Category: Politics

Misanthropyst has the low-down on nefarious plots to spread misogyny via brainwashing.

Jeff Jarvis is working on an Op-Ed on the Dean/Blog problem, which will be worth reading. Jeff’s already said that he figures Dean’s problem is that the blog effectively insulated him from the Iowa voters by coating his campaign with a thick gel of True Believers who didn’t represent the ordinary people who make electoral decisions, and I think that’s a big part of the problem.

But there’s another way of looking at things that may cast more light on the events leading up to the Great Meltdown on caucus day in Iowa. Instead of asking why Dean wasn’t able to use his super-fantastic organization to sway the voters in Iowa, we should be asking how such a marginal candidate was able to build such a large and dedicated following in the first place. After all, the “I have a scream” speech tells anyone who cares to pay attention that Dean doesn’t have the right stuff to be the leader of the free world: not the temperment, not the character, not the policies, and not the staff and advisers. But he’s raised more money than the other Democrats, even those like Kerry and Gephardt who’ve been in the game for long enough to have cultivated their own large followings and networks around the country.

Dean captivated the hearts of an army of naive and inexperienced followers who only know politics and Dean through the Internet and through their Internet-enabled MeetUps. Most of them joined the campaign not because of any specific admiration of Dean – there’s not much there to like – but because his campaign gave them to tools to get together, mix with each other, make friends, and swear allegiance to a Movement. Had they come to meet Dean in the old-fashioned face-to-face way, they would have noticed that his emotional affect is off, but the Internet hides emotion and allows us to substitute our wishes about a person’s emotional makeup over hard information about it.

So Dean captured well-meaning, naive people by hiding his character behind a screen, as so many scammers have done before him. Fortunately, the face-to-face nature of retail politics in Iowa and New Hampshire provided the necessary corrective to the Internet’s blind spot.

And that was good for America, even if it was a tragedy for George W. Bush, the Emergent Democracy crowd, and Dean’s insiders.

The conventional wisdom was that organization wins in Iowa, but we learned last night that pure campaigning, both message and style, also count for a lot. Nonetheless, an Iowa organization helps, so to understand who won and why you have to factor organization out of the count. When you do that, Edwards rather than Kerry emerges as the winner. Blogger Adam Sullivan nails the dynamic that pushed Edwards over the top:

Only one seems to have learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger – sell positively to the center, and a crowded field of polemicists will poison itself.

That’s right, it was the Arnie factor. Kerry, Clark, and Dean are too stiff to pull off this kind of campaigning, so they’re at distinct disadvantage as the primaries roll along. Unlike Sullivan, I’m not ready to forecast Edwards as the eventual victor because I don’t think he’s got enough substance behind the smile, but he’ll make a nice running mate for Kerry.

Arnie-style campaigning only really works when you don’t have enough time to get to know the candidate, so Edwards will be pushing his sell-by date in early March when the primaries are finally decided. He’s clearly the kind of guy that voters like less as they get to know him better — the only reason he’s running for President is because he can’t get re-elected to the Senate from North Carolina. But he’s going to make a close run of an otherwise dismally boring campaign.

Via Roger L. Simon

Check the Election Projection website for a vision of things to come.

From Ipse Dixit.

Dean supporter Britt Blaser does his best to understand Barkin’ Howard’s Iowa Meltdown, and gets pretty close to the truth:

I honestly don’t know what to make of this, but here’s my instinct. People who are outside the Internet religion resent we who have it and want to peddle it to them. Frankly, our orange hats may have worked against us, making the conversation about our movement, not Iowans’ interests. Kids brimming with enthusiasm and inexperience can seem irrelevant to graybeards like me and the many people I know in Iowa.

Let’s go the rest of the way: a vote for Dean is not a statement of political preference, it’s a membership application to a suicide cult, and most Democrats don’t want to go there. As time passes and the Bush Doctrine proves to be a winning strategy in the Middle East, Democrats are increasingly uncomfortable talking about Iraq, so they want candidates who will change the subject anytime this painful issue comes up. It doesn’t matter if they talk about sending our jobs to India, free drugs for the poor, better job security for the teachers’ union, or lower postage stamp prices. Democrats want to elect ABB (anybody but Bush) and their preferred candidate talks about ABI (anything but Iraq).

Every time Dean opens his mouth, he picks at the scab and annoys people.

Link via Doc Searls.

There’s some interesting commentary on the Iowa Caucus at Matt Welch, Jeff Jarvis, Josh Marshall, Michael J. Totten, and Roger L. Simon’s blogs. Several of them are quoting Bill Schneider, the CNN analyst who said the wheels started coming off the Deaniac Movement when Saddam was captured, and Marshall, DLC tool that he is, is denying it, which further underscores the truthfulness of it. I think the dynamic is something like this: when Saddam was captured, and then Qaddafi capitulated, as did Iran, and then Syria, it became clear that the Bush Administration’s Middle East policy — AKA, “war” — is working. Consequently, Democrats can’t gain any traction by criticizing it (except around the edges), and they can’t gain any traction by supporting it, since it’s Bush’s signature policy. So the only way for Democrats to stay happy is to change the subject.

Kerry and Edwards have done that, by adopting heavily nuanced positions on the war but talking mainly on other issues, such as health care, the economy, special interests, oil companies, and anything but the war. Polling in Iowa says the number one and two issues with Democrats were the economy and health care, followed by education, with the war in Iraq way down the list and of primary importance to only about 14%. Now if you take away the war, Dean hasn’t got a single issue to run on where’s he’s got a comfortably consistent position – he’s already been all over the map on health care, has no experience managing an economy that’s not about tourists, weekenders, and selling ice cream to stoned hippies, and he’s flip-flopped on gun control and trade.

So when the war rhetoric dies down, you see that Dean’s an utterly shameless opportunist who’s willing to say or do anything to avoid having to go back to work as a country doctor. It’s sad that his campaign will soon be history, because I’d like nothing better than to see more of the antics Dean pulled at his non-concession speech where he screamed the names of the twelve states he can remember before doing some kinda New Englander’s imitation of a Rebel Yell. Despite being a clinical example of delusion and dementia (OK, because of it) his exhibition was the most entertaining TV of the night.

Kerry and Edwards will run a professional, is somewhat boring campaign against Bush and Cheney, but before that starts we do have at least a few weeks of Dean off his meds, Clark’s wacky conspiracy theories, Kucinich’s space alien fixations and Sharpton’s street hustling. Electoral politics is Reality TV at its finest, and we watch because we take joy in the suffering of others.

Super-duper ground campaign organizer Michael Whouley is the reason for the Kerry surge, according to New Republican Michael Crowley:

Unless you’re a hard-core political junkie, you’ve probably never even heard the name. But within the Democratic political world, Whouley is an almost-mythical figure. Revered as one of the party’s fiercest and most talented ground-level organizers, Whouley is widely credited with saving Al Gore’s foundering campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire in the 2000 primaries against Bill Bradley. Now this old Kerry ally may be working his magic one more time.

Personally, I think there’s more to it than one guy. Dean’s slithering around is hurting him, as is his “manufactured outrage.”

With three days to go in Iowa, the wheels are coming off angry dwarf Howard Dean’s campaign:

January 16, 2004 – Democratic presidential contender John Kerry opened a five-point lead on three tightly bunched rivals in Iowa three days before the state’s caucuses, according to a Reuters/MSNBC/Zogby poll released on Friday.

I figured the Dean campaign would self-destruct sooner or later, because shoot-from-the-hip pandering doesn’t work as well as the calculated pandering of political pro’s, but this early decay, which is also happening in New Hampshire, is surprising. Apparently Dean got a lot of early attention by taking extreme positions and running more of a sustained temper-tantrum than a campaign, and as the time comes for voters to take a closer look, he’s not holding up too well, even in the uncritical eyes of Democratic Party regulars. This was the same dynamic that took John McCain down, so it’s utterly predictable.

With his back up against the wall, Dean has rolled out the heavy guns on his behalf – Martin “Jed Bartlett” Sheen and Rob “Meathead” Reiner are campaigning with him in Iowa, all the better to reach the “off their meds” demographic who believe Sheen is president and Reiner’s a political activist.

And it’s working, judging by the Saturday poll that shows Dean wiping out Kerry’s lead. Now there’s a man who knows his demographic.

Esteemed blogger/journalist Matt Welch has written an article about the major threat to civil liberties in our time for Reason magazine:

It’s about how innocent men’s lives get ruined by states who are incentivized by the Welfare Reform Act to name fathers of welfare-receiving children & then take over the collection process from the “deadbeat dads,” even if there is DNA evidence proving that the men never fathered the children they’ve never seen. Unless you are already familiar with this system, you literally will not believe the extent to which these poor guys (and I mean literally poor) are basically presumed guilty, and then systematically overwhelmed by the voracious state. And even if the Child Support people know they’re not the father, they won’t stop until the last dollar is collected, with interest.

The story is not in the online space yet, and I’ll have more to say about it after I’ve read it. I’d encourage anyone interested in civil liberities to get the current copy of Reason today.

Meet the Press had a little segment on presidential candidate blogs this week, with a bunch of people who don’t read or write blogs. The most interesting thing about it was their complete avoidance of political commentary/punditry blogs; it was as if the only blogs that exist are either diaries or fundraising ploys run by the paid staff of cynical politicians like Mad Howie.

There was one interesting question raised about the Internet and politics in general, and it went something like this: to attract attention on the Internet, you have to be extreme, and this has obviously worked for Mad Howie. But to get elected, you need to be moderate. So does “winning” on the Internet necessarily forecast losing the election? My guess is that it does.

Another issue about all this is whether foaming-at-the-mouth candidates are giving the Internet a bad name, and whether that bad name’s deserved. For months the Itologists have been claiming that using the Internet makes people more compassionate and caring, but all the evidence I’ve ever seen about this depersonalized medium points to just the opposite conclusion.

You can read more about MTP at BuzzMachine.