Journal of Other Forum Analysis

[benji]

Public opinion trending away from a Presidential candidate at warp speeds not seen since Howard Dean:

"Yeah but his policies are good if people just took time out of their days to decipher what he actually meant in-between continued gaffes, blunders and wildly varying states of energy and cohesion. He should stay."

It's absolutely bonkers how low the standards of a "good candidate" have fallen since then. A goofy little scream was enough to take him down in 2004. I bet he thinks about it frequently every time Trump or Biden open their mouths.

He had already lost when he did the scream. His national "frontrunner" status never saw him at much more than 25% and it was crumbling as they went into Iowa. He was at 30% in Iowa on Jan 7th, he got 18% on Jan 19th. Basically everyone jumped to Kerry when he won Iowa, the scream was essentially irrelevant.

I'm not the only one who thinks this:

A feature of the scream that often goes unmentioned was that Dean was trying to energize his supporters after a loss. He had been the poll leader in the Iowa Caucus for months, as the graph below shows, but his support began to fade in the days before the contest, while the fortunes of John Kerry and John Edwards rose. There are a number of explanations for Dean's fall, including a failure to be embraced by party insiders, an inability to convert online national support into on-the-ground organization, and an ad war with Richard Gephardt that pulled both of them down. But it's key to remember that the Dean Scream occurred only after his disappointing finish in Iowa, the place where he'd concentrated most of his campaign efforts. A presidential candidate can certainly survive a third-place finish in Iowa, but it's damaging to do so when you were widely expected to come in first and when you have little organization elsewhere.

...

Sometimes, party insiders converge on a candidate long before the contests ever begin. That didn't happen in 2004. A lot of Democratic governors and members of Congress waited to issue endorsements because they wanted to see how the candidates did in the early contests. Dean's failure in Iowa demonstrated to them that he wasn't a closer. (Contrast that experience with 2008's Iowa Caucus, when Barack Obama demonstrated that a candidacy with celebrity-like appeal could actually translate hype into votes.)

Why didn't insiders flock to Dean? Keep in mind the nature of his candidacy. He described himself as representing "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," suggesting that others were not quite Democratic enough. He referred to the Democratic members of Congress who had voted with Republicans to support the Iraq War as "cockroaches." He notably made enemies of many of the party elites. This is a terrific strategy to generate press but a terrible pathway to win a party's nomination. Party insiders were far more impressed with John Kerry's steady ability to generate votes and his longstanding party bona fides.

JOE TRIPPI, Campaign Manager: The worst part was we were headed to frickin' New Hampshire, where John Kerry had been in their living rooms for years as a Massachusetts senator. If there was a state he was going to win, New Hampshire was it. And he had just won Iowa.

...

TRIPPI: Our whole strategy was built around winning Iowa. And if we didn't win Iowa, we were going to be in a lot of trouble. And guess what, we didn't win Iowa. The Scream had absolutely nothing to do with the end of the Dean campaign. The Scream was just an exclamation point on it.

...

GARRETT M. GRAFF, Deputy National Press Secretary: I think it's one of the most misinterpreted moments in American politics. I think that the true impact of the Scream was that it cost John Edwards the bump that he should have gotten out of Iowa. The Democratic primary should have pretty quickly become a John Edwards-John Kerry two-man race, but it didn't because the Scream sucked up all the oxygen. I think if Edwards had gotten that boost two or three weeks earlier, right after Iowa, he might very well have ended up the nominee.

TRIPPI: Look, the establishment wanted to stop us and they did. He could have smiled and introduced himself that night, or he could have screamed. In the end I'm not sure it would've mattered.

GRAFF: The Washington establishment and the national media press corps never really understood the Dean phenomenon. And this was sort of an excuse for them to write off something that they didn't fundamentally understand. But more than that, the Scream was a way for them to discount the entire movement.