Dean Christakos« Not Sure I believe this one | Main | How to Deal with Those People »
January 7, 2008
I Provide My Political Insights
I really need to write this post quickly before it becomes obsoleted by tomorrow's primary results.
Anyway, I got a couple of e-mails asking me what I thought of Iowa. I spent, you see, the better part of the 2004 primary season campaigning for Howard Dean, and so some people e-mailed in asking how this year compared. You'll remember from 2004 that a relatively little-known governor of Vermont ended up attracting a lot of support because he criticized the Iraq war when most other politicians with presidential aspirations supported it because it was the "safe" thing to do. Given this swell of support, the strategy in Iowa for the Dean campaign was this: invest a lot of resources into Iowa, create a massive increase in turnout of caucus-goers, and have Howard Dean cruise to victory. The reason this was a lynchpin of the strategy was because a lot of the regular, old-time base was fixated on "safe" candidates, so the obvious solution was to go to disaffected people who didn't usually participate in the Iowa caucuses.
Unfortunately, this didn't work out. A lot of Iowans got turned off by the dueling ad campaigns of Dean and Gephardt, and the large number of Dean volunteers that flooded Iowa in late 2003 didn't help turnout. The Iowa caucus turnout in 2004 was pretty much the same as it was in 1988, the last time there was a serious contest.
This primary race I pretty much stayed out of. I've been nominally supporting Edwards, but a combination of a lack of disposable income and time prevents me from donating time and money to the campaign, and the truth is that I'm pretty happy with all of the Democratic candidates.
This brings me to Obama. The whole lynchpin of his strategy was to turn out new, young voters disaffected with politics in order to win Iowa over the more establishment Hillary Clinton. Now, having been the veteran of a bunch of losing campaigns, I felt it was my right, as a cranky old person, to roll my eyes at this strategy and point out that there's always a candidate in every election cycle who always claims that they're going to do this, and it always fails, because targeting a demographic of voters who don't normally vote just isn't a good idea.
My point is this: last Thursday, what Dean said he was going to do, what plenty of candidates say they're going to do, and consistently fail to do, Obama actually did. Iowa caucus turnout was up 80 percent among the Democrats (while not having anywhere near the same increase in turnout among the Republicans from their last contested caucus). The Obama volunteers in Iowa actually did get a lot of previous non-participants to turn out for the caucuses.
It could just be that this is a flash in the pan, and we'll have a better idea tomorrow night. However, for Obama to succeed in pursuing a strategy which invariably always fails is potentially a game changing, landscape altering event.
Posted by Dean at January 7, 2008 7:50 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.christakos.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/414