At 12:20 PM 1/24/2004 -0500, you wrote:

PS: At the risk of going even further out on a limb, I think that's what happened re Howard Dean in Iowa. The 20-something Meetup/Moveon campaign was so bloody imageable, from the NY Times Sunday mag. to Wired. Meanwhile, Kerry just kept organizing in traditional ways, but nobody wrote stories about that. (Of course, Dean was ahead in the polls till the last week, but why spoil a good story?)

As an Iowan and a caucus participant, Barry, I'd say your observation is half right. The 20-something first-timers and Dean's use of the Web all made good copy for the media, and Kerry was well organized. But Dean had a pretty fair organization from any traditional perspective also, and nobody but nobody was better organized than Gephardt, who had the labor unions working for him. Perhaps the least organized of the "serious" candidates was John Edwards, who came in a strong second (32%) with Kerry (38%), to Dean's and Gephardt's very distant third (18%) and fourth (11%) respectively. Edwards' organization was minimal, yet he did very well. In fact, by some counts Edwards had more voters than Kerry, but because of the Byzantine caucus math, did slightly poorer in the delegate count. The pundits talk organization because they understand it, but the truth of the matter is that most of the caucus participants had had the opportunity to actually see and/or meet several of these guys in person in the weeks prior to the caucuses. If they hadn't seen them personally, they all had a trusted friend or neighbor who had. They were sick of the phone calls (6 to 10 per day at our house), the TV spots (average 150 per day per local broadcast station according to the University of Wisconsin ad watch project), and the direct mail (mostly from the better organized campaigns, Dean and Gephardt especially). People weren't talking about the media messages, but they were talking a great deal about personal impressions. I think the real story here is how relatively LITTLE impact the organizations and the media had, and how MUCH Iowans wanted to feel as if they were circumventing those to decide on the basis of personal experience with the candidates. When I saw Kerry in person (twice) I was rather shocked at how much better he came across than he did in his TV spots. I was likewise shocked at how poorly Gephardt played in person compared to his television persona. Edwards seemed to come across well both interpersonally and in mediated form, but the event of his I attended was filmed and segments of it made into his two most frequently aired TV spots, so my analysis there may be biased by having been present at the taping of the spots. I didn't have opportunity to see Dean, but many who did said things like, "he isn't like he looks on TV." (By the bye, I heard second hand from someone who had been at Dean's "non-victory" celebration and saw his now infamous "yee-haw!" or "I have a scream" speech in person, and thought it lots less weird than it looked on TV.) As a media studies person, I know most of the nation will not have the benefit of personal experience, but will decide on the basis of the 30 second spot, the 10 second sound byte, or the one minute scan of the home page, so it's questionable how it will translate beyond Iowa, and perhaps New Hampshire. But I really think that the Iowa result was because when people saw Dean and Gephardt "up close and personal" they didn't like what they saw and felt the media had deceived them. Just the opposite with Kerry and Edwards, who looked in person as good as, or better than, they did on TV. The news media simply failed to consider the power of non-mediated encounters. ------ Mark D. Johns, Ph.D. Asst. Professor of Communication/Linguistics, Luther College, Decorah, Iowa http://faculty.luther.edu/~johnsmar/ ----------------------------------------------- "Get the facts first. You can distort them later." ---Mark Twain