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party, a former candidate for Congress, and a former chief of staff for Vilsack, Norris was a major catch for Kerry. From the beginning, Norris was convinced, even when nobody else was, that Kerry could win Iowa. "I was convinced Iowa would not give the nod to Gephardt," he said. Norris didn't worry about hard counts for months. Instead, he went after leadership: county chairpersons, state legislators, environmental activists, education activists.
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