Blogger Storm
The Dean Campaign has about 3,500 people on the ground
in Iowa, and the Gephardt people about 1,000. But in terms of body mass,
it's more even then the ratio suggests. Most of the Dean Supporters are
young people, male and female, with an average stature of Dennis Kucinich.
Most of Gephardt's people are labor guys, mostly Teamsters, I understand,
with the average stature of an NFL lineman.
Consider the political import of that difference: the total
mass of Dean vs. Gephardt canvassers is probably equivalent!
I'm amazed
that the media has not picked up on this vital statistic
as yet another example of Dean's diminished lead. After all, their job
is to bring out the important, subtle issues that we mortals might not perceive.
And they do this as consummate professionals, subject only to preemption
by more important issues, like Michael Jackson walking from a limo to a
court
room.
But the Dean canvassers outweigh the Teamsters in another
metric: they include a lot of bloggers, and they're documenting
the canvassing experience so heavily that there's a site set up to point
to their posts. BloggerStorm (referring
to Joe Trippi's "Perfect
Storm" Iowa campaign) offers
some pretty good insights that are more biased, but more nuanced than the
press, of course. Even the Deaniacs are suffering from ad fatigue (from Seth-Tech):
Campaign Overload
You know there are too many campaign
commercials on TV here in Iowa when I start complaining. As someone
with an interest in political science,
and 18 hours of coursework to back it up, I'd consider my tolerance
to be higher than the average Iowan, but last night was relentless.
I'd say that at least 50% of the ads were political last night, all
Dean, Kerry, Gephardt, and Edwards. At least it will all be over soon...
Speaking
of media fatigue, the Michael Jackson event seems to be enough to cause Doc to
flee Santa Barbara for
Burlington's -40 wind chill.
The Doc is In
I'm picking up the SearlsDude at the Burlington Airport at 11:35 tonight.
He says that he hasn't been in really cold weather in 2 or 3 decades.
I've been disingenuous about a critical fact I should not have withheld:
There
are
no jetways here.
He
gets
to walk
from
the plane
to the
terminal in whatever golf jacket he's wearing.
I've been urging Doc to visit Dean HQ since the weather
was clement. He'll interview Harish Ro, Tony Lyon, Tom Limoncelli and Jascha
Franklin-Hodge to learn about the campaign's
abundant use of Linux and open source, and probably act as Team
Cluetrain's Inspector General to see if we're as clued as we seem to be.
It'll also be fun to hang with him up here in the midst of
this ferment of smart young people.
1:02:23 PM 
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