Quotes of the Day

As the caucuses were beginning Monday night, John Kerry was in Urbandale, Iowa. As caucuses go, Urbandale’s was a rich prize — seven precincts with 1,400 potential caucus-goers — and Kerry wanted one last chance at convincing the undecided Iowans there to side with him. Donna Wilcox, a 69-year-old department store worker in Urbandale, still hadn’t decided between Kerry or North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. Kerry asked her what problem worried her the most. For Wilcox it was health care for her parents, both in their 90s. Kerry quickly outlined his health care plan, paid for by rolling back Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy. “I hope you’ll help me,” he pleaded.

    “Okay,” Ms. Wilcox said, but she wanted to hear from Edwards’ precinct captain first.

    “Thanks for listening,” Kerry said, not knowing if he had won her over, and rushed to another caucus goer.

    It turns out Iowans were listening to John Kerry and Monday night they handed him nothing short of an astounding come-from-behind victory. Kerry had trounced the presumed front-runners, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and Missouri Congressman Dick Gephardt. The Massachusetts senator won 38% of the caucus vote, with Edwards taking 32% and Dean and Gephardt trailing badly at 18% and 11%.

    “Thank you Iowa for making me the comeback Kerry,” the Massachusetts senator roared to his faithful at election night party Monday. “Not so long ago this campaign was written off.” But, Kerry said, “I have listened to you and I have learned from you…You have made me a better candidate.”

The Kerry Surge

    How did a candidate who just two weeks ago was considered dead in Iowa pull off such a miraculous victory? Kerry’s turnaround began largely unnoticed back in mid-November. With advice from outsiders like former President Bill Clinton, Kerry had sharpened his populist message on the stump, delivering shorter, less rambling speeches with snappier bight lines that connected with audiences. With his poll numbers in New Hampshire free-falling, Kerry decided to “bet the house on Iowa” to resuscitate his campaign. He blanketed the state with about $2 million worth of television ads. Campaign workers were rushed into the state during December, along with a crack field team headed by Michael Whouley, who ran Al Gore’s ground game. Kerry, who had already raised some $20 million, pumped another $6.5 million from his own fortune into the campaign, much of it going to Iowa, where he eventually assembled close to 120 paid operatives.

    The extra effort began to pay off by the beginning of January. At events in both Iowa and New Hampshire, Kerry began to see far larger crowds, and — critical for his campaign — more undecided voters showing up at events to check him out. Slowly, Kerry’s poll numbers began to climb. By the beginning of last week, “Kerry was on fire,” said a campaign adviser. Sunday night, his aides were stunned when 1,000 wildly cheering supporters jammed into an Iowa State Fairgrounds hall in Des Moines, while another 500 shivering outside had to be put in an adjacent tent. “This is the most unfair economy, the most unfair workplace that I have seen in all of my public life,” Kerry thundered in a voice cracking and raspy from giving so many speeches. “Americans are working for the economy and we deserve an economy that is working for Americans.”

   Kerry was clearly benefiting from voter concern over Dean’s verbal missteps. Curt Nedoba, a 64-year-old Cedar Rapids psychotherapist, had been a Dean supporter until two weeks ago. But he was sitting at a Kerry rally with Ted Kennedy at a Waterloo elementary school Sunday afternoon and planning to caucus for Kerry the next night. Dean had finally turned him off with the report that he’d disparaged the Iowa caucuses four years ago as governor. That swipe and “other Dean statements were kind of impulsive,” Nedoba believed, “and it reminded me of the kind of things that George W. said. So if you want a change you don’t want someone who’s unelectable.”

A Des Moines Register survey released Sunday morning had even better news for the Massachusetts senator: 26% for Kerry and 23% for Edwards with Dean and Gephardt trailing badly at 20% and 18% respectively. Kerry’s internal numbers still showed that Edwards had stalled by Friday, particularly with Iowans who were more likely to attend caucuses. Nevertheless, a nervous Kerry took a swipe at his new public rival. The party’s nominee, Kerry argued Sunday evening, had to be seasoned in national security issues “to stand up to the onslaught that will come from the Republicans.” Edwards had only four years of Senate experience. “When I came back from Vietnam in 1969 I don't know if John Edwards was out of diapers then,” Kerry said sarcastically. “Well, I'm sure he was out of diapers." The 50-year-old Edwards was 16 at the time.

    Last week’s surge by Kerry opened the money spigot for his cash-strapped campaign. Kerry fundraisers who’d been stiff-armed a month ago suddenly found more of their calls being returned for contributors. “The money is coming in,” says one campaign adviser. Over a five-day period from last Monday through Friday, the campaign collected about $300,000, a hefty one-week take considering it had raised just $2.5 million from October through December. About $100,000 of it was rushed to Iowa for last-minute get-out-the-vote efforts.

   One sign that Kerry was gaining: By last Friday, Dean and Gephardt, who had been attacking each other relentlessly, turned their guns on him, claiming the Senator was an enemy of farmers. A Dean worker on Saturday passed out a sheet at a Kerry speech in Clinton, Iowa, with a Kerry quote from a 1996 Worcester (Massachusetts) Telegram & Gazette story that the federal government should “get rid of the Agriculture Department, or at least render it three-quarters the size it is today.” Kerry, who had the endorsement of Iowa’s agriculture secretary, Patty Judge, dismissed the attack as a last-minute “smear effort.” Sunday, two Dean supporters stood out front of Kerry’s rally in Waterloo holding a bed-sheet sign that read “Sen. Kerry why didn’t you vote with Sen. Kennedy against the war,” referring to Kerry’s support of the Iraq war resolution. Kerry was delighted with the barbs, which he claimed showed that his campaign “is moving.” The last time the senator took incoming fire from other candidates was at the beginning of the campaign when he was considered the front-runner. (Kerry stayed positive in his TV ads, but attacked Dean and Gephardt in campaign mailings.)

Winning the Ground War

    Kerry’s aides would have been ecstatic if the surge in the polls had been in New Hampshire, a primary state; but in a caucus state like Iowa the survey numbers meant far less. They did create momentum for the campaign and heated up the media buzz over Kerry, all of which helps entice supporters to go to the caucuses “because they like to be with a winner,” said Kerry’s Iowa director John Norris. But as Kerry told more than 750 people Sunday at a rally in an Iowa City mall, “polls don’t turn out caucus goers, people turn out caucus goers.” It was the candidate with the best ground organization to turn out caucus goers who wins in Iowa. The question senior Kerry advisers were asking themselves privately: “can our ground organization catch up with the momentum?” as one told TIME.

    By last week, Kerry’s Iowa organization had begun to show results. More than 450 out-of-state volunteers arrived the week of Jan. 12, according to campaign aides, about ten times the number that showed up two weeks earlier. The “night numbers” the week before the caucus — the count of people campaign workers called each evening who promised to attend the caucuses as Kerry supporters — were almost double what they had been four weeks earlier. Campaign volunteers were reporting that they weren’t having to work as hard on follow-up phone calls to keep people committed to spending their Monday night at a caucus. Inside the campaign this was known as “flakage” among caucus goers. By last week, “we were finding minimal flakage,” says Norris. It meant that Kerry supporters were sticking with him.

    A Vietnam War hero, Kerry had also invested heavily in Iowa’s vets, as a counter to Dean’s thousands of young volunteers and Gephardt’s union muscle. The campaign had identified about 160,000 veterans in the state, a little under 50,000 of whom were registered as Democrats. Kerry campaigners had about 10,000 of the vets, along with many of their wives, signing pledge cards or promising over the phone to attend the caucuses as supporters of the senator. Phone banks manned veterans in Iowa and seven other states made 20,000 calls to in the Hawkeye state.

    Kerry had begun a routine at practically every American Legion Hall, Elks Lodge and VFW post he visited to turn out more vet caucus goers. Three Sundays ago, for example, 250 people braved a snowstorm in Indianola, Iowa to troop to the local American Legion hall and hear Kerry. After a stirring I'm-for-the-soldiers speech, Kerry asked for the veterans in the hall to stand up and be honored. Seventy got out their seats. Campaign aides passed out supporter cards to every one to recruit them as caucus delegates.

Caucus Night

    The Kerry campaign, however, did not know whether this hurry-up drive to recruit veterans was any match for the organizations Gephardt and Dean had on the ground to turn out their caucus goers. The other candidates were going after veterans as well. Gephardt had a formidable force of seasoned union operatives blanketing the state. Dean had an army of young organizers turning out his faithful along with a powerful set of endorsements that included former Vice President Al Gore, former senator and presidential candidate Bill Bradley, Iowa’s senior Sen. Tom Harkin and Ambassador Carol Mosely Braun who urged her caucus goers to back Dean. “He should be blowing the socks off everyone,” a Kerry adviser said Friday. The weather forecast for Monday night also worried Kerry’s organizers — bitter cold, which meant the best organized like Dean and Gephardt would have a better chance at getting their supporters to leave their warm homes.

    Fortunately for Kerry, a large number of caucus goers remained undecided even a day before the vote. But maddening for him, and the other candidates, many of these Iowans walked into the caucus still with their minds not made up. They were folks like Robert Beyers, a 54-year-old sheet metal worker from Clinton, who found Kerry “interesting” but still an unknown quantity after listening to him speak, and Beverly Smith, a 73-year-old retired school teacher from Waterloo, who said Kerry “looks Linconesque” but, along with the rest of the Democratic candidates, had yet to prove he “can beat George Bush.” Beverly was getting so many phone calls from different campaigns desperate to know how she planned to vote caucus night, she says she began to hang up on them.

By the end of last week Kerry’s aides worried privately that his momentum in the polls could backfire by raising media expectations for a surprise victory when his ground organization could only reasonably expect to produce a second- or respectable third-place finish. “Six days ago we were absolutely dead,” Whouly complained in one campaign meeting last week. “Now you want me to win this thing?” Kerry, whose voice was growing raspy and whose body was becoming bone tired from only four hours sleep a night, would have preferred to have his surge sneak up unnoticed on the other candidates. But in an age of instantly released tracking polls and 24-hour news coverage, that was impossible. So Kerry faced the peculiar problem of peaking too early with poll numbers that didn’t count.

    But this time, the polls were surprisingly accurate. By the time Kerry’s bus had returned to Des Moines Monday evening, his aides had alerted him that he may have scored a stunning upset. Kerry planned to take a late night flight to New Hampshire so he would be campaigning there Tuesday when the sun rose. “I have only just begun to fight,” he vowed.   

• Douglas Waller
• Inside the last week of the Senator's surprising caucus surge