Every single pundit in America claimed that the Iowa caucuses would be a showdown between Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt. Howard Dean, everybody claimed without exception, was the unstoppable front-runner and John Kerry was written off. Only nsnews [newsworld showdown] accurately claimed that Howard Dean's lead was absolutely phony and it was only a matter of time before John Kerry and John Edwards would inherit votes
that in fact belonged to them.
Without exception, the pundits claimed that Howard Dean's double digit lead in Iowa had
made John Kerry and John Edwards irrelevant. The question that all the pundits ignored;
Were Kerry and Edwards in fact irrelevant or was it wishful thinking? Even when John
Kerry and John Edwards were soaring in the polls, media pundits kept insisting that
Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt had better organizations and that the polls were
therefore misleading.
The fact of the matter is, Kerry and Edwards were written off because Republicans
wanted to run against Howard Dean. Formidable candidates like John Kerry threatened
the re-election of George Bush, and the obsession to dismiss them through the effort to
dictate the outcome in Iowa was very clear and obvious. The following message posted on
the Internet, does not leave any room for the imaginative pundits who constructed their
own reality:
I can't help feeling that Dean is being maneuvered into the Democratic
candidacy by Republican money, because he will be the easiest candidate for Bush to
defeat in November. Nobody knows what Dean stands for. Nobody I know likes him. In
fact, I've never seen anybody claim him for their own. Yet he is the 'front-runner' because
he has raised the most money. Personally I like Edwards, but he's way down in the money
race because he doesn't have any huge corporate contributions from, like, the Republican
Party.
Howard Dean's inflated lead was kept afloat by bandwagon pundits who repeatedly
claimed that the campaigns of Kerry and Edwards had faded, and in the end, their lost
credibility was claimed by nsnews, the organization which was bold enough to claim that
John Kerry would win the Democratic Party Nomination and that John Edwards would be
his Vice President. Clearly, when conventional wisdom is a rumor spread by the media,
nsnews is a breath of fresh air. All the phantom young people who allegedly financed
Howard Dean's campaign, showed up and voted for John Kerry.
At his post-caucus rally Monday night, Dean looked angry and sounded delusional.
Gephardt, who graciously accepted defeat, was every inch the veteran public servant he is.
Unlike Gephardt, Howling Howard screamed, turning red in the face, jabbing his index
finger in the air, carrying on and on about all the states in which he was going to
successfully compete, as if he had the divine right to win the Democratic Nomination. He
was positively silly and scary to the point of raising questions about his very sanity. A
spirited, fiery tirade, is not the appropriate demeanor of a loser, but can anybody really
blame Howard Dean for 'losing it'? The media had crowed about Howard Dean to the
point where he believed that he had won the Democratic Nomination, and he had every
right to hyperventilate. The game was over but Dean wanted to extend the play because in
his eyes, the media had let him down. "We will not give up!" Dean shouted, and he listed
the election's future battlegrounds as his face shot red. "We will not quit now or ever!"
This is one angry man who was appropriately retired by the Democrats in Iowa, he doesn't
have to quit. The predictions of every pundit in America collapsed on the shoulders of one
man who was in desperate need of the reality therapy he received when he was defeated
by John Kerry and John Edwards, and sooner or later, he will get the message.
Organization, organization, organization is not enough.
Dean was supposed to be popular because he allegedly raised over $40 million, and the
average donation, it was frequently pointed out, was well under $100. The zeal to create
the impression that everybody except Howard Dean is influenced by special interests, is
absolutely preposterous. As a matter of fact, Howard Dean's entire campaign was based on well orchestrated lies, distortions and deceptions and they betrayed the pattern and the conduct of lobbyists who spend
millions of dollars, to distort the truth. The claim that Howard Dean's campaign was driven
by grass-root supporters was clearly a desperate fraud, the exuberant enthusiasm of
those who took the bait was very interesting, especially since only nsnews was perceptive enough
to expose it.
According to popular misconception, Howard Dean used the Internet to prove that the
Republican and Democratic parties are no longer the most effective ways to organize
like-minded people to achieve political ends. The suggestion that Howard Dean
single-handedly upstaged the Democratic Party was in fact the wet dream of crafty political
operatives who have generated the perception that Howard Dean was essentially a
third-party candidate who had used Internet technology to achieve a takeover of the
Democratic Party.
That was the perception which was supposed to derail the reality that John Edwards and John Kerry were unbeatable political candidates -unless of course, the machines that count votes without allowing the opportunity to confirm results, are rigged. Richard Nixon collected million
dollar, cash donations in brown paper bags to bribe eyewitnesses who were in a position
to expose corruption and if Howard Dean has nothing to brag about beyond the size of his war chest, he is just like Richard Nixon -a crafty strategist who cannot win an election unless it is over the dead bodies of his enemies -it took three assassinations to make Richard Nixon a viable, political candidate.
The false perceptions that the Howard Dean campaign manufactured are laughable, especially the claim that
Howard Dean was John Kerry and John Edwards, rolled into a single candidate.
John Edwards was the Democratic candidate who had not spend his entire adult life in politics and John Kerry was the
Democrat with the progressive record that Howard Dean's campaign hijacked through nonsensical rhetoric.
The Internet is not Dr. Frankenstein. The Republican and the Democratic parties still dominate. The Internet is merely the docile recipient of Republican and Democratic resources. If the Republicans, who are always obsessed by the
effort to control the media, think that Dean's hostile takeover of the Democratic party will
enhance George Bush's re-election prospects, they think that way because the creation of Howard Dean's "third party" candidacy was supposed to mimick Ross Perrot's third party candidacy.
According to Republican folklore, Ross Perrot derailed George Bush Sr's second run at the White House and Howard Dean was supposed to derail John Kerry's candidacy in a similar fashion.
The media obediently thought that putting Dick Gephardt and Howard Dean on the cover of Time Magazine would make them more relevant thn Edwards and Kerry. It didn't work, despite "Republican mouthpieces" like Judy Woodruff, who repeatedly claimed that "organization" was going to make the difference in Iowa. If it is possible to call the organized plot to steal the election from John Kerry, a legitimate process, then the media was right.
The streets in Iowa were teeming with youths and not-so-youths in orange caps and
knapsacks, who had come in from out of state to try to muscle Dr. Dean to victory. It felt
like the same GOP "love-in," the angry mob that stopped the counting of votes by rushing
the doors outside the office of the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections to steal the election
from Al Gore. John Kerry is no Al Gore. But he got the same treatment. Maybe that's where all the confidence that he is going to lose, comes from.
Rove's smear machine was RATHER good.
The media selected Bush through coaxing Dan Rather to apology for telling the truth.
