Third Party & Independents: Archives

it’s sad that scream speech caused him so much grief, because it’s only that one tape that they have shown over and over that you can actually hear that scream. there are other tapes of that speech, in which his “cry” was barely audible.

and in other news, the Chief Executive of CNN has apologized to the Dean Campaign for playing that “scream” footage 633 times….saying that it might have negatively affected Dean’s campaign.

that of course, does not include the hundreds of times every other news channel played the footage…

dean may not have been able to win this race, but the media did a great job of sealing his fate.

here’s the link on the CNN thing:

http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/02/08/cnn/index.html

Blame the media? For the love of god, there’s a website dedicated to storing just the MP3 songs that were made of that!!! The Internet raised Dean, and ultimately it crucified him as well.

The media had a role in it, but only because it was valid news and it was wild to see him yell like that. Blame Dean for doing it, not the media for over-reporting it.

Here’s a message board dedicated to it as well.

Could it be that Dean with the second largest number of delegates is now in the running for the Vice Presidents chair? If looked at in that context, he has reason enough to stay the course.

I doubt Dean is looking to be tapped for VP, if anyone is pulling for that at this point, it’s Edwards.

Rob brings up very good points.

By the way, DeanGoesNuts.com has been set up in praise of Dean’s Iowa speech. It is not an example of the Internet “crucifying” Dean. That was the attempt of people exploiting a single passionate speech. Note how the website asks people to donate to Dean’s campaign.

And speaking of the Internet, a single email about Wisconsin sent out by Dean has raised the campaign close to $2 million dollars in the last 5 days, including $700,000 in the first day!

Seems like the Internet has served to support Dean, who, by the way, revolutionized the way campaigns mobilize and address supporters, via online.

Dean’s not going to get the vice presidential nod and has said that a Kerry/Dean ticket would be too regional. If he continues being a respectable second choice to Kerry in these primaries, picking up delegates and advancing his agenda, I hope he runs to the bitter end.

Kerry’s not exactly a known quantity to the electorate — he hasn’t been subjected to the battering that comes with heightened media scrutiny yet, because the press is having so much fun right now playing catch up with Bush’s transgressions.

If Kerry’s prime strength is his electability, and that perception fades, Dean could find himself in a position to take advantage of that if he doesn’t drop out.

does anyone find it funny that when the Right blames the media for being liberal and attacking them, its ok….

but when the media attacks the liberal Dean, blaming the media is an overreaction on our part?

hmmmm…..

Rob, the media did not attack Dean. They repeatedly showed a video clip. That was not an attack, nor was it perceived as an attack except by those who clutch at anything that might detract from their perceived adversary.

Dean was passionate. Dean is passionate. I don’t like Dean because I neither want a passionate religious person nor a passionate atheist, nor a passionate anyone leading this country.

I want a pragmatist in the Whitehouse willing and able to profer solutions to problems facing our nation without preconceived ideology, getting in the way of facts and figures that should be weighed in devising solutions.

you are certainly right, there were no direct attacks on dean from the media. to me, however, it seemed like the context with which it was constantly brought up was designed to poke fun and ridicule. while his “go nuts speech” should not have really changed anything, (his policies and those of his opponents remain the same) perception is reality and many people think they’d be getting a nut-case in the white house. it, beyond a shadow of a doubt, hurt his electability. is it fair? probably not, but that’s the way things work.

As I heard it, Dean’s had good second place finishes in the states Kerry won, so he’s been picking up delegates. Those delegates raised Deans hopes, so he wouldn’t take a defeat in Wisconsin that badly. He’s never been a pushover, so I don’t know why this surprises you, SoL.

Mr. Remer:

My apologies, I did not mean to say that the media was attacking Dean, however, I feel that he has been treated unfairly by the media. Much like the Janet Jackson tape…by overplaying the said event, you cause the “outrage” or scandal to remain fresh and overblown…which has tremendous influence over people.

i’d like my news to be about news, not ratings… i guess that is where i was going with my prior statements.

rob, we agree, the media seizes on shock value, and they played it for all it was worth in advertising dollars. However, Dean is an experienced politician. He was not ignorant of the cameras and their potential. And that in fact, is one of his enticing qualities, he is who he is. Ultimately, the responsibility for the tape’s effects lies both with Dean and the media to the extent they played as if it were important news, which it wasn’t.

The media overplayed the Howard Dean Iowa speech. The amplification of a speech that showed Dean’s passion, repeatedly shown, was irresponsible. In fact, the clip is still being shown today.

Re: David’s comments — Dean isn’t a passionate “religious person”, nor a “passionate atheist”. Rather, he has shown that he is passionate about taking this country back for the majority of Americans. I can see why one wouldn’t want a president who constantly brings up religious ideals instead of thinking of sounds economic policies, though. Obviously it doesn’t work.

It’s interesting that Dean’s use of the internet helped bring him to frontrunner status, and the replaying of his Iowa caucus speech on the very same internet helped reduce him to an also ran.

Any candidate should know by now that the media is your best friend and your worst enemy, often on succeeding days. Once the media established the Dean phenomenon and anointed him as frontrunner, its goal then became the vicious tearing down of Dean. Right or wrong, this is reality, and it will happen with Bush and Kerry as well in the same cyclical fashion.

Voters who want to make intelligent decisions need to NOT focus on soundbytes or single occasion events, but rather on substantive policy and character issuesof potential nominees.

While Dean’s campaign is to be commended for its use of the Internet it only got thew gameplan half right. While he built a strong core of supporters, they ultimately ended up doing too much “preaching to the chior” — participating in MeetUps, cocktail parties, posting to blogs read by other supporters, etc. But they didn’t develop as effective a tool to reach out to those who still needed to make up their mind about Dean. Each supporter can only vote once, no matter the level or their passion — well, except for here in Chicago :)

blipsman - I think you hit the nail right on the head. Unfortunately, the Dean campaign is still making the same mistake.

Asking the Blog to vote on the Wisconsin advertisements this week was silly. I’d rather see my money spent on ad testing with potential voters, not ad testing with already committed supporters. They’re two utterly different demographics.

I saw it suggested that doing that was Roy Neel’s way of passing the buck to the Blog, so if Dean falls in Wisconsin, he can blame the Blog for the failure. I’m starting to believe that could be true.

Dean quickly turned a dominant campaign, into a circus. It seems that once people actually were able to see him as he is, instead of just through the millions he spent on ads, they were turned off. He has always been one of the two democratic candidates I wouldn’t vote for. Kucinich being the other, of course.

I think many campaigns are making the same mistake. In his book Kingdoms in Conflict, Chuck Colson talked about the Nixon Administrations strategy of gluing together coalitions of wildly divergent interests in order to get surprise majorities. But what’s happened over the years, is that politicians have become to rigid of thinkers on the subject, trying to assemble those same groups again and again.

What they should be doing is trying to get past those groups to reconfigure the interest groups by way of skillful PR. You should be trying to get people who normally don’t vote for you caught up in that majority you’re trying to build. That’s the whole point of what those coalition building approaches were supposed to do in the first place.

Dean has the best resume. Kerry has one like a post office worker, except he comes to work less. Edwards has none….
Both lawyers, they’ll fix the health care system, sure! And MD’s will fix the legal system.

Dean’s record of success in Vermont speaks for itself. If you were hiring one of the 3 based on their resume, who would you pick?

Too bad he spent so much cash in meaningless Iowa. And the press DID take him down. After the scream, a non event in my opinion, they considered him unelectable and a loose cannon, and the people went along for the ride.

It would be naive to think that media spin is not deliberate and not to question how it gets that spin. On Dean, Eric Boehlert’s article in Salon.com takes some of the guessing out of it.

It would also be naive to think that the choice of which photo or video to use in a story is not deliberate, intended to color our perception. As far as “the scream”, if the networks had been interested in versimilitude they would have used the other video, available on the web throughout the final week of the NH primary, which showed that Dean yelled, but just loud enough to be heard above the cheering crowd. And Diane Sawyer would not have waited until 2 days after the primary to “discover” that the famous video was only possible because Dean used a directional mike, which filtered out all other noise.

If we don’t get hardnosed about how it’s done, we most certainly will be taken in.

NPR is reporting what we have known for a while. The fix was in for IOWA! Working through Leo Hindery and Robert Torricelli, Kerry and Gephardt colluded to fix the Iowa race! When the hate ads came out Gephardt claimed he knew nothing about them. By law the 527 had to report who paid for them by 1/31/04. The cat is now out of the bag! Gephardt is tied directly to these smear ads. He knew he was going to lose. He knew he would be safely on the sidelines by 1/31/04. Therefore there had to be an agreement between at least Gephardt and Kerry that by the end of Iowa, Gephardt would be behind the scenes. Otherwise this information of dirty politicking with the likes of Torricelli and Leo Hindery fom Global Crossings would have been devastating to Gephardt’s run. He didn’t care, he denied knowledge, why? Ask tourself who benefits … Kerry. They knew the outcome before the vote! They knew Gephardt was going to lose the race, and, they must have known when they formed the 527 and started collecting funds!
This was reported on NPR today:

Dirty Democrats
NPR 2-14-2004

The new campaign finance laws are making it harder for political contributers to spend a lot of money, but its by no means impossible. Just in the last few days, some federal disclosure forms have made it clear how a group of influential Democrats spent almost 2/3 of a million dollars. They used it to drag down the Presidential candidacy of Howard Dean in the critical weeks before the Iowa caucases.

NPR’s Peter Overby has been tracking this story, and Peter remind us what this group was and what it did.

The group is called Americans for Jobs and what they wanted to do is to bring down Howard Dean.

Now you have reported the existence of this group previously. Its known as a 527 group, which is a reference to the Internal revenue code which covers it. It is outside the campaign finance law. But what is known now is who contributed and how much.

So, what do you know?

We know that they raised about 660 thousand dollars or a little bit more. A lot of it is from people whose names are familiar. You had a guy who was Dick Gephardt’s college classmate and has since been a fundraiser for Gephardt. You have poeple whose names show up again and again on democratic contributer lists. Robert Torricelli, the former senator from NJ. Youve heard about Robert Torricelli? Yes

Yes, he put in 50,000 from his senate campaign, which still has a lot of money left. You remember that he resigned from the senate and withdrew from his reelection campaign about a month before election day back in 2002.

Now you told us about the TV ads that these guys were able to pay for last month and id like to play one now. This is attacking Howard Dean and the visual on TV shows Osaba bin Laden’s face.

(DEEP VOICE) We live in a very dangerous world. and there are those who wake up every morning determined to destroy western civiliation. Americans want a president who can face the dangers ahead. But Howard Dean has no military or foreign policy experience. and Howard Dean just cannot compete with george bush on foreign policy. Its time for democrats to think about that, and think about it now.”

So this commercial caused real trouble for Howard Dean and was it possible to really know at the time who paid for it? No. if you saw the ad on tv it would say “paid for amereicans for jobs, health care and progressive values” but if you wanted to know who paid for Americans for Jobs Health Care and progressive Values, you would have to wait until the financial disclosure statements were filed. That didnt happen until the end of January.

which is after the Iowa voting. right.

And Peter, I think the one thing which most people do understand about the new campaign finance law, new for this presidential election, is that most peeole are supposed to be allowed to contribute only 2000 to a presidential candidate. And that does raise the question of how it is legal for these individuals to spend tens of thousands of dollars, or even 100 thousand dollars attacking Howard Dean.

These groups, so called 527 committees are not a political commitee under the definition of the FEC so it doesnt have to comply with the contribution and spending limits.

They are spending money to affect a political race, but they are technically independent of any candidates and for the moment, independent virtually of federal campaign finance laws.

Right. You know they are not coordinating with the candidates. On a thing like this you don’t need to coordinate. it seems pretty clear that Dick Gephardt and John Kerry wanted Howard Dean brought down a peg, so you dont have to coordinate with the campaigns to figure that out! But you have people who are fundraisers for Gephardt and for Kerry, like Bob Torricelli is raising money for John Kerry, giving large amounts of money to this independent non-coordinating committee.
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What do we stand for as Democrats? Are we going to let these kinds of dirty tricks and dirty politicians like Torricelli decide our Nominee?

What would you say if this was ROVE?

Do the right thing! Do not let Kerry and Gephardt get away with this.

If we do not stand on principle what good is winning?

These people have tampered with the sacred right of the American people to have a vote and a voice in a free and fair election.

This is worse than, or at least tantamount to any lie that Bush told!

Please, help get these dirty politicians out of the party and out of this race.