'Tapped' comments about Dean and Gephardt IA campaigns

[bobbieinok]

found thes comments there

But a number of us press folks have been wondering, based on our interviews with Iowa voters, if the Perfect Storm in fact backfired on the Dean campaign. Dean's hard count was high, but failed to materialize at the last minute. Could some of them have been scared off by the Perfect Stormers and the incessent Dean phone calls? One thing a woman in Waterloo -- who said she didn't want her name in the paper -- told me about why she was supporting Edwards: "His campaign doesn't harass people on the phone like other campaigns I've noticed." Asked to specify, she cited Dean.

Many of the Perfect Stomers seemed out of place in Iowa, and the neighbor-to-neighbor strategies employed to get out the vote for Edwards and Kerry seemed to work better than the flood of outsiders brought in by Dean and Gephardt. The Deanies I ran into at the Kentucky Fried Chicken outside Newton had attitudes that suggested they might not have been the best advertisement for their candidate. "I feel like I'm in a foreign country," said one Perfect Stomer wearing a lilac windbreaker. "I'm off the net. I'm not watching television. I can't find the New York Times. When I'm at my desk, I read 40 papers a day, all the political pundit sites...Now I'm doing something different. I'm talking to real people who have real lives raising kids." She looked around the KFC at the families eating extra-crispy chicken like they were a novelty, instead of her countrymen.

The unions backing Gephardt also seemed particularly ineffectual at getting people to the polls. John Palumbo from the Laborer's Union Local 891 in New York had been organizing the area around Newton since Jan. 6, he told me on Sunday, but at Gephardt's last pre-caucus rally there only about 100 people showed up -- as compared to more than 200 for a Kerry rally later in the day -- and a number of them were the out-of-state organizers. Indeed, I realized -- as I was trying to get out of my car in Newton and was almost clipped by three gigantic big rig trucks advertising the Teamsters and honking their horns that came barreling down the street -- that one of the odd things about the union presence in Iowa was that each gigantic machine was driven by a lone individual. Gephardt's presence was announced by enormous Boilermakers vans and Teamsters trucks everywhere he went, but the big machines were all empty.

at webpage

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/

[seventhson]

1. I think Dean's 18% in Iowa accurately reflects the demographics of Iowa

mostly mainstream democrats are more conservative there - unlike New Hampshire.

I think we will see Dean Clark Edwards and Kerry in that order.