Reply #46: I know people who were on the inside of the Dean campaign [View All]

[deutsey]

who told me they thought Kerry and Gephardt engaged in a lot of dirty tricks against Dean in Iowa.

As a grassroots leader in the Dean campaign, that pisses me off, but, in a warped kind of abused-spouse way, I thought, well, if Kerry played that dirty against Dean, well, maybe he is the best one to go up against Bush after all.

However, he fucked up in two significant ways, in my opinion. 1) As others have pointed out, Kerry hardly fought back against Bush/Rove smears early enough and strongly enough. 2) He never tried to tap into the grassroots activism that was the real fire under the Dean campaign.

I'm not a big-time (or even a small-time) strategist, but it seems to me that if the Kerry campaign had fought back hard--I mean blasted every Bush/Rove smear the moment they spewed it--and if they had cultivated a strong, grassroots activist base, he might have had a real chance to overcome Bush.

What really pisses me off isn't that they "took Dean down," so much as they seemed to have taken him down because his campaign posed such a threat to the old Democratic establishment. If they had co-opted his outspokeness and fighting spirit, along with his grassroots activism, hearing something like what Jones is saying would be easier to take.