UH-OH, THE PRESS STARTS TO NOTICE HOW BAD A CAMPAIGN HE'S RUN:

Dean in the Danger Zone: Six pitfalls that could plague Dem front-runner's campaign (Howard Fineman, Jan. 08, 2004, Newsweek)

What has the campaign done wrong? Here’s my armchair general’s list, for what it’s worth:

SMALL LOGISTICAL MISTAKES
No biggie, I guess, but if you are going to invite reporters to take part in a conference call, don’t hook them into your own private staff meeting. That’s what the Dean campaign did with reporters in Arizona, and it resulted in stories there quoting the Deanies’ rather sophomoric strategizing. It’s the kind of hurried, amateurish mistake they hadn’t been making.

Are they really ready for prime time? In terms of stagecraft, they aren’t there yet. Dean is self-conscious about his stature. He claims to be five-eight and three-quarters. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in his company and, while he is an energetic presence, he isn’t a tall one. If he’s nearly five-nine, I’m Larry Bird.

But Dean’s problem isn’t his height, it’s his humorlessness. He isn’t a guy to make fun of himself (the way his own dad did, calling himself “Short Me” as he strode energetically through life). In any case, his staff opened him to ridicule by the way they staged the endorsement from former NBA star Bradley. If Dean is going to stand on a soapbox, which, in effect is what he was doing, you don’t allow the TV cameras to film the whole thing from behind. It was a silly, amateurish effort at stage-managing a fact that couldn’t really be hidden in the first place. [...]

HYPE OUT OF HAND
Trippi is a smart guy—very smart and very experienced. But at times he gets a bit carried away with the wondrousness of the Internet tsunami that Dean generated, and makes claims that are too large for his (and Dean’s) own good. Now and then, Trippi forgets what I call Tully’s Law: There are no straight-line extrapolations in politics; growth curves don’t go on forever.
Last September, when Dean had 450,000 on his e-mail list, Trippi confidently predicted that he would have 900,000 by the end of the year. But the astronomical growth didn’t continue, and the total has barely inched to 600,000. The campaign hoped that 5,000 volunteers would come here to Iowa for the last days. Some 3,500 have showed up—an impressive number but well short of the goal.

The first point, his humorlessness, is an especially dangerous in a politician. Guys like Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter were humorless and predictably disastrous presidents. Mr. Dean gives you a sense that if his wife pulled a Laura Bush he'd beat the tar out of her.

The second, that the whole Internet deal was about a small self-selected group and not transportable to a wider audience, is particularly damning of the press, which covered the story very poorly. The Doctor and his campaign did not create the on-line campaign; it created him. The Move-on types needed a candidate and he decided to be it, tailoring his message to this one special interest group at the expense of the actual electorate.

MORE:
-World Wide Dean: Howard Dean, the Blog for America, and the candidacy of the self. (Jonathan V. Last, 01/09/2004, Weekly Standard)

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 9, 2004 08:31 AM