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Cahill felt that the Boston allies who had seen Kerry through difficult fights in the past, especially his brutal re-election campaign in 1996, understood the candidate in a way no one else could. Strategist John Marttila started showing up at campaign headquarters three days a week. Pollster Tom Kiley was charged with keeping track of voter opinion in New Hampshire. The press office had cleared out with Jordan, so she brought in Michael Meehan, Kerry's 1996 campaign spokesman, and hired Stephanie Cutter, Kennedy's former spokeswoman. Michael Whouley, one of the most gifted organizers in the party (and a product of St. Peter's parish), also came aboard and agreed to make a quiet reconnaissance trip to Iowa a few days before Thanksgiving. Between Jordan's hires and Cahill's, there were at least two of everything--pollsters, consultants, representatives. But Cahill was able to bring order to it all, she says, "because everybody who was around the table was familiar to me." And she let them all know they had to play by her rules. "There is no dissension--zero," says Whouley. "There is no second-guessing--zero. There is no leaking--zero."
Cahill beefed up the campaign's outreach to veterans and decreed an end to the gimmick of posing Kerry on a Harley at nearly every campaign stop. She bluntly told the candidate he had to quit sounding as if he were on the Senate floor and start showing some fire. But her first big strategic move made hardly any sense at all to anyone who wasn't at Cahill's table. With Kerry trailing in New Hampshire, campaign staff members would look instead to Iowa's caucuses the week before to give them a bank shot. "We knew that Dean didn't have what he said he did [in Iowa]," Cahill recalls. "We knew they did not have on the ground what they said they had. It was never real."
So she pulled resources from other states and sent them to the Midwest. "We were running in Iowa an absolutely classic caucus operation," she says. "We were just methodically finding our voters and getting them to the polls." But that meant leaving Kerry's New Hampshire backyard nearly unattended, except for appearances by his wife Teresa Heinz Kerry and his campaign chairwoman, former New Hampshire Governor Jeanne Shaheen. It wasn't easy to watch Kerry drop steadily in the public polls in a state that everyone knew he needed to win. Staff members on the floor below could hear Cahill's reaction each morning when the public polls would reach her computer screen. They called it "the 10:30 scream."