Mark Ambinder reports that Democratic field operations wizard Michael Whouley is working behind the scenes with the Clinton campaign, mixing up his magic potions and casting his spells. Since this is the first time we’ve heard Whouley’s name during this campaign, it made me think back to the come-from-behind win Whouley engineered for John Kerry in the 2004 Iowa caucus.
We’re now in the home stretch, where all the preparatory work for caucus night finally gets tested, and the knives truly come out. If you’ll recall, four years ago at this time Iowa was being invaded by thousands of well-meaning and slightly naive orange hat-wearing Howard Dean supporters, who proceeded to pretty much drive Iowans crazy with their persistent begging.
Before I go on, some caveats. The brief story I’m about to tell came to me third hand. Not being an Iowan, I never got one of these phone calls, nor did I talk to anyone who did. The people who told me about it got it second hand themselves. On the other hand, two different reporters who had been on the ground in Iowa told me they had heard about the calls.
The story is as follows: As caucus day approached, Iowans were getting pretty annoyed with all the voter contact they had to endure – mailers, phone calls, people knocking on their doors, and so on. And no one was doing it more than the Dean army. A few days before the caucus, voters supposedly started getting calls at three in the morning from people saying, “Hi! I’m from the Howard Dean campaign, and I wanted to know if we can count on your support!” Needless to say, this did not endear those voters to Howard Dean. And the source of those calls was alleged to be people working on behalf of John Kerry.
Again, I can’t confirm that this actually happened, but it was certainly something that reporters in Iowa were talking about. And if it did happen, and if the Kerry campaign was behind it, no one knows whose idea it was or who gave the order.
So I’d like to hear anyone who was in Iowa in 2004 chime in – did you hear this story? Is there anyone out there who actually got one of these calls?
The juicy question now is, what sort of underhanded, Rovian maneuvering will occur in the fifteen days before the caucus – on either side?
And as a side note, we should acknowledge that when it comes to this kind of thing, the Democrats are pathetically amateurish compared to the Republicans. One good way to get a sense of it is to take a look at the College Republicans, the snake pit where the operatives with the most talent for cheating, lying, and vote rigging rise to the top, and where Lee Atwater, Ralph Reed, Jack Abramoff, and Karl Rove all got their start. You can’t understand today’s Republican Party without reading Franklin Foer‘s terrific New Republic piece from 2005 on it. (For some reason it doesn’t seem to be available on the TNR site, but you can read it here.)
— Paul Waldman
