On to New Hampshire
Jan 19th, 2004 by jimmoore
Congratulations to Senator Kerry and his team. Michael Whouly, his field operations person, especially, seems to have done important things right. And Kerry TV ads, according to friends in Iowa, including my dad, were very vital and animated–and gave people a sense that Kerry was positive and could do something about our nation’s challenges. Congrats my friend, Stanford Dickert, is CTO. Senator Kerry is my senator from my home state of Massachusetts.
Just watched Governor Dean on Larry King Live. Howard acknowledged that we came in third–which Howard defined more or less positively as “getting our ticket punched” so that we can go on to the later states in the process, with the New Hampshire primary next Tuesday.
Larry King asked Howard what happened, that our campaign could go from first to third. Howard said basically that that was the problem: We became front-runner early, became the target, and took a lot of hits from other candidates and from the press. Howard didn’t mention this, but if you look closely at the Des Moines register poll, our positive numbers stayed pretty strong–but our negatives went through the roof. Unfortunately, negative attacks work.
Of course, there are things we could have done better. And we will. We are committed to being a learning organization, and we are committed to continuous improvement. The “we” in our campaign includes hundreds of thousands of volunteers–joined in creative new ways.
The Dean campaign is bringing new people into the process. In some real ways, the Dean campaign was instrumental in bringing unprecidented focus and involvement in Iowa.