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
In the end, he decided that it did not matter. The scream, that is. Howard Dean had delivered what many considered one of the most damaging political speeches in history, but Dean felt it didn't matter at all. "We had just lost Iowa," he said. "And whoever lost Iowa was going to lose the nomination." It was that simple. Though the candidates and their campaigns would stumble on for several weeks, in the end it was all about where it had begun--it was all about Iowa. Steve Elmendorf, who was Dick Gephardt's chief of staff, said, "In my experience, John Kerry winning Iowa was the single most important victory anyone has ever had." The mysterious Michael Whouley, Kerry's secret weapon in Iowa, agreed. "The Iowa caucuses," he said, "won us the nomination."
The political world had been turned upside down. It had been almost universally recognized by the media that Dean and Gephardt had the best organizations in Iowa and that Kerry and John Edwards could barely compete with them. In reality, the opposite was true, but reality in Iowa was often hidden from view. When the dust had settled, the front-runner had been fatally wounded, and the also-ran now ran in front. Yet for all their importance in determining the Democratic nominee, the Iowa caucuses have been the subject of little real scrutiny. An examination by U.S. News, based on dozens of interviews and a review of contemporaneous notes of participants and campaign documents, shows how the caucuses were won--and why they were lost. One conclusion: In Iowa, a friendly little place with an oddball voting system, almost nothing was as it seemed.
Howard Dean had instructed his campaign to build him a "juggernaut" in Iowa, but instead they built him a house of cards on a foundation of sand. Dependent on bogus or incompetent counts of Dean supporters gathered by enthusiastic but inexperienced campaign workers; racked by deep conflicts within the Dean senior staff; lacking coordination between state headquarters in Des Moines and national headquarters in Burlington, Vt.; and with a relationship between campaign manager and candidate that was largely dysfunctional, the Dean campaign devoted much of its time to presenting a supremely confident, and largely false, face to the media. The result was predictable (though few predicted it): Dean came in third in Iowa with 18 percent of the vote. But it was even worse than that. His top aides had told reporters (and Dean) that the former Vermont governor couldn't lose Iowa. In fact, Dean won only two tiny counties, Lyon and Jefferson, out of 99. "Lyon and Jefferson are microscopic counties," said Tim Dickson, one of Dean's top field organizers in Iowa. "In those counties, a family of eight shows up for Dean and they skew the whole thing."
Dean's only two victories, in other words, were flukes. Though Dean tied in two other counties, one could argue that if he had had no field operation, no precinct captains, no 3,500 people in orange hats, and no expenditure of $6 million, he could hardly have done worse.
John Kerry, on the other hand, trailing badly in the polls, unable to win big-name endorsements, having difficulty raising money, and with the governor of Iowa telling him privately that he had "a solid lock on a distant third," made the decision to shift his focus, his forces, and his finances to Iowa rather than pinning his hopes on New Hampshire, whose primary was eight days later. True, it was a decision aided by necessity: Kerry was doing so badly in New Hampshire that a distant third in Iowa actually looked good . But many presidential campaigns have ignored urgent necessity in order to gamble on the siren song of false opportunity. Instead, Kerry mortgaged his Boston house and rolled the dice. It was going to be Iowa or Palookaville, with no stops in between. "On the night of the caucuses," said the state's junior U.S. senator, Tom Harkin, "the two most surprised people in Iowa were Howard Dean and John Kerry."
Dean was especially shocked. "I knew how many Ones that we had, and I knew how many Twos that we had, and I knew it was enough to win," Dean said. In a political counting system so old that Moses may have used it to gauge his support among the Israelites, voters are ranked on a list from one to five. Though it differs slightly from campaign to campaign, a One is your strongest supporter, someone who has signed a pledge card promising to go to the polls and vote for you. A Two is a person who has pledged verbally to support you or has signed up at an event. Taken together, the Ones and Twos form your "hard count," those voters the campaign depends on to come out and vote. (Sort of. Actually, human nature being what it is, most campaigns figure they will get only about 80 percent of their Ones and 60 percent of their Twos on Election Day.) A Three is a person leaning toward you, a Four is supporting one of your opponents, and a Five is strongly for one of your opponents. The list of Ones, Twos, and Threes is compiled by calling or knocking on the doors of hundreds of thousands of people and asking them how they feel about the candidates. (This can also be done by robo-call, when a computer dials the phone and a recorded message asks the person to punch a button on the phone keypad to indicate level of support. The Kerry campaign was very big on the use of robo-calls, making sure whenever possible, however, that the recorded message came from a recognizable local or statewide supporter. One reason the Kerry camp liked robo-calling was that in the beginning, when Kerry was doing very poorly in Iowa, it was depressing for his volunteers to call people and be constantly told the person was not going to vote for their guy. By letting robo-calls cull the list, human volunteers could then take the list of Ones and Twos produced by the calls and follow up, making human contact.)
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 .
"In that order?" he was asked.
"That's the order I always said," he replied.
And that's precisely why some on the campaign believe that Dean was responsible for his own defeat. "Did he really want this thing?" asked a frustrated senior aide. "That is what I ask myself. This process only rewards those who really want it and who do whatever it takes to get it. John Kerry proved that. John Kerry took risks. The great unreported story of Iowa is the John Kerry campaign."
To a certain extent, Dean agrees. "I think it would be unfair to do this piece without saying that Kerry won Iowa; it wasn't just a matter of us losing it," Dean said. "I mean, Kerry did a really good job."
He did. And he did it with as much secrecy as he could possibly manage.
Magical Mr. Whouley
When the news spread like a prairie wildfire that Michael Whouley was on his way to Des Moines, Gordon Fischer, the chairman of the state's Democratic Party, had one thought: "John Kerry has just dropped his H-bomb on Iowa." Such is Whouley's reputation. Since the surest way to get publicity in America is to try to avoid it, Whouley's status in political circles has grown to nuclear proportions, even though Whouley (pronounced HOO-lee) almost never appears on TV, rarely gives interviews, and almost never schmoozes with reporters or hobnobs with other political operatives. He is a coiled spring of a man, wiry, watchful, and with a Boston accent thick enough to spread on a soda cracker. He believes in winning, in secrecy, in power, in clout, in order, in organization, in loyalty. He believes in John Kerry (just as he believed in Al Gore and Bill Clinton) and unabashedly uses the word "love" to describe his feelings for the man. He had one constant refrain to the troops in Iowa: "We got to make sure the campaign keeps up with the candidate." The candidate would be fine--screw the polls, screw the press--the candidate would do his stuff, hit his marks, make his points, deliver his message, win the crowds. But the campaign had to be ready to handle the result of that. Which is what Whouley did in Iowa. And there was one other imperative that Whouley emphasized: "What we don't do is frigging talk about things." It was the opposite of the strategy of Dean's campaign manager, Joe Trippi, who constantly promoted the campaign, the candidate, the movement (and Joe Trippi). Whouley believes in staying so far below the radar screen of the press and opposition that nobody can find you. Which means Whouley's social interactions on the road can be, well, limited. Staying alone in his hotel room and ordering beer and chicken wings from room service is a big night for Whouley. In Iowa, the Hotel Fort Des Moines, an undistinguished red-brick building in the city's downtown, housed not only the Kerry and Dean campaigns but also several dozen reporters. The bar at the Fort Des Moines, needless to say, was packed every night in January with pols and press, but of all Whouley's accomplishments in Iowa this campaign season, he may be proudest of never having set foot in the place. Both reporters and political operatives tend to gossip and (lubricated by a few drinks) often reveal too much in casual conversations. This was not a problem for Whouley.
Here he is describing the most common of events in Iowa, running into someone from an opposing campaign, who asks a socially conventional question: "They always ask, 'How you doing?' " Whouley complained. "I just didn't want to engage, you know? 'How you doing?' My attitude was, 'None of your business, how I'm doing! 'We're doing fine, you know? We're just going to do our frigging thing!"
Which is Michael Whouley in full campaign mode. (And he used a word other than "frigging." Though he does not use the "F" word in inappropriate circles or circumstances, it is so much part of his conversational style that it is impossible to render an accurate portrait of him without quoting it. In a tape-recorded interview with U.S. News that lasted several hours and produced a 40-page, single-spaced transcript, Whouley used the "F" word in all its forms exactly 45 times.) When you have Whouley on your side you have him body and soul, and he is unconcerned with what others think of him. "I'm old-fashioned," he said. "If my candidate wins, I'll be fine. I don't need anything else."
On the night Kerry won the Iowa caucuses, he gathered a small group of reporters in Room 1014 of the Hotel Fort Des Moines and coined the phrase "the magical Michael Whouley." Later that night, as Kerry took a planeload of staff and press to New Hampshire to begin his victory march to Boston and the nomination, Whouley was nowhere to be seen. He didn't get on the plane, which carried virtually all of Kerry's top aides, because he didn't want to risk overshadowing the candidate at his moment of victory. Instead, Whouley drove the 306 miles to Chicago (if you drive, you don't bump into reporters in airports or on planes), ate ribs at the Fireplace Inn, drank three beers, and went to bed. When he got up, he flew to Boston and refused to set foot in New Hampshire because it was time for others on the Kerry campaign to get the attention. "These guys had to eat s - - - sandwiches for a year because of Howard Dean, and now it was their moment in the sun," Whouley said. "I didn't want the press to pay attention to me; I wanted them to pay attention to these guys."
Whouley and Kerry's other key operatives had built their organization quietly and steadily, and strict orders were given that if asked by reporters, the prowess of the campaign was to be underplayed. "We low-balled to the very end," Whouley said proudly. "We had a simple strategy: We put one foot in front of the other."
The foundation of any statewide campaign, Whouley believes, is to build a strong network of precinct captains who know their communities and know their neighbors and are extremely disciplined in the counting of Ones and Twos. Whouley emphasized over and over to the members of the field staff that if they fooled around with the counting of supporters, they were fooling only themselves. Whouley knew the Kerry campaign was being helped by Dean's fumbles, but he also had a healthy respect for the quality of some Dean staffers in Iowa. "They had people who understood this stuff," Whouley said. "But somehow nobody wanted to [take a close] look and say, 'Is it really there? Is the support really there?' "
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."
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.
They were more than supporters: They were validators. "In their local communities, they were known and respected," Norris said. "When they said they were for John Kerry, it meant something." Even so, Kerry wasn't getting any traction. Dean was hot; Kerry was not. "We weren't losing our people," Norris said, "but it was getting harder and harder to get people to join us."
It was about this time that Norris got the idea of the veterans list. Veterans get a break on their property taxes in Iowa, so Norris knew a list of veterans had to exist. It was a natural target audience for Kerry, but there was a problem: There wasn't one list; there were 99, one in each county, and some counties didn't want to give it up. "It was the mentality of the small town," Norris said. "They just didn't want to make it public and so they fought us." In the end, the Kerry campaign collected about 90 lists. They were in all kinds of different forms: electronic, paper printouts, handwritten. (Iowa has some very small counties.) The cost of collecting the lists was only $25,000, but in those days $25,000 was considered real money in the campaign. But it was worth it not only for the names and votes it produced but for something almost as important: The Kerry staff in Iowa was demoralized. Getting the list together boosted their spirits.
By summer, Norris had started collecting his hard counts, but the rules were strict. If a person responded to a phone call by saying, "I'm supporting John Kerry," that was not good enough for a One. To be a One, you had to sign a pledge card or have your support for Kerry validated by a volunteer or staffer. This first wave produced about 10,000 Ones. After that, however, with Dean's popularity skyrocketing, the numbers flat-lined. Norris grew worried and ordered the field staff to do what field staffs hate to do: Recount the Ones to make sure there was no erosion. (If you are responsible for Pocahontas County, population 8,600, and you have met your quota of Ones, the last thing you want to do is find out that 60 of them have dribbled away and that you have to find 60 new Kerry Ones to replace them. It was easier to keep telling headquarters in Des Moines that everything was fine and that there was no erosion.)
But Norris wanted his recount. By September, he was assembling his precinct captains. By October, Kerry's internal polling in Iowa showed improvement, but some people on the campaign didn't believe it. "Some started to question Mellman's methodology," Norris said. "They wondered what universe he was polling." In the last month before the caucuses, the numbers from the field were gathered in what everybody called the Blue Room, because unlike the Dean campaign, which used a complicated color system, Kerry used one color: blue. The bluer the map of Iowa got, the better it was for Kerry. "And it just kept getting bluer and bluer," Norris said. When he heard reports that Dean was getting 3,500 volunteers to come in for the last weeks of campaigning, he was not impressed. He had asked for 500 volunteers, got them, and wanted no more. It was difficult to train and organize even that many people. But he still had a big problem: Even though the numbers were improving, Norris couldn't get the money he needed for mailings to voters or TV ads.
Enter Michael Whouley. Suddenly it was not just John Norris on the phone to headquarters begging for money, but Michael Whouley saying we need the frigging money and we need it now. And the money came: for phone banks and mail and television and those "signature" items that made Whouley Whouley. Among Kerry's ground troops in Iowa, Dec. 19, 2003, is a day they still talk about, a day that is burned in their psyches and a day they will probably bore young staffers with for decades to come. "December 19," a top Kerry aide in Iowa said, "is the day the field staff got to meet Michael Whouley." The meeting took place in Des Moines's First Unitarian Church, which was appropriate. "To them, Whouley was almost a godlike figure," said the aide. "Norris and I had given the field staff many, many pep talks. But Whouley electrified them. He lit the room on fire with his passion for John Kerry. 'We're not just going to do well,' he told them. 'We're going to win!' "
Because it was Whouley who said it, they believed it. And if there were any lingering doubts as to whether Whouley was truly magical or not, it was settled on the day he decided he wanted a helicopter. A helicopter, Whouley believed, would make Kerry look even more presidential. The public is used to seeing presidents climb in and out of helicopters. Helicopters also reminded people of Vietnam, and anything that reminded people of Vietnam was good for Kerry. So Whouley picked up the phone to Washington and said he wanted a chopper. Whouley's friend and associate at the Dewey Square Group, Joe Ricca, was worried about the cost. The campaign was running on fumes, but Whouley wanted a helicopter. "It sucked up a lot of money," Ricca recalled. "I remember yelling, 'I want the frigging helicopter!' " Whouley recalled.
Whouley got the helicopter, but only after Kerry mortgaged his half-interest in his Boston home for $6.4 million. "The helicopter was a good idea," Whouley said. "It was worth it. I wanted to keep him in that goddamn helicopter." The press loved it, Kerry loved it, and it became a Whouley trademark: the man who could come into a losing and broke campaign, demand a helicopter, and get one.
On January 19, caucus morning, Michael Whouley's phone rang at 6 a.m. "Ahh, Michael," the familiar voice said. "Ahh, Michael, we are going to make history today."
And John Kerry turned out to be right.
Having it...losing it
Joe Trippi could feel it in his bones, smell it in the wind, sense it in his gut: Howard Dean was doomed. It was a burden to see things others could not, but it was a burden Dean's campaign manager was used to. Wasn't he the only one, early on, who said Dean could get the nomination? Wasn't he the only one who saw how the power of the Internet would transform the Dean campaign? But now his insight was less pleasant, and, like Cassandra, Trippi knew nobody would believe him. He may have felt a twinge of anxiety, a palpitation of doubt, a tremor of fear before, but on Sept. 13, 2003, in a muddy, rain-swept field in Indianola, Iowa, the truth could no longer be ignored. Iowa was a catastrophe that had only one solution: Pack up and leave. The event was Tom Harkin's annual steak fry, and everybody except Trippi was feeling great. It was a Woodstock for political junkies, and despite a cold and steady rain, cars were backed up for miles on the two-lane blacktop leading to the field. The big draw wasn't the presidential contenders but Bill Clinton, who, dressed in a work shirt and jeans, managed to sound sincere (a specialty of his) when he told the sodden crowd of 5,000: "I know all these people, and this is the best field of candidates we have put together in decades!" The crowd roared.
The rain eventually stopped, the loudspeakers blared Sister Sledge's "We Are Family," the candidates held hands for the photographers, and Clinton went off to work a rope line that dipped and rose over the wet fields as people shouted, "We miss you!" He clearly missed them, too, and he didn't leave until he had shaken every hand and the daylight had faded into inky blackness. The Dean buses departed with the damp but happy faithful.
Doom, Trippi said to himself. Doom, doom, doom. Trippi was an Iowa expert. He had run tiny Jones County for Ted Kennedy in 1980, where he first met Mike Ford and the others who would become his heroes. Kennedy lost, but in 1984 Trippi ran the entire state for Walter Mondale and won easily. In 1988, he was deputy campaign manager in charge of media and message for Dick Gephardt and again worked with Mike Ford and again won Iowa. He would go on to other campaigns in other places, but Iowa would always be his specialty, the place whose mood he could sense in his gut. And now his gut told him that Iowa could not be won by Howard Dean. Trippi went back to Dean headquarters in Burlington, Vt., with his gut still in turmoil but an idea hatching in his head. Iowa was going to be a disaster? Then forget Iowa. Abandon Iowa and just go to New Hampshire! Trippi would hold a news conference and say, "We are not going to spend $6 million in Iowa just to prove we can beat Dick Gephardt. So the real fight's now in New Hampshire. Dick, God bless you, go take Iowa; it's yours, baby!" (Trippi's special insight did not extend to foreseeing the eventual winner of Iowa: Gephardt would come in fourth.) Trippi revealed his plans to Paul Maslin, the campaign's pollster, who pointed out that Dean was leading in the polls in Iowa and suggested that maybe Trippi's plan was a little extreme. After the campaign, when asked if he ever told Howard Dean of his plan, Trippi said he could not remember. In fact, Dean first learned of it from U.S. News in an interview for this article and was shocked. "I can assure you he never said that," Dean said. "I never heard that. Nobody ever said that in this campaign."
Trippi eventually abandoned his abandon-Iowa plan. In his new book, he repeats his contention that he knew Dean couldn't win Iowa and bemoans the fact that at the time he was the only one who could see it. But the worst part, Trippi writes, is that there was "nothing more" he could do.
Virtually everyone in the leadership of the Dean campaign disagreed. September is still very, very early in terms of the Iowa caucuses, which were held on January 19 of this year, and no matter how screwed up the campaign was at the time of the Harkin steak fry, there was still plenty of time to set it right. Almost everybody on the campaign, including Dean, knew exactly what Trippi could do: He could go to Iowa. But the battle to get Trippi to go to Iowa threatened to tear the campaign apart.
All presidential campaigns have disagreements, power struggles, and conflicts. John Kerry, after all, fired his campaign manager in November, which led to the resignation of his spokesman and deputy finance director. But the conflicts in the Dean campaign were worse than normal. Trippi's friend and mentor, Ford, was brought into the campaign to try to establish some order. "Headquarters was dysfunctional," Ford said. "It was a very difficult atmosphere to work in. Joe and Howard didn't talk, which was part of the dysfunction."
Because Trippi's firm, Trippi, McMahon & Squier, had worked for Dean for years in his gubernatorial campaigns, and because Trippi ended up with the campaign manager's job, many assumed he and Dean were close or had some kind of personal relationship. They were not and did not. It was Trippi's partner, Steve McMahon, who had the personal relationship with Dean, and it was McMahon who urged Dean to hire Trippi. Trippi's reputation as a difficult person had preceded him--he admits he often does not work well with others--but besides being an expert on Iowa, he was skilled in the mysteries of the Internet and believed passionately in Dean's message of empowerment. Dean knew Iowa was going to be critical, and Trippi's experience there went a long way in getting him hired as campaign manager. So naturally, when Trippi came back from Iowa with dire mutterings on how "soft" things seemed there, others in the campaign suggested he go back out there and solve the problem. Trippi refused.
McMahon, as a friend and partner to Trippi, begged him to reconsider. He knew Trippi well, and he knew Trippi's insecurities. Trippi was afraid that if he left Burlington, there would be a coup and he would be replaced as campaign manager. So McMahon made an offer: Everybody would go to Iowa! That way there would be nothing and no one for Trippi to be afraid of. Still, Trippi refused. Finally, Dean himself made the request. Again, Trippi said no.
When asked by U.S. News how he could refuse the request of the candidate, Trippi replied, "Howard asked people to do a lot of things." Trippi often acted dismissively toward Dean and made no secret of it. "They didn't talk ," Ford said. "It was ridiculous." When Dean would call in from the road to find out what was happening, Trippi sometimes refused to take the call. "It was a clash of wills, period," said Ford, who was close to both men. "Joe felt he knew how to run the campaign. Howard was so new in the beginning that he depended on Joe. But Howard learned quickly."
Why didn't Dean replace Trippi on the spot? Trippi held an enormous trump card: his understanding of the Internet and its power to raise money. The Deaniacs, those devoted Internet supporters of the campaign, loved Trippi, felt he understood them, and saw him as an important symbol of their movement. If Trippi got the boot, they might not take his departure calmly. And, in fact, in the fall, a revolt among the Deaniacs would paralyze the campaign.
In mid-November, thanks to the considerable sales efforts of Trippi, Dean obtained the endorsement of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). It was a huge boost to his campaign. AFSCME has 1.4 million members and SEIU 1.6 million. The unions were racially diverse (which Dean badly needed) and could provide thousands of trained campaign volunteers. The endorsement not only showed that Dean could get support beyond the Internet but that he could be the candidate of labor, one of the most important pillars of the Democratic establishment. It should have been an occasion for rejoicing in Burlington. Instead, it was a near disaster.
The Deaniacs were upset, and through their blogs they let Dean know it. To them, big labor was no different from big business. They were all part of the same old Establishment. "They thought it was a sellout," Ford said. While Dean needed labor's support, he could hardly afford to alienate the Internet troops who were funding his campaign. Besides, Dean and Trippi were both committed to empowerment, to letting people see how they could exercise power they never realized they possessed. The Deaniacs were the very essence of the Dean campaign, and nobody on the campaign wanted to mess with them. So, Trippi and Ford--who were supposed to be making the most important day-to-day decisions on the campaign from headquarters--were forced to go on a secret mission to meet with the Dean supporters and calm their fears.
Ford went to Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and a few cities he can't remember. Trippi took the rest of the country. The meetings, arranged through the Internet, attracted thousands of Deaniacs. "They were very candid and direct and sometimes difficult," Ford said. "But at the end, I felt we were all on the same page." Though his presence was a sign of how seriously the Dean campaign took the complaints, Ford delivered a message of realpolitik. "We made clear to them that their value was immense and unprecedented, but there were 600,000 of them and that we were going to need 54 million votes to win the presidential election in November," Ford said. "So we needed the support of those unions." Things finally settled down. But the "People's Revolt" would have far-reaching consequences for the campaign.
Even before the caucuses, some Dean staffers felt his empowerment message had grown old and thought he should try to grow the campaign beyond the Internet legions by going back to his core issues of healthcare and balanced budgets. Gina Glantz, who had been Bill Bradley's national campaign manager and was now on the Dean plane every day to act as the "adult" the candidate would listen to (it didn't work), said, "The campaign was enamored of the 'you have the power' message, but it got stale and Dean kept speaking to the same people instead of expanding. 'You have the power' does not put food on the table. He had terrific issues and terrific answers, but he didn't give them. He just kept riding the movement wave." But Trippi and Ford remembered how badly the Deaniacs had reacted to the union endorsements. They weren't willing to risk another revolt. "It was obvious by the end," Glantz said, "that Dean needed to expand his message, but he listened to Joe and Mike Ford, and they encouraged him to stay on the message that got him there."
Trippi worried that Dean would betray the movement by slipping back into his role as a conventional politician. (After all, Dean had been a six-term governor and a former chairman of the Democratic Governors' Association. He knew how the game was played and how to play it. There was little in his background to suggest he was truly unconventional.) For Trippi, the first bad sign came at the very beginning of the campaign, when Dean gave an electrifying speech before the Democratic National Committee on Feb. 23, 2003. "What I want to know," Dean began, "is why in the world the Democratic Party leadership is supporting the president's unilateral attack on Iraq?" The party elders, including Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, were reportedly less than overjoyed, which pleased Trippi and dismayed Dean. "Right after the damn DNC speech he heard that Daschle was pissed at him and he turned to Kate [O'Connor, his longtime aide] and asked for her cellphone so he could call Daschle to tell him that he was sorry we offended him," Trippi told U.S. News. "I turned to the governor and said, 'Better put him on speed dial because we're going to be apologizing to him every other day!'" (Trippi recounts a slightly different version in his book.) One reason Trippi promoted the empowerment message so relentlessly is that he was worried that Dean would slip away from it and his Internet base. "It was almost like this internal fight within him," Trippi recalled. "He was a conventional guy that got to be unconventional, but that conventional side would sneak up on him every once in a while, would pull him back in, sometimes at the worst moment." Trippi usually prevailed when it came to maintaining loyalty to the movement, however. In Dean's last TV ad in Iowa before the caucuses, the much-criticized "White Background" ad, Dean faced the camera and said: "This election is about power. About who runs the country and who owns it." Steve McMahon, who made the ad, said he had been handed the script by Trippi and to this day has no idea who wrote it. Trippi said, "Everyone agrees the last spot could have been better." The ad may have been a mistake--Tom Harkin loathed it, feeling the stark background made Dean look isolated and that the message of empowerment was no longer working. "It was not like we were just sitting back and saying things are going swell," Glantz said. "I had been on the plane about a week when I said to Joe, 'Something is wrong. Something is very wrong in Iowa.'" She could sense it from the crowds, which were smaller and less enthusiastic than Dean crowds in other states.
Weeks went by, the problem remained unresolved, and the headquarters staff continued to split into warring factions. Things got so bad that sometimes no two people could agree on the same thing. Even old friends found themselves at odds. "Joe wanted Ford in the campaign," one senior aide said, "but he grew paranoid about Ford, too." Ford put it this way: "Joe was upset with me, and he was often uncomfortable because he didn't feel he could disagree with me because he was respectful of our old relationship." There was also a difference in styles. "Joe governed with an iron hand and had everyone completely terrorized, from the receptionist to the communications director," one senior aide said. Ford's style was different. "I sometimes believe in comic relief. 'Nobody's going to die here,' I would tell people. 'Let's all relax,'" Ford said.
By late fall, Trippi had concluded that even though his title was campaign manager, the Dean campaign was not manageable. "We were an insurgency," he said in an interview. "You cannot manage an insurgency. You just have to ride it." On the Dean campaign, this was not jargon. The Internet success of the Dean campaign was based not just on thousands of contributors falling in love with Dean or his empowerment message. What they were also in love with is that the campaign was not controlled from the top. They felt they were the campaign. The campaign website was not run by political people, as in other campaigns. The website was designed to allow the voices of the Deaniacs to be heard and allow them to talk to one another. It was not top down but bottom up. And one of Trippi's strengths was to see its potential and let it happen. But this philosophy has its limits on a presidential campaign. "It works fine when you're talking about how the Internet campaign should be run," Ford said. "But it doesn't work so fine when it comes to deciding who goes to Iowa."
But if Trippi had gone to Iowa, would it have made a difference? Some say his appearance in Iowa would have been a dramatic morale boost for his dispirited troops. He also could have played precisely the role Michael Whouley played for Kerry in Iowa: an organizer who simultaneously cares about the details while maintaining a big-picture overview. Further, Trippi could have assessed the Iowa situation and used his authority as campaign manager to get Iowa what it needed, which was coordination with Burlington. "There were pretty significant flaws in the campaign and how it was run both in Des Moines and Vermont," said Tim Dickson, who had been an executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party and went to his first caucus in 1976. Dickson was one of those sent to Iowa by the Dean campaign to try to salvage the situation, but Dickson arrived after Christmas. "The road show [i.e., Dean's appearances, speeches, etc.] was problematic," Dickson said. "The intersection of campaign and field, well, the national campaign didn't always meld the message and the schedule." These complaints are not uncommon in presidential campaigns, even in winning ones. The field never believes that headquarters really understands what's going on and vice versa. But what Whouley was able to do for the Kerry campaign is instructive. Whouley had the clout, the muscle, the influence with headquarters to get what he needed for Iowa. And because he was on the scene, because he had gone to Iowa, he could learn firsthand what Iowa needed. He even had enough clout to influence the most closely guarded element of the campaign: the message. "Everybody played a role, and we all worked together," Whouley said. "I was telling Shrum [Bob Shrum, top Kerry aide, speechwriter, and one of the most sought-after operatives in Democratic politics], 'You know, here is the speech I want,' and Shrum was like saying, 'Whatever you want.' And I gave him my ideas for the speeches. I'm just saying it was a cooperative. Nobody had weak knees, OK? I don't know about the Dean campaign, but we were pretty cohesive." The Dean campaign was not cohesive. And Trippi would not go to Iowa.
"I didn't go to Iowa because there were a whole bunch of problems in Burlington," Trippi told U.S. News . "Who was going to keep the Internet going? When I left the building, it didn't work, and when I was in the building, it did." Others think Trippi is just making excuses. "We spent three weeks of rolling discussions trying to get Joe to go to Iowa," a source close to the discussions said. "We said go in there and impose some order and discipline in Iowa, and basically do what Michael Whouley did for John Kerry." But Trippi wouldn't, and what was baffling to everyone was that the people urging Trippi to go were his friends, people he knew and trusted. Trippi did have people on the campaign who didn't like him, and these people used Trippi's refusal to bolster their argument that he never should have been hired in the first place. It led to some serious verbal brawls. "If Howard wants to get rid of Joe Trippi, Howard should get rid of Joe Trippi!" one of Trippi's backers shouted during a heated discussion in Burlington. "But we all enable Joe Trippi, because we all understand the benefit to this campaign of having Joe here. It is profound! It's huge, and we wouldn't be here if it weren't for Joe! Now we clearly have to make some adjustments to work around Joe's deficiencies, which, I'll admit, are many." So a structure was created to "work around" Trippi. "Since his relationship with Dean didn't exist," said one senior Dean aide, "a group of three or four of us decided we would make major decisions with Joe through regular daily conference calls, and twice a week those calls would include Howard." Even this plan had to be presented to Trippi with the utmost care, however. "We are not trying to run the campaign," the group told Trippi. "We are trying to make the campaign run." It was a nifty line, but Trippi was not about to cede power to any committee. The conference calls would be made, but Trippi would sometimes refuse to join the call. "Then he announced one day there could be no meetings that he was not part of," a source said. For a campaign to succeed, information needs to be shared, but there was little sharing in the Dean campaign. So little that, in December, a group of top aides found to their horror that the campaign was going to be out of money in January. "So we had to cut spending in Iowa," one Dean aide said. "Don't get me wrong; we didn't lose Iowa because of money. But we were spending money so fast that it was clear that we would be down to $5 million in January and we would need $9 to $12 million for the period from January 1 to 19 and then $7 to $8 million more for the period that followed." In terms of using the Internet for political campaigns, Trippi may be the nation's leading expert. But in terms of classic campaign management skills, Trippi was, in the words of one of his longtime associates, "remarkably dysfunctional." Trippi now says that Ford warned him against going to Iowa, warned him that if he left Burlington there would be a coup and he would be replaced. Ford puts it a little differently. "The bottom line was that in Howard's mind Joe was the best Iowa guy we had, and he wanted Joe to go and me to fill in at headquarters," Ford said. "My sense was that if I did that, it would stay that way, and that's what I told Joe. I think Joe was uncomfortable with leaving his post in Burlington and saw going to Iowa as a downsizing of his job." Ford also contends, however, that those people who think Trippi could have made a dramatic difference in Iowa don't really know Trippi. "If he had gone to Iowa, he would have spent all his time with the press corps and not the campaign, anyway," Ford said.
In an interview, Trippi compared Iowa to two cars rushing headlong into each other. "When the cars were far apart, they didn't ask me to go to Iowa," Trippi said. "But now that the cars are about to crash, they said, 'Trippi, go to Iowa, and step in between them.'" But the cars were still far apart in September, when Trippi says he felt Iowa was going to be a disaster. Even by late 2003, Kerry was still very far down in the polls, his campaign was considered pretty much a national joke, and his ability to raise money was dropping to near zero. "Our strategy worked," Trippi said. "Kerry's face was in the mud. He was broke and out of it. Then he writes himself a check for $6.4 million and he's back in." Not quite: Kerry writes himself a check for $6.4 million and puts a lot of it into Iowa, where he has a strategy, a skilled local staff, and Michael Whouley. In the end, the Dean campaign did assemble what experienced Iowa hands were available, but they got to Iowa pretty late. Tim Dickson, who ended up managing the Dean field operations in Iowa, was proud of the team but was under no illusions. "I'm local to Iowa," he said, "but this is my 19th year of not receiving mail in the state. You know, I just had been away for a long time." One of the first things Dickson's team did was take a look at the Ones, which numbered about 23,000 at the time. Then they tried to apply a more disciplined definition of what a One was. They also ran into the Vietnam body-count problem. Some Ones didn't appear to exist. After Dickson's first check, he slashed the number of Ones by 50 percent. It was necessary but depressing. Overnight, half of Dean's support in Iowa had disappeared.
Trippi knew the situation was critical, but he points out that, unlike Whouley, Trippi was the manager of the entire campaign and had to think past Iowa to other states. "Yeah, I could have gone to Iowa and eked things out," Trippi said. "But then we would have been dead." It was a stunning miscalculation. Without a victory in Iowa, the Dean campaign was dead. Worrying about what came after Iowa was not worth worrying about. In 2004, it was win Iowa or go home. Kerry understood it, shifted the focus of his campaign, mortgaged his house, and staked everything on one state. Dean understood it, too. He just couldn't get it done.
Meet the Machine
When you think of Iowa--if you ever think of Iowa--you think of farmers on tractors, cornstalks in the field, and hogs in their pens. You do not think of John Mauro. Mauro, 63, is a small, solidly built man with curly gray hair, a firm handshake, and a ready smile. He wears a gold watch with a thin gold band and dresses very, very well (though he gives full credit to his wife of 41 years, since he is colorblind). He is the unlikeliest of things in this bucolic farm state: a political boss. He does not use that term, though when it came time for him to name his Italian-American political organization, he had a name handy: La Macchina, which is Italian for The Machine. It was his way of saying maybe we really don't have political machines and political bosses in Iowa, but you don't want to mess with me and find out. Mauro, a Polk County supervisor in a state where county supervisors are powerful figures, controls thousands of votes on the sprawling Italian South Side of Des Moines, almost all of them through absentee ballots. Decades ago, it occurred to Mauro that people didn't really like to go out and vote and that if you could make it easy for them, if you could get a ballot mailed to their home and then pick it up from them, that was a guaranteed vote. In the old days, absentee ballots had to be notarized (which meant that few people bothered with the process), but Mauro hadn't built up a successful insurance business by being dumb or lazy. He had an idea, and he and about 25 of his boyhood friends (who would become the nucleus of La Macchina) became notaries and carried the heavy seals around in their pockets as they went door to door collecting absentee ballots. You wanted service? John Mauro would give you service. You could vote without ever getting off your couch. Today in Iowa, getting an absentee ballot notarized is no longer required, which makes Mauro's job even easier.
Joe Ricca, a senior adviser to John Kerry and a former Iowa organizer for Michael Dukakis, was assigned the job of wooing and winning Mauro over to the Kerry campaign. At the end of December 2003, the Kerry campaign wanted--needed!--those votes that Mauro had in his pocket.
Ricca, with Kerry adviser Michael Whouley at his side, explained it this way to U.S. News .
"So John Mauro has 9,100 absentee ballots," Ricca said.
"Don't get the guy indicted though, OK?" said Whouley.
"Oh, no, they're all legit," said Ricca.
"Sure they're legit," said Whouley. "Right."
But they are legit. Unlike many states, which require a reason for requesting an absentee ballot (you are going to be out of town on Election Day or are disabled and can't get to a polling place, for instance), Iowa requires no reason whatsoever. If you want an absentee ballot, all you need do is sign a card and one will be mailed to you. And today, absentee ballots are a very big deal in Iowa because in the 2000 presidential race, they changed the outcome. If the votes only of those who showed up at the polls had been counted, George W. Bush would have won Iowa by 7,253 votes. But when the absentees were counted, Al Gore won the state by 4,144 votes. So now, both parties are scrambling to do what Mauro has been doing for years: lock up votes before Election Day even comes around. (In 2000, Mauro got a frantic call just before Election Day from the Gore campaign saying it needed 2,000 absentee ballots pronto for Al Gore, which Mauro delivered.) There was only one, tiny problem, however, with Mauro's skills and the Iowa caucuses: The caucuses forbid absentee ballots.
In theory, this is because the caucuses are supposed to be a public, deliberative process in which people talk to one another before voting. In practice, it keeps the caucuses more insular and more easily controlled by party activists. So Mauro's 9,100 absentee ballots were worthless to the Democrats running in the Iowa caucuses. Maybe. When you thought about it, 9,100 votes were still 9,100 votes, and what if Mauro's voters could be persuaded to get up off the couch and go out and vote? Which underestimates the problem. They were not being asked to go out and vote. They were being asked to spend two, three, five hours arguing with people in some overheated room on a winter's night in order to eventually line up for their candidate. So when Des Moines power lawyer Jerry Crawford, Kerry's Iowa chairman, called Mauro and asked him to meet with some Kerry people to talk about supporting Kerry in the caucuses, Mauro was not doing handstands. "I tell him," Mauro said, "I tell him, 'Hey, this isn't our bag of tea.' We do absentees. We don't do the caucuses. I've gone to the caucuses maybe twice in my life, and I have never asked anyone else to go."
Still, Crawford saw the possibilities. Because so few people vote in the Iowa caucuses--only about 11 percent of registered Democrats bothered to vote in 2000--it is tempting to see "expanding the universe" as the key to victory. Instead of putting all your resources into battling the other candidates for the 11 percent who regularly turn out, you battle where you can but save your resources for reaching out to new voters. If you can tap into the 89 percent of people who don't vote, you can ride that wave to victory. And most major candidates had a plan for doing this in 2004: Dick Gephardt targeted family farmers; Howard Dean went after the young and disenchanted; Kerry pursued veterans. This strategy has only one drawback, however: It almost never works. And that is because the Iowa caucuses are not designed to attract large numbers of voters. They are designed to keep large numbers of voters away. The party does not say this, of course. But if the party really wanted wider participation, it could have made voting much easier years ago. Instead, the Iowa caucuses are an extremely daunting process in part because party activists want to keep the process in the control of the party activists. If you make the process difficult and complicated, then only those who are truly motivated and who really understand the process will turn out.
Gov. Tom Vilsack, an unusually thoughtful politician, made this candid appraisal of the caucuses in an interview: "This really is a party-building process. It's designed to find those people who are genuinely interested and active and willing to spend the time, because those are the very same people that you're going to rely upon [in the general election] to make the phone calls, to knock on the doors, to lick the envelopes and the stamps, to host fundraisers. That's the structure." Lest you think Vilsack is in any way defensive about the process, however, he went on to liken the Iowa caucuses to the American Revolution. "If you think about how our democracy got started--really got started--it was a caucus process," he said. "It was those guys meeting in the basement of the tavern in Boston yakking about the issues of the day and figuring and fussing and fighting and ultimately coming to a conclusion about the direction they were going to take. I think it's great."
Great, but difficult. Which is why Mauro and La Macchina didn't bother with it. The caucuses? Who needed them? Well, Kerry needed them if he was going to become the Democratic nominee, and his aides were not going to let guys like Mauro slip between their fingers. Crawford knew he could not close the deal--he had not backed Mauro for county supervisor--but he maintained good ties to Mauro's brother, Michael, who just happened to be the Polk County auditor, and Crawford kept asking Michael to help bring John around. (John has seven living siblings--one died a few years ago--which means that when the family gathered for Christmas in 2003, there were 131 people and they met in a church hall. When U.S. News asked Mauro how many votes he could count on from that gathering, he smiled and said, "About 60," which is not bad considering some are children and too young to vote.) But Crawford knew somebody else would have a better chance of sewing up Mauro, especially if that somebody else had a last name ending in a vowel.
"So Crawford calls me up and says he wants me to do a 'wop-on-wop' with Mauro," Ricca said.
"That would be 'Italian-on-Italian,' " Whouley interjected.
"You could translate it that way," Ricca allowed.
So Ricca flew back to Iowa (he had been there in November with Whouley to try to persuade Vilsack to endorse Kerry), and he went to a dinner meeting with Mauro and about a dozen members of La Macchina a few days after Christmas at an Italian restaurant owned by one of Mauro's cousins. (By his count, Mauro has 655 cousins. Mauro likes to count things.) Ricca assumed he was going to have to do a selling job, but it didn't turn out that way. Mauro had met Kerry on a previous trip to Iowa, and Mauro liked it when Kerry roared up to the meeting on a motorcycle. Besides, Kerry was a veteran, as were Mauro and many members of La Macchina, and they felt a bond with him. So Kerry was not the problem. The caucuses were the problem. The caucuses were not their thing. Ricca understood the psychology perfectly. (A good political organizer would make a pretty fair shrink.) "These guys were not used to failing," Ricca said. "That was the problem. Their organization spent its life making it easy for people to vote--here is the absentee ballot; I'll come back and pick it up from you--and now they were going to be asking people to go to caucuses for three to five hours in winter. It was the antithesis of what they knew how to do."
Mauro agreed. "This was a different thing," he said. "I don't know about caucuses. One reason people vote absentee is because they don't want to go out! Holy cow, what was I doing?" After the dinner and assurances he would get some support from phone banks, Mauro told Ricca that La Macchina would do it. But he wanted to make clear that this was a huge commitment. "If we do something, we do something to win," Mauro said. Ricca was very pleased, but he was also no starry-eyed kid. He knew that Mauro was going to be trying something completely new, and completely new things rarely pay off in their first outing. "I really wasn't sure what it would yield," Ricca said later.
After the dinner, Mauro and his friends went to his insurance office just west of downtown Des Moines, where Mauro has 10 phone lines. They began calling people to get an idea of how difficult it was going to be to get people to vote in the caucuses.
"Don't ask me!" caller after caller told Mauro. "Please don't ask! A vote for you, that's different. I always vote for you; you know that. But to go out to the caucuses for--who is it? John Kerry?--c'mon, John. We're talking three, four hours here!" Mauro knew he was not going to win that battle. So he had to massage it. He called the people who would be his precinct captains on caucus night and told them that the caucuses were not going to last three, four hours this year. "If you ain't done in an hour and a half," Mauro said, "my people are walking out, so be done in an hour and a half. This ain't no ceremony . Get 'em in, get 'em out."
Still, Mauro did not have an easy time. Many balked. But now Mauro was committed, and he and La Macchina worked the phones and worked the doors. "I knew Dean was not going to sell," Mauro said (noting also that the Dean campaign had never bothered to call him for his support). "You can't bring people in from outside to start knocking on doors. It don't work that way." Ricca went out with one of Mauro's precinct workers one day to see how it did work. "I went around door to door with the guy," Ricca said. "He knew everybody, and everybody knew what they had to do. The guy says, 'Check these seven names of people and see if they are coming to the caucuses, and I'll be back at 2 p.m. to check.' And at 2 p.m., he comes back and they tell him, 'These five are coming for Kerry, and these two are not.' " And those were figures that the Kerry campaign could depend on. (And the two who were not coming could depend on somebody knocking on their door and asking why they weren't coming.) The Dean volunteers were often passionate, dedicated, and enthusiastic. But for the most part, they were not talking to their neighbors, and Kerry's volunteers were. John Mauro had coached Little League in his neighborhood, he had lived in Christ the King parish for 27 years, and he had known most members of La Macchina, which was also a civic organization doing charitable work, since they were 7 years old and going to St. Anthony's Catholic elementary school together. Most of the Italian immigrants who came to Iowa settled in either Des Moines or Oelwein. "And we all said the same thing to them," Mauro said. "We wish you had gone to Florida! We wish you had gone to California!" But they came to Iowa, where the winters are harsh and the caucuses harsher.
Mauro was not a lifelong politician. One day in 1990, he had a disagreement with a county supervisor over a piece of land and didn't like the way he was treated. "Bada bing, bada boom," Mauro told the incumbent. "Maybe it's time we take you out. Maybe it's time we find somebody to beat your brains in." In other cities, in other states, that might have meant somebody was going to get whacked, but while politics in Iowa is vigorous, it is not homicidal. All Mauro meant was that maybe it was time for the incumbent to be challenged. "You got nobody to beat me," the incumbent told Mauro.
"I'll beat you," Mauro said, and, of course, he did, though now, years later, he admits, "It was not a good reason to run." So Mauro had this core group from the neighborhood, and it was a powerful force because it organized only in the neighborhood. "It is an Italian village," Mauro said. "People here, they don't want outside advice." The South Side of Des Moines is also one of the densest population centers in Iowa, which means a large number of votes can be harvested in just a few blocks, compared with driving down miles of country roads for hours to knock on just a few doors. As the years went by, La Macchina did not escape notice. Senator Harkin came to Mauro, as did Vilsack, and both received support through his absentee ballots. (And it was, of course, a two-way street. "Harkin got us money for an Italian-American cultural center," Mauro said. "That was good. We have never asked the governor for anything, but we are sure he would be there for us.") As La Macchina began producing names of committed voters for Kerry, Ricca noticed something wonderful. "Mauro's group started churning up names we didn't have in our database!" Ricca said. Which means Mauro was truly expanding the voting universe. He was coming up with people not on anybody's list and getting them to vote for Kerry.
Which was not good enough. Nothing is ever good enough for people who sweat details, and many Kerry operatives had spent their lives sweating details. (In politics, the race is not always to the swift or even the smartest; it is often to he who works the hardest.)
The Kerry campaign had its own precinct captains for the South Side of Des Moines, and Ricca wanted to be sure they meshed with Mauro's. "Mauro's guys rarely came into Kerry headquarters," Ricca said. "They did their work from their homes. And we were very leery of that." You could ask why the Kerry campaign wanted to look a gift horse in the mouth, but political campaigns are very complicated machines and unless somebody is making sure all the parts are working together, they have a tendency to grind themselves apart. So Ricca asked Mauro to bring his precinct captains in to meet with Kerry's precinct captains, so nobody stumbled over anyone else. Ricca will never forget the day. "It was like a scene from Goodfellas !" Ricca said. "The leather jackets! The gold chains! I'm Italian-American, so I can say that." And it was important to Mauro that Ricca was Italian-American, that Ricca's father had been a custodian, and that Italian had been spoken in the Ricca home by Ricca's father and grandfather. "Though I can understand just a few words myself," Ricca admitted. "But I got to tell you, Mauro knew as little as I did!"
Mauro recorded a robo-call for the campaign, and it got a good response. And Mauro's people came out for John Kerry on caucus night (or, more accurately, they came out for John Mauro on caucus night). At the request of U.S. News, Crawford crunched the numbers: Of the 27 South Side precincts dominated by Mauro, Kerry won or tied in 16, or almost 60 percent of them, and came in no worse than second anywhere, even though Polk County turned out to be one of John Edwards's strongest areas in the state. Of the 14 precincts that Crawford considered Mauro's core area of support, Kerry won 11, or about 79 percent. "They were very good numbers," Crawford said. Ricca was delighted, not just for the 2004 caucuses but for the future. "We were tapping into a network of nontraditional caucus attendees that actually worked," he said. "Dean had a grand plan to expand the universe, but it was too amorphous. Mauro knew his universe, and that is how you get beyond traditional attendees."
The Dean people did not disagree. "It's extraordinarily difficult to expand the pool of voters," said Dean aide Tim Dickson. "It's not like a primary. You can't just, on your way to dropping off the kids, just go in and cast your vote and get your sticker and say 'I voted' and be gone. You have to go to a meeting with people you don't know, you have to be there for hours--and this isn't golf shirt weather; this is Iowa, cold, rotten weather--you have to cast your vote in front of other people, and so it's a fairly daunting process. And just to mobilize people and try to educate them about that, where to go, what to do is somewhat difficult." Which was an understatement for a campaign not known for understatement.
When Kerry won the caucuses, Mauro went to the victory party, where he chatted with Ricca. Mauro did not get to see Kerry, which did not surprise him. He did not expect to be treated like a big shot. "I don't need no congratulations," Mauro said later. To this day, however, Kerry has not called to thank him. Perhaps Kerry never knew of Mauro; it was, after all, a large campaign. But snubbing a guy who lives in a world where small courtesies are never forgotten and small slights rarely forgiven is not good politics. Especially since in order to win the presidency, Kerry might need Iowa, and in order to win Iowa he might need absentee ballots, which means he might need Mauro. "I think Iowa is going to be closer than they think, but Kerry can and will win," Mauro said. "Especially if they give me Polk County to organize. You can't send somebody from Detroit to find a street here." And Mauro asks very little in return. "Ambassador to Italy," he said with a laugh. "Write that down."
'A lock...on third'
John Kerry pursued large constituencies in Iowa like veterans and women, and he pursued smaller constituencies like environmentalists and political activists. But the constituency he pursued most relentlessly (and largely in secret) was a constituency of one: Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack. In his second term after becoming the first Democrat to be elected as Iowa's governor in 30 years, Vilsack was a popular figure in the state--smart, thoughtful, and highly respected among Democrats who were likely to show up at the caucuses. The Kerry campaign team had strong ties to Vilsack, and that was no accident. John Norris, Kerry's Iowa director, had been Vilsack's chief of staff, and Jerry Crawford, Kerry's Iowa chairman, was a top donor and adviser to Vilsack. Crawford had been pursued by both the Edwards and Dean campaigns, but he decided on New Year's Eve 2002 to go with Kerry--but only if Vilsack approved. So before calling Kerry, Crawford called the governor. "My primary allegiance is to him," Crawford explained. Vilsack gave his blessing--"I think that's a great decision," he said--and only then did Crawford call Kerry to accept the job, telling him that he intended to maintain very close contact with Vilsack. Good idea, Kerry replied. Even Michael Whouley had some Vilsack ties. So everything was in place for a Vilsack endorsement. Except that Vilsack didn't want to do it. "If either Harkin or AFSCME had endorsed Kerry," Crawford said, "Vilsack would have endorsed us." Crawford believed AFSCME would endorse Kerry and that that would give Vilsack the "cover" he needed to abandon Dick Gephardt. "Vilsack has a great affection for Gephardt," Crawford said. "And it was going to be very hard for him to be endorsing someone other than him."
It was unlikely that Harkin would endorse Kerry--"There is a lack of chemistry between them," Crawford said diplomatically--but he was hoping for the union's endorsement. While he waited, Crawford assembled a huge notebook of Kerry's policy positions and dropped it off at Terrace Hill, the ornate Second Empire-style governor's mansion in Des Moines. (Though Terrace Hill is pleasant looking, the architectural style is familiar to anyone who has seen a horror film. The house on the hill in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is Second Empire.) He also assembled a tape that matched Kerry's appearance on Meet the Press against Howard Dean's and dropped that off, too. Sometime in the summer, Crawford found himself on the same flight home to Des Moines with Christie Vilsack and told her: "I want to make sure you know how eager we are to earn your support." To which the governor's wife replied, not unpleasantly, that she had made no decision, but "I don't need to be lobbied or romanced."
The Kerry campaign, of course, continued to do both. Kerry met with Vilsack in early fall, and Vilsack set out three criteria for an endorsement: Kerry would have to be endorsed by AFSCME, he would have to be competitive in the polls in Iowa, and he would have to have a solid foundation of support. The first meeting between Vilsack and the Kerry staff came on November 24. Though it was set up by Crawford, the pitch was made by Whouley and Joe Ricca. Whouley knew the meeting was going to be difficult. On November 12, AFSCME had endorsed Dean so Vilsack no longer had the cover to endorse Kerry. Vilsack didn't want to meet with the Kerry aides either in the capitol or the governor's mansion, where somebody might have seen them enter or leave, so the meeting was set up in a holding room in the vast Polk County Convention Complex after an MSNBC debate. (The meeting was supposed to be top secret, but through a bizarre mix-up the media were alerted: Ricca, trying to reach Whouley to tell him the time and place of the meeting, called his hotel, the Renaissance Savery, and asked for his room. He left a voice mail saying the Vilsack meeting was set for that night. But Ricca had been mistakenly connected with the room of Ryan Lizza, a reporter for the New Republic .)
In the meeting, Vilsack was frank. Without the AFSCME endorsement, he said, there was no way he could endorse Kerry. "I am about to propose a major tax package to fund educational initiatives, and I need AFSCME to push it," Vilsack reportedly explained. "I can't alienate AFSCME by going against their choice. All politics is local, and I can't afford to do this."
Whouley and Ricca believed him, but they also knew that Kerry's poor standing in the polls made it far easier for Vilsack to say no. Nobody wants to back a loser.
"We have a foundation of support in Iowa," Ricca told Vilsack.
"You have a solid lock on a distant third," Vilsack replied.
"He was alarmingly straightforward," Ricca recalled later. "We were a distant third."
There wasn't much else to say. Whouley mentioned the vice presidency--"Hey, play your cards right, you know you could be the VP," he reportedly said--but everybody laughed. "When you're 22 points down in the polls," Ricca said, "you are not making serious offers of the vice presidency." Both men told Vilsack they couldn't disagree with his analysis of Kerry's status, but the campaign was building, and eventually Kerry was going to win. At least Vilsack didn't laugh in their faces. "The door was left open," Ricca said, "for continued discussions."
Vilsack put it to Crawford more directly. "Without AFSCME and without Harkin, there is no way I can do it to Dick Gephardt," he said. It was not as though Gephardt had a chance for victory, however. In a long interview after the campaign, Vilsack said, "As far as Dick Gephardt was concerned, I love the man, I think he's just a terrific guy. But his organization, his structure, was no bigger than it was in 1988 minus whoever was no longer around. OK? It didn't grow." Vilsack was happy not to endorse anyone. There was no need to offend Gephardt and AFSCME to endorse a guy who was a distant third.
But then things began to change. Vilsack had his own sources of political information, and they were telling him that Kerry's organization was stronger than it looked and that Dean's was weaker. There was a small hint of Dean's weakness that came not from a political source but from the Chicago Tribune . It is difficult for the media to determine how good a political campaign's organization really is before Election Day. If a campaign says it has well-trained precinct captains, knowledgeable county chairmen, and a huge get-out-the-vote effort all ready to go, this is taken pretty much at face value. But two Tribune reporters, Flynn McRoberts and Jeff Zeleny, decided to test how good the Dean organization really was and were immediately rewarded. Though the Tribune buried the story on Page 15, it turned out to be one of the few alerts in the media that the Dean campaign might not be a juggernaut after all. On December 4, McRoberts drove to Atlantic, Iowa, about 82 miles west of Des Moines. Atlantic, population 7,200, is the county seat of Cass County, and the Dean website had promised a "meet up" in all of Iowa's 99 counties that evening. The Cass County meet up was supposed to be at a restaurant called the Farmer's Kitchen, and it was supposed to be hosted by Dean admirer Forrest Teig. Nobody showed up. The Tribune tracked down Teig, who was sitting at home. He said he knew nothing about the event. Then he said of the Dean organization: "It's a group of amateur people working on the campaign." McRoberts and Zeleny wrote: "The gap between the campaign's organizational boasts and the reality . . . illustrates the central challenge facing Dean less than seven weeks before the January 19 caucuses." Their report also pointed out that enthusiastic supporters were one thing and "organizational know-how" was quite another. The Dean campaign, the article said, "is a work in progress." Few in Iowa probably saw the story, but one who did was Tom Vilsack. And he was genuinely shocked. "Nobody showed up!" Vilsack said. " Nobody showed up! And that led me to believe that the passion, the commitment was not as deep as it appeared. There were people from outside the state that felt passionately about Governor Dean, but it did not yet translate into people in the state getting there, making the commitment, and the organization wasn't as strong."
That may be a lot to divine from a single story, but Vilsack was right: The passion for Dean was not nearly as strong in Iowa as it was outside. There was another sign even more foreboding. "A second warning signal for me about the Dean campaign was a holiday reception that we have every year," Vilsack said. "We invite the state workers from the capitol complex here to come into the office. We shake hands, there's punch and cookies, and the tree's up and they're streaming through here--they're all AFSCME people, you know--so I'm figuring 'OK, I'll see Dean buttons.' But then I see Edwards, Kerry, and Gephardt buttons! The point was that each person had a different button, [but] there was no consistency. I thought, 'That's interesting. The folks at the top (of AFSCME) had made a decision, but the folks at the bottom of the food chain didn't see it that way.' "
Vilsack felt liberated to move closer to Kerry. He couldn't endorse him once he had used AFSCME as an excuse, but he could help Kerry in important ways. One of the most important--and most secret--came in January, when Kerry was in desperate need of support. He was doing so poorly in state and national polls that his finance committee--his big fundraisers--was reporting that people were refusing to take their calls. The month before, Crawford had invited the finance committee to come to Des Moines in January. As a sign of their commitment to Kerry--Des Moines in January has two temperatures: cold and colder--about 50 of them showed up. The staff put on a dog-and-pony show for them, revealing internal polling indicating that Kerry was on the upswing and bragging about its list of Ones and Twos. Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry both spoke, but the real star was a surprise guest lined up by Crawford: Tom "I'm Officially Neutral" Vilsack. And this time he didn't care if Kerry people were seen with him. He met with the Kerry fundraisers in the state capitol. He couldn't tell them he was endorsing Kerry, of course, but he did the next best thing. "He gave a big smile and a wink and a nod," Crawford said. "He was very encouraging." At the end of a dinner, at the 801 Steak and Chop House, a supremely expensive restaurant in downtown Des Moines favored by anyone on an expense account (or trying to show he is not worried about money), Crawford told the finance committee: "Don't make fundraising calls for John Kerry today or tomorrow or the next day. But get your lists out so you can call on January 20 and get money for the winner of the Iowa caucuses!"
A few days later, the campaign delivered the clincher: Christie Vilsack would endorse Kerry. The campaign had been in constant touch with her and knew the signs were good. After she watched a tape of Kerry on Meet the Press, she told Crawford: "When I watch John Kerry, I feel like I am watching somebody who could be president of the United States." Crawford told her that this was the most important presidential election of their lifetimes, that Kerry had to win Iowa to win the presidency, and that she could help Kerry win Iowa. On January 10, nine days before the caucuses, Whouley, Norris, and Crawford went to Terrace Hill to make their final pitch. They had facts and figures, but they also knew political matters were not Christie Vilsack's only concern. "I think a very poignant moment," her husband recalled, "was when she said, 'This man makes me feel safe.' " Many saw--and were intended to see--Christie Vilsack's endorsement as the shadow endorsement of Tom Vilsack. "We talked about it beforehand," he said. "I mean, obviously she isn't going to do something that--you know, her first loyalty is, obviously, is to me--and she wouldn't do anything or want to do anything that would be hurtful and harmful to me. And if I had said, 'Gee honey, an endorsement's not really a good thing,' I'm sure that she would have given very serious consideration to not endorsing him." But Vilsack didn't say that.
Securing Christie's endorsement wasn't easy. Kerry and his wife, Teresa, both met with her while Christie got no chance to meet with Judith Steinberg, Dean's wife, who didn't show up in Iowa until just before the caucuses (which was, Dean now admits, a big mistake). "What was surprising, I think, of all this," Tom Vilsack recalls, was that John Edwards didn't pursue [an endorsement] by Christie as strongly as I would have thought." (Rob Bernsten, Iowa director for Edwards, said many attempts were made to meet with Christie Vilsack, but scheduling conflicts prevented it.)"I do think Christie's endorsement validated what people were thinking but were fearful to openly express because all the press, all of the buzz, was about Howard Dean," Tom Vilsack said. "But people said, 'Well, jeez, if Christie thinks he's OK, then I think he's OK, and I'm going to tell my neighbor I think he's OK,' and before you know it things were on a roll."
It wasn't quite that simple, of course. The Kerry campaign was ready for Christie Vilsack's endorsement, ready to have her make a robo-call to thousands of Iowans, ready to put her on the campaign bus, and ready with media interviews. And then a terrible thought struck John Norris: Mount Pleasant, where the Vilsacks vote in southeast Iowa (it is her hometown, and he was mayor there from 1987 to 1992) was not exactly Kerry territory. So what would happen if Kerry didn't get enough votes in Christie Vilsack's home precinct to earn a delegate? What would the press do with that? Norris called her and asked her to please line up a precinct captain for caucus night, so Kerry would have someone who could argue his case. Governor Vilsack, still officially neutral, felt he should not go to the precinct caucus, but his wife did. As it turned out, Kerry did earn delegates in Precinct One of Mount Pleasant but did not carry the precinct. Edwards won, with six delegates, followed by Kerry and Dean with five each. (Christie was later named an at-large delegate and will lead the Iowa delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Boston.) Which is very Iowa. Think the voters of Precinct One might be impressed that the governor's wife had endorsed Kerry? Impressed enough to carry the precinct for him? Naw .
Wait, this is even more Iowa: In minute Cumming, Iowa, population 162 and home of Tom Harkin, you would think Harkin would be a very big deal, and he is. And you might also think that when a U.S. senator from your hometown endorses Howard Dean, that would carry the day for him there. Naw . "Kerry, Edwards, Gephardt, they all started talking about how Dean couldn't win, couldn't beat Bush," Harkin said. "And I started getting calls from friends, neighbors, regular caucus goers, saying, 'We got to win, Tom. Dean can't win. I'm going for Edwards. I'm going for Kerry.' This was a snapshot of what was happening around the state." Harkin went to Dean and told him that things were not looking good--no matter how many Ones he thought he had. "But he had no seasoned political people around him to feed him ideas," Harkin said. "You can't know everything yourself. And something is very wrong when someone's campaign manager is getting more publicity than the candidate. I went to Governor Dean, and I told him, 'I have an uneasy feeling and not just about Trippi but about everything.' He thanked me and that was it." In the end, Harkin managed to get a second-place finish in his precinct for Dean behind Kerry. "But I had to talk to two or three friends real hard," Harkin recalled, "to get Dean that."
Stormy Weather
The Perfect Storm was a perfect mess. It was the Dean campaign's name for the 3,500 volunteers who would come from across America to work in Iowa in the final days of the campaign. The media ate it up. What a great example of the dedication, the passion, the commitment of the Dean volunteers (which was true) and of the strength, the competence, the near invincibility of the Dean campaign in Iowa (which was not).
The name had first been used by Trippi in May on the DeanNation blog, in which he described the campaign as a "Perfect Storm" that Dean's enemies were trying to stop. He also wrote that "the wind is getting stronger, and the waves are getting higher, the Perfect Storm is building . . . ." The campaign's Iowa spokesperson, Sarah Leonard, thought it was a name that people wouldn't understand and was going to object to it, but when she heard that it was Trippi's idea, she held her tongue. Besides, the idea had bigger problems than just the name. "The idea was to bring 5,000 volunteers--of which we only got 3,500--to come out and live in Girl Scout camps and talk on rented cellphones and drive rented vans," Leonard said. "In the summer, we couldn't afford air conditioning, and now we had boxes of cellphones all over headquarters. I had never seen a campaign spend like this one." Tom Ochs, a senior aide on the field staff, agreed. "We wasted money," he said, "and that stemmed from our ability to raise it. We always thought we would be able to raise more." The Dean campaign had become a modern-day cargo cult, looking to the Internet heavens to provide funds without end. The campaign had to rent a separate building and create a separate staff just to deal with the Stormers, as well as rent 13 "firebases" around the state in which to house them. Trippi thought the Storm was a swell idea--he had poured 1,000 volunteer "Fritz Blitzers" into Iowa in 1984 to work for Walter Mondale. But he hadn't worked in Iowa since the Gephardt campaign of 1988 and was out of touch with some critical events. "The state had just gone through a fierce anti-immigration battle two years before, and the legislature had just passed an English-only law," Leonard, an Iowa native, said, "and I didn't think bringing in 3,500 people from the outside was a positive addition to the mix." Nor was the problem with the Stormers that, as other campaigns claimed, they all had pierced tongues and shaved heads. Actually, they didn't look all that different from Iowans. But while their numbers endlessly impressed the media, some Iowans had a different reaction. If you live in Miami or Los Angeles or Dallas and you pick up a newspaper and read that 3,500 political volunteers are descending on your state, it might not make a big impression. But in Iowa, the population of most towns is smaller than 3,500. Of the 953 communities in Iowa, 800 contain fewer than 1,000 people. So if you lived in one of those small towns and read about how these orange-capped "Stormers" (the name "Storm Troopers" was fortuitously passed over) were soon going to be banging on your door, your reaction might be one of apprehension. Governor Vilsack was pro-immigration as a way of building Iowa's population--he points out that Iowa is the only state in the union that hasn't doubled its population in the past 100 years. But oppposition to his immigration plans had forced him to sign an English-only law to protect his political backside. In an interview, he said this about the Stormers: "I'll tell you the one thing you don't want to do is you don't want to bring folks in from outside the state to tell Iowans what to do. It's great that people were that enthusiastic and that passionate, but they were not Iowans. If they had had 3,500 Iowans with caps, it might have been a different deal, you know, and if you're going to have caps, you either have to have black and gold (the University of Iowa's colors) or cardinal and gold (Iowa State University's colors) in this state or both."
The other campaigns were openly contemptuous of the Storm. "This supposed Howard Dean juggernaut is not what it appears to be," Steve Murphy, campaign manager for Dick Gephardt, said at the time. "The Perfect Storm turns out to be a perfect drizzle." The real fear of the other campaigns, however, was not that the Stormers would be effective campaigners but that they would try to vote in the caucuses (presumably after hiding their orange caps). When voters sign in at their precinct caucus, they sign an affidavit swearing that they are residents of the precinct, but in reality nobody checks (though in many Iowa precincts everybody knows everybody else, and massive fraud would be difficult).
Mike Ford, who had come to Iowa because Trippi wouldn't, thought the Storm was a bad idea, but he could do nothing about it. "It was an Internet decision, not an Iowa decision," he said. "It was a fait accompli . The people wanted to come." And on the Dean campaign, you never said no to the Internet, to the movement, even if the idea was a bad one. "What could I do?" Ford asked. He had publicly disagreed with the campaign's plan to get people to drive from California to New Hampshire for the primary--he felt it was senseless for volunteers to drive all the way across the country when there were plenty of states in between where they could be of use--and he was told to stick a cork in it. So, days before the caucuses, a horde of volunteers was going to descend not just on Iowa but on the Dean campaign. "It was clearly a burden to the staff on a day-to-day basis," Ford said, "but it was even worse than that: When Howard came to the state, he was expected to deal with the Stormers, talk to the Stormers, spend time with the Stormers as their reward for coming here. But that meant Howard wasn't talking to Iowans ." What's worse, the Storm arrived just as Dean phone calls and focus groups were indicating that people were tired of being bothered by volunteers calling them and knocking on their doors. "We were like the houseguests who won't leave you alone," Ford said. "There was complaint after complaint about the volume and intensity of our contact. But our organization felt knocking on doors was what an organization was supposed to do. The Iowans didn't."
Which raised a critical question: Just what were the Stormers actually supposed to accomplish, except impress the media? The plan, as it turns out, was to have each Stormer bring 10 voters to the caucuses, which meant that Dean would be assured at least 35,000 votes. Supplemented by the efforts of the field staff and organized labor, that could put him over the top. (In fact, he ended up with only about 22,000 votes.) But the thought of the Stormers getting 35,000 people to accompany them to the polls--if, indeed, the Dean campaign ever actually had 35,000 supporters--was preposterous. "Though the theory behind the Storm was kind of cool," said Ochs, a sen-ior aide, "we had no ability to actually execute it on the ground. So the Storm became a huge distraction and a management failure. They were well meaning but had little training, so all we could use them for was less important stuff than the hard work of door-to-door canvassing. We had them distributing literature and 'visibility' stuff like standing on corners and waving signs."
Some did go door to door, but since there was no time to train them (other than a 15-minute crash course), and since there was no time for them to learn all the policy positions Dean had taken (which wavering voters might reasonably ask them about), the Stormers were told to tell their personal stories to voters instead. It was a ludicrous (and arrogant) notion that Iowans, in the last days of an exhausting campaign, actually wanted to hear the personal sagas of the Deaniacs. Rose Levine, 19, of Montpelier, Vt., wrote about her experience on the Dean campaign in Iowa for the Rutland (Vermont) Herald: "Although his campaign was massive," she wrote, ". . . many of the key strategic tasks were left to young people with little campaign experience." She also noted that "the basic premise of the Iowa 'Perfect Storm' was problematic: Volunteers were intended to go door to door celebrating our personal journeys to Iowa ('My name is Rose, and I came all the way from Vermont . . .') instead of listening to the concerns and questions of Iowans." And if 19-year-old Rose Levine could see that, how come all that political talent in the Dean campaign could not?
Actually, some did, but the Storm was a Trippi idea, and nobody wanted to mess with Trippi. To Trippi, the Stormers were the essence of the Dean campaign, the empowered, decentralized masses who would transform America. That they were going to be a logistical nightmare that burdened rather than helped both the campaign and the voters of Iowa was secondary to that. Many of the Stormers left Iowa in good spirits, even though Dean lost. They had bonded with like-minded people, felt they were part of a movement, and today some don't want to hear any criticism of the Storm. But the Storm wasn't supposed to be a scout jamboree; it was supposed to help elect a man to office. "The Iowa caucus goers were not buying what we were selling at closing time," Ochs said. "The Storm was part of that."
Rose Levine wrote: "Our volunteers were a tight-knit group--too much so. Many voters, instead of feeling welcomed into our clan, felt like outsiders and may have been insulted by out-of-staters rushing in to tell them how to vote." Trippi defends the Storm to this day. "Maybe they are the reason we got 18 percent instead of 13 percent," he said in an interview. Eighteen percent. A true disaster. "In the end, everybody knew we were sinking," Gina Glantz, a Dean aide, said. "Dean knew it was slipping away. He was prepared to come in second. But nobody was prepared to come in a distant third. In the summer, the Dean leadership was sitting around measuring drapes for the White House, and now it was falling apart and they didn't know how to confront that."
Back in early December, a Dean spokesperson had solemnly informed reporters that on December 26, the Brewing Storm would begin. From January 2 to 4, 2004, there would be the Emerging Storm, from January 9 to 11, the Gathering Storm, and from January 16 to 19, the Perfect Storm. It was a storm too far. Only after it was all over did anyone see the irony of the name. The Perfect Storm was a book about a disaster of unprecedented magnitude, leaving little trace in its wake. So perhaps it was the perfect symbol for the Dean campaign after all.
'Steady As You Go'
As Howard Dean's field operations manager in Iowa, Tim Dickson lived both in a high-tech world of computer projections and multicolored voter maps and a low-tech world of door-knocking and phone-calling. Because the trial by endurance that is caucus voting makes good organization a necessity, the field operations staffs were often looked upon as the critical element that would make or break a campaign. But Dickson now believes there is something even more important: the candidate. "Votes don't come from phone calls and door-knocks alone," he said. "All of us have mystical ideas about the caucuses and the role of organization and, yes, you have to get your Ones to polls, but you have to give them a reason to go." And after its loss in Iowa, the big question for the Dean campaign became: Did Howard Dean give people a reason to vote for him, or did he drive people into the arms of the other candidates? Many on the Dean campaign now believe Dean's gaffes in Iowa did him in, that his verbal blunders turned people off, made him look unpresidential and lacking in temperament and, therefore, unable to beat George W. Bush. And while this theory is popular among staffers because it absolves them of blame, Dean seemingly had an incredible series of missteps in a short amount of time:
In early November, he told the Des Moines Register: "I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks."
In early December, he said on National Public Radio that he had heard an "interesting theory" that Bush was "warned ahead of time by the Saudis" about the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Also in early December, it was revealed that Dean had sealed for 10 years more than half of his gubernatorial records, because, as he had told Vermont Public Radio, "we didn't want anything embarrassing appearing in the papers at a critical time for a future endeavor."
In mid-December, when Saddam Hussein was caught, Dean said "the capture of Saddam has not made America safer."
And in late December, he said, "I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely guilty, we should do our best not to . . . prejudge jury trials."
After the campaign was over, Dean told U.S. News , "There's almost nothing I said that wasn't true. It goes back to that old quote, 'A gaffe in Washington is when you tell the truth, and nobody thinks you should have.' And I actually don't think it hurt very much either." During the campaign, Dean not only defended his gaffes but reveled in them. "Some people call it slips of the tongue, and other people call it straight talk," he told a crowd in Waterloo, Iowa. And in Marion, Iowa, he told the crowd he was going to say, "all those things those pollsters tell me not to say!" He drew applause each time, but his opponents were quick to exploit what they saw as an opening. "His problems are self-made," Gephardt said of Dean while campaigning in Dallas Center, Iowa. "A lot of statements he's made don't give people confidence that he can take on George Bush."
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."
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.
"Dated Dean, Married Kerry," the bumper stickers in Iowa read, and for many it was true. Dean had excited them, energized them, made them believe it was possible to beat Bush. But once they thought it was possible, they started wondering whether Dean was the best vehicle for their hopes, whether he was truly presidential. Dean's Iowa director, Jeani Murray, said: "We did a focus group in August that said if the message moves from change to electability, Kerry was going to win in Iowa."
Which he did. But what happened to all those Dean voters identified as Ones, the voters who would vote for Dean without fail? The most likely explanation is that thousands of them never really existed, thousands did not show up at the caucuses, and thousands showed up and voted for someone else. "Would we have done better with a better organization?" Mike Ford asked. "Yes. But we wouldn't have won. What you want in a campaign is people feeling increasingly better about your candidate so you top out at the end. In our case, the better the voters knew Dean, the less they liked him. Organization could not have saved this one."
That is the opinion, of course, of someone who was partly responsible for the organization. Others have a different point of view. "This was a campaign that ill-served its candidate," one top Dean aide said. "We let him down." Some of Dean's former aides say Dean remained a powerful and appealing candidate to the end but was doomed by an organization without, in the words of Tom Harkin, "any structural integrity." Then there are those who say, yes, the campaign was awful, but it was awful because of the "insurgent/empowerment" philosophy that Dean and Trippi stubbornly clung to, even at the expense of building an efficient campaign organization. "We were supposed to be insurgents, outsiders, free-form," Ochs said. "Experience was seen somehow as a negative. It was hubris, the hubris of believing that anything new and different was good. Mundane, traditional campaign tasks were not valued. The campaign often operated in a head-scratching, mind-numbingly ridiculous manner."
While losing campaigns are rarely as bad as they look and winning campaigns are rarely as good, there were dramatic differences between the Dean and Kerry campaigns in Iowa: The Kerry campaign acted decisively and sent an Iowa expert to Iowa when things looked bad, something Dean wanted to do by sending Joe Trippi but could not manage. The Kerry campaign coordinated the needs of Iowa with the candidate's message and appearances, which the Dean campaign often could not manage. And the Dean campaign was obsessed with its political philosophy and Internet movement, while the Kerry campaign was obsessed only with making John Kerry the Democratic nominee. Kerry won Iowa and Dean lost, and that was the whole campaign. Democrats wanted a standard-bearer, one who could beat George W. Bush, and they wanted him fast. And once they had a true front-runner, one who had actually won a state, they were going to stick with him.
Sitting on his campaign plane a few weeks before he was due to accept the Democratic nomination for president, John Kerry looked back at Iowa. "There was a media perception that our campaign was written off," he said. "People had all but handed the nomination to Howard Dean. [So] we had to win Iowa or come in a very strong second." Very early on, in January of 2003, things were going well for Kerry. Then, the ground shifted, and Howard Dean shifted it. "What we couldn't control was the war in Iraq," Kerry said. "Basically, I was moving very effectively and very well until the war in Iraq stopped the debate and changed the dynamic. It just didn't matter what you were doing and what you said; there was just one angry topic. Dean didn't have to vote on the war, and he moved in and created a different dynamic." Nothing could change Kerry's vote supporting the invasion of Iraq, and all he could do was slog on and try to explain it.
In the end, Kerry actually won the antiwar vote in Iowa. Among those voters strongly opposed to the war, according to exit polls, Kerry got 34 percent to Dean's 29 percent. Among young voters ages 17-29, who many analysts thought would go for Dean, Kerry got 35 percent to Dean's 25 percent. Even among those who used the Internet "a great deal" to learn about the candidates, Kerry got 31 percent to Dean's 25 percent. "I had an inner confidence," Kerry said. "I could see people shifting; I could see things the media couldn't. I was pretty confident, one foot in front of the other, steady as you go." He felt he had a good staff in Iowa and a good staff in Washington and, most of all, nobody concealed bad news from him. "If it doesn't look good, my people know to say, 'We've got a problem,' " Kerry said. "And we had a few of those conversations early on. 'What do we do? How do we fix it?' " And, of course, he had a fixer, the magical Mr. Whouley. "He's very skilled, incredibly disciplined, and capable," Kerry said, and then grew almost rhapsodic, an emotional state he does not often visit. "He works quietly behind the scenes like the wizard of Oz behind the curtain. He is the magical Mr. Mistoffelees! He can organize. He is calm and steady and knows where you are, and he knows how to count. And it is good to have people around who know how to count." No kidding. Just ask Howard Dean.
"In the beginning," Tom Ochs said, "we had no plan for success, and in the end we had no plan for defeat."
"Howard Dean never believed in the movement," Joe Trippi said. "Never. And I was never managing the thing. Never. Howard Dean was his own manager."
"I don't think there was a single category of voters where Dean beat us in Iowa," Michael Whouley said. "Maybe the people who said they were with Dean every week for nine months, who didn't show up at the caucuses; he beat us in that category."
"Over my life I've had a lot of different battles," John Kerry said. "Sometimes you have to go out and make your own breaks and make the fight. Iowa is the fight I chose."
"If this thing had started in California," Howard Dean said, "I'd be the nominee."
But it started in Iowa. A friendly little state with an oddball voting system where little was as it seemed.
HOWARD WHO?
Before the Iowa caucuses, the Howard Dean campaign predicted he would win over 70 percent of Iowa's counties.
[Iowa Map Key]
ACTUAL VOTING RESULTS
Actual Dean win
Dean tie
DEAN PREDICTIONS
Confident of winning
Reasonably confident of winning
Likely to win
[Iowa Map labels]
FREEMONT COUNTY
LYON COUNTY
O'BRIEN COUNTY
JEFFERSON COUNTY
Sources: Dean for America, Iowa Democratic Party
Stephen Rountree--USN&WR
This story appears in the July 19, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.