What Was That All About?
How Kerry Won So Easily

Now that it's all over but the shouting for the Democratic Presidential nomination process, it's useful to deploy the benefit of hindsight to get a handle on what that was all about.

Only six weeks separated the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 20, when Sen. John Kerry first exploded to the forefront of the Democratic pack, and Super Tuesday this Mar. 2, when the last of his serious challengers withdrew from the field.

In the days leading up to the Iowa caucuses, Kerry was considered by many to be dead in the water. The prevailing wisdom was that Gov. Howard Dean's meteoric rise over the previous months had taken Kerry as its first victim. Reporters were asking Kerry if it was still worth his even hanging on. He insisted he was doing fine, but no one believed him.

But then the Iowa caucuses happened. The outcome favoring Kerry stunned the nation, and he never looked back. Dean was dealt a fatal blow from which he never recovered.

In the Feb. 22 New York Times, Todd S. Purdum's commentary asked the very question about the Dean candidacy that I wanted to: "So What Was That All About?" The article included pictures of 11 covers of national newsmagazines that featured Dean during his rise last fall.

While the article missed the point about what really happened, blaming the "flare and fade" phenomenon of the campaign on Dean's own temperament and the "scary" aspects of his Internet-based movement, it was a far better analysis than the infantile gossip about internal dissent in the campaign that was the subject of Howard Kurtz' piece, "Divide and Bicker," in last Sunday's Washington Post.

All campaigns, especially a novel one burdened by so much instantaneous success as Dean's, experiences internal differences and even strife. Politics is not for the faint of heart, and those who run campaigns are necessarily assertive. That there are clashes should surprise no one, except that in the aftermath of a failed effort, they can become fodder for "kiss and tell" tabloid journalism. They don't explain anything.

In my view, the biggest mistake of the Dean campaign was to go into the Iowa caucuses, to begin with. It should have skipped Iowa and started in New Hampshire.

Ironically, Dean, himself, had the right intuitions about this. He made prescient remarks in earlier times about how the Iowa caucus system is skewed, remarks which his opponents dragged out to use against him during the Iowa campaign. He should have paid heed to what he'd said then.

Dean's was a mass movement, like an explosive religious revival calling forth a –almost-religious zeal from thousands of committed, mostly younger true believers. Dean's so-called weaknesses were his strengths commanding this phenomenon. He was rough around the edges and spoke bluntly, but he was honest and passionate about what he stood for.

He exhibited the one quality seen most lacking in ordinary politicians. He had guts. He had the guts to sign civil unions into law in his home state and to defend his action everywhere he went. He had the guts to be the first Democrat with a national profile to speak out sharply and uncompromisingly against Bush's invasion of Iraq.

He had advisors and high-level supporters, including former Vice President Gore, who were tutoring him on how to be presidential as his popularity soared.

But this movement was in no way prepared to negotiate the Byzantine mazes of entrenched organized political machines. Whereas it could have swept thousands of new voters to the polls on an election day for a popular vote, it wasn't equipped to tangle with vastly more experienced political veterans "in their house," so to speak, as in a caucus.

To the finely-tuned Democratic Party establishment machine in Iowa, Dean and his thousands of eager young minions who came from everywhere in the country determined to launch their revolution, were the foreigners, the outsiders. They had to be stopped.

Somewhere in the last days before the Iowa caucuses, the machine decided to close ranks behind its ticket of choice. For it, the choices were two well-established party regulars: Gephardt and Kerry. Edwards was the future. Gephardt and Kerry were the now. The machine chose Kerry, and gave Edwards second. The rest is history. The machine weighed in. The inexperienced Dean forces were no match in the caucus rooms. Their new recruits to politics were intimidated and many just stayed away. The Kerry/Edwards ticket was pronounced out of the caucuses by the entrenched party apparatus.

Had Dean skipped Iowa and focused on popular votes in New Hampshire and beyond, the outcome could have been far different. But he could not recover from the body blow dealt him in Iowa. Had he, the frontrunner at the time, not been in Iowa, the outcome there would have been discounted. As it turned out, it counted for everything.