POLL DRIVEN POLS:

Divide and Bicker: The Dean Campaign's Hip, High-Tech Image Hid a Nasty Civil War (Howard Kurtz, February 29, 2004, Washington Post)

In different conversations and in different ways, according to several people who worked with him, Dean said at the peak of his popularity late last year that he never expected to rise so high, that he didn't like the intense scrutiny, that he had just wanted to make a difference. "I don't care about being president," he said. Months earlier, as his candidacy was taking off, he told a colleague: "The problem is, I'm now afraid I might win."

As Dean was swallowed by the bubble that envelops every major candidate, he allowed his campaign to sink into a nasty civil war that crippled decision-making and devastated morale. In the end, say some of those who uprooted their lives for him, these tensions hastened the implosion that brought Dean down.

The polarization revolved around two people: Joe Trippi, the rumpled, passionate, sometimes headstrong campaign manager who drew rock-star coverage in the press, and Kate O'Connor, the quiet, shrewd, low-profile Vermont confidante who never left Dean's side. [...]

Every presidential campaign has an ambitious strategist, a James Carville or Karl Rove, pulling the strings back at headquarters, and an unassuming body man (or woman) traveling with the candidate, a loyalist who can read his moods, cater to his needs and watch his back. And there are often tensions between "the office" and "the road." For Trippi and O'Connor, the sparring began early and never let up.

When Dean, once dismissed as a gadfly candidate, was surging to the front of a crowded Democratic field in September, things came to a head.

O'Connor, according to a staffer who saw the e-mail, wrote a friend that she wanted to get rid of Trippi and that she felt like quitting herself except that she needed to protect Dean. This followed a clash in which Trippi and other top political advisers helped craft a major Boston speech in which Dean was to denounce special interests -- only to have him toss out most of the speech after O'Connor expressed her opposition.

O'Connor, who said she had "possibly" sent the e-mail but did not recall it, said Dean felt the speech wasn't suitable for a large rally. But she confirmed that she was "uncomfortable" with the campaign's move toward "harping on the special interests. . . . I thought it was not a message that was true to who Howard Dean was." While she offered her opinions, "the thought that I could manipulate him is just absurd."

In October, as much of the media and political establishment began to view the former governor as unstoppable, Trippi was so frustrated by the mounting strife that he threatened to resign, he and other officials confirmed. Trippi asked his campaign allies to join an "intervention" with Dean to get things changed, but they told him he was being unrealistic. Trippi's partner in a consulting firm, Steve McMahon, and Trippi's wife, Kathy Lash, a campaign aide, talked him out of quitting. But he made a pact with his wife that, win or lose, he would quit the day after the New Hampshire primary.

For all the low-level warfare between what was termed the "Washington faction" and the "Vermont faction," O'Connor does not believe the disagreements damaged Dean's effort. "Maybe I'm just naive," she said. "Maybe it did and I'm oblivious to the fact that it hurt the campaign." [...]

Even the highest-ranking advisers found Dean resistant to changing his approach. Dean strategists say campaign chairman Steve Grossman repeatedly urged the candidate to talk about treating patients as a physician and expressed frustration that Dean never took the advice.

"Unfortunately Howard never took advantage of that unique quality and experience he had, that of being a doctor," Grossman said. Had Dean used more "personal examples" involving patients, it "would have humanized him and created more of an emotional link between him and the voters."

Trippi dispatched various aides to accompany Dean and O'Connor on the road, but problems developed each time. One said he was viewed as "Trippi's spy." Another said O'Connor would "kill" people she viewed as insufficiently loyal. A third said staffers were frightened of "the wrath of Kate." As fundraising surged and the campaign was rapidly expanding, Trippi tried to hire several seasoned pros but told colleagues that O'Connor had blocked his efforts.

"Completely false," said O'Connor. "I didn't meddle in hiring." She said Trippi refused to hire some people suggested by Dean, which Trippi confirmed.

But O'Connor saw herself as standing up for Dean. "If Washington people wanted to change a position, Kate would be the first one to say no, because she knows how long and how adamantly the governor held a particular position," said Sue Allen, Dean's longtime Vermont spokeswoman.

"She had the thankless job of keeping him on message. He's the kind of guy who will chat with somebody and change his opinion. She would control access, and that angers people. . . . She's a handy scapegoat."

David Bender, the New York senior deputy campaign director, said that when O'Connor complained about exhaustion and he suggested some time off, "she looked at me with a ferocity in her manner and voice and said: 'I know they want to get rid of me. . . . I will do this job if I have to do it from a hospital bed hooked up to an IV because I'm the only one who protects Howard. Everyone else wants something from him.' " [...]

Kate O'Connor knew about the Al Gore endorsement. Joe Trippi didn't. He blamed O'Connor. He also blamed Howard Dean.

It was early December, and Dean and Gore had agreed to keep quiet about the former vice president's plan to announce his support within days, fearing a premature leak. Trippi grew suspicious when staffers were asked to charter a large plane to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He asked Dean, who said someone would be endorsing him but he couldn't tell Trippi who it was. Trippi reminded him that he was the campaign manager. But Dean wouldn't budge.

The larger message was that O'Connor had known and the Washington faction had not. O'Connor said she was simply doing what Dean and Gore wanted. What no one knew was that this would be the high point and that the corrosive sense of mistrust would eat away at the campaign at the worst possible time.

Over the next six weeks, Dean's rivals escalated their attacks on his fitness for the White House, and he was hit by an avalanche of negative headlines. "Every media organization and reporter went after us because, you know, take down the front-runner," he told CNN.

But Dean also started making high-profile mistakes. After the seizure of Saddam Hussein, Dean's top political aides scripted a San Francisco speech in which the candidate would say that although his opposition to the Iraq war was unchanged, the capture was a victory for the American military. At the last minute, Dean added a line that the country was no safer, sparking a new controversy.

It was during this period that some senior officials became convinced that Dean wasn't serious about doing what it takes to win the White House, especially when he refused repeated requests to ask his wife, Judith Steinberg Dean, to make even an occasional campaign appearance. Dean did not respond to an interview request, but O'Connor believes he never wavered in his desire to be president.

Still, she said, "he didn't expect to be there" as the front-runner, and they were surprised at the intensity of the media barrage. "We never anticipated the constant getting beaten up over something every single day," O'Connor said.

But others felt the campaign should have been better prepared to play defense and that this contributed to the daily drip of damaging stories.

Senior officials, for instance, said they had never been able to gain access to the boxes of Dean records in O'Connor's garage or the files kept in her car trunk. Enright had reviewed tapes of Dean's appearances on a Canadian talk show from 1996 to 2002, but there was one tape she never got -- and NBC triggered a flap by reporting that Dean on that tape had disparaged the Iowa caucuses as "dominated by the special interests." The staff blamed O'Connor, who said she had never seen that tape and that the material in her Ford Focus was just news clips from Dean's gubernatorial days.

Campaign officials said they also tried to get O'Connor to dig out old National Rifle Association questionnaires completed by Dean. Enright was blindsided when the New York Times obtained one from a rival campaign, showing that Dean had opposed restrictions on owning assault weapons -- a contradiction of his current position.

When Dean, despite raising $40 million, finished third in Iowa on Jan. 19, he ripped up his prepared remarks and started yelling on his campaign bus, officials said, proclaiming that the message of taking on Washington's entrenched interests hadn't worked, that the grass roots were a mirage and had let him down. [...]

The warfare continued over Dean's message, the outsider-against-Washington-special-interests pitch that Trippi had developed in a PowerPoint presentation, tested in polls and, despite O'Connor's concerns, used to sell the candidate to major labor unions.

Dean's policy director, Jeremy Ben-Ami, declared in an e-mail: "The message of the campaign is simply no longer our campaign vs. the special interests. This is not what the governor wants to be saying -- or frankly what he ever really wanted to be saying."

Joe Drymala, the chief speechwriter who received the e-mail, resigned in protest. "I refused to believe it because I didn't want to," he said. "To believe that was to believe that Howard Dean was a fraud."

This kind of infighting is indeed a staple of every campaign, but what exacerbated it in Mr. Dean's case was that he ran as something he isn't, just because it happened to be working. The Vermonters closest to him knew him to be a moderate, even conservative, Democrat, one who could run on his record as a governor. The Washingtonians wanted him to be the anti-Iraq war/pro-class warfare candidate who they trot out every four years. For the Vermonters he was Bill Clinton. To the Washingtonians he was Al Gore (2000 version). Unfortunately, Mr. Dean bought into the Washingtonian shtick when it moved him in the polls, but since that isn't who he is it appears to have brought on some kind of psychotic episode.

Now John Kerry has inherited the mantle and, though the anti-war half fits him to a tee, the rhetoric about special interests and fighting for the little guy rolls off his tongue like cinder blocks. It's always a bad idea to go before the American people and try to present yourself as something you manifestly aren't. How long before Mr. Kerry starts his own schizophrenic meltdown?

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 19, 2004 5:32 PM