Netroots Rising

Trei Brundrett is a Democratic activist and super-techie from Texas who traveled to Iowa in early 2004 to help the Howard Dean for President campaign. The following interview was completed on July 25, 2007.

In Iowa, I didn’t go with the Texas Rangers, I went on my own a week before the caucus and stayed until the day after the caucus. I connected online with people that were going to be there but I didn’t know anyone with the campaign there. There were some people from New Mexico that we knew from canvassing before.

They had Dean shuttles. The Kerry headquarters [in Des Moines] was right next door [to Dean's] and looked completely dead…The Dean headquarters looked like a party. There were tons of people, a very striking difference with the Kerry headquarters which l later noticed was filled with people in button down shirts, working very hard. I has signed up through the Dean web site — they had a special “Iowa Perfect Storm” site. Then I got another email and they said I needed to register again. I got an orange hat and a badge. Lots of people there didn’t get a hat or they got a handdrawn badge. There was a hierarchy of colored hats with red and especially black being higher ranking than orange.

They made us sit and watch a movie in this room with a lot of food. There were a lot of people but no one really in charge. After the movie, there was a canvass training. We had to hook up with the people we were going to canvass with right there and then. I hooked up with these people who had flown a plane from Florida. They were mad that there hadn’t been a news story about it.

There were not a lot of young people, mostly people in their late 30s and early 40s. i went to suburban Des Moines. I hit a big vein of stay-at-home moms who had a gotten calls from Governor Vilsack’s wife or letters asking why Dean’s wife didn’t campaign with him. I got a very poor reception from these women. They all had the same response. It wasn’t what I had experienced canvassing before where it was obvious that people formed their own opinions. [In this case], it was obvious that these people had been messaged. I found out later that Kerry had organized heavily among these women. I saw the “soft 1″ phenomenon very closely — many of these people had said they were Dean supporters previously but were not when I canvassed.

I got a very friendly reception. It was freezing rain and everyone was very friendly, inviting me in, which canvassers aren’t supposed to do, but I wanted to get a sense of people. I didn’t run into anyone who had been hit multiple times until the last day. And those hadn’t been hit multiple times by Dean had been hit by everyone. It felt more like we were disorganized than that we were overwhelming.

The lit was bad and was not standardized. It didn’t feel like it was synched to the TV. They were telling us to “just tell the people about yourself and where you came from.” There was no message discipline at all.

I found some people with a car a couple of days in so I didn’t have to take the van anymore. SallyNSF — a prominent ["Blog for America"] blogger, now on Daily Kos, was one of them. I was blogging my experience. I don’t normally blog my personal life but the blogging was very woven into my Dean experience.

While I was with them, we decided “let’s go see Dean” and went to Iowa City to see him. I think I canvassed four days in DesMoines, one in Iowa City and one in a little tiny farming town I can’t remember the name of.

The Dean campaign had all these little “Perfect Storm” centers. In Iowa City, one was in a Motel 6; it had the ambiance of a revolutionary meeting. The room was dark and so was the mood because it was clear that Kerry was surging. We canvassed some that day, not a lot. We went to a big rally at a university. Joan Jett and Janeen Garafolo opened, then Tom Harkin spoke. There were too many people, a huge crowd, many many orange hatters there. They told us we had to get out. I just left. But I’d say about half just took off their hats and stayed. The rest of us went in a room with a speaker and we could hear Joan Jett, harkin, Dean, etc.

Everyone in the room was kind of disgruntled. You could tell in the room it was a lot of total newbies. Then they brought Janeen Garofolo in and she signed autographs and hung out. Then Dean came in and people ended up very happy. I remember there was this older dude there with his teenage son. They were talking the whole time and the older man told his son, “this is why we’re going to lose. All these people are just here to see Dean. They’re not here to work.” I could tell he had done campaigns before and I could tell he was disheartened by how all the volunteers just wanted to see Dean.

We went to this little town the next day and there was zero Dean support. It was brutal. They were all Kerry, Gephardt, or Edwards but more Gephardt than anything else. The Gephardt people were everywhere. They had either been where I was before I got there or I crossed their paths.

Then we went back to Des Moines and they wanted to go to the bloggers’ breakfast the morning of the caucus. It was all people who commented on the blogs. It was like a proto-Yearly Kos [convention]. Everyone had their blog handle on their name tag. it was like a family reunion. It was incredible how excited people were to see each other and meet. They did an around-the-room thing and people introduced themselves. Teri Sperry from Texas was there and she was clearly very well known by all the bloggers. It was at that moment that I realized that while I thought I was in deep, I was nowhere near in as deep as some people. Senator Graham’s daughter and Leonard Boswell’s daughter came and spoke and the Dean photographer was there.

In New Mexico, it was much more organized. and the AFSME people were in charge. They were the people who trained me, very hard core. The tone was like when you go hiking with someone who’s really into hiking and they take it very seriously — the kind of people who say “you need this much water, no I mean really you need this much water.” There was none of this bloggy or internet stuff going on there. They took one picture for posting on the blog but the organizers weren’t internet people. In Iowa I never saw any of that kind of “lock and load” political mentality. I saw IUPAT people with their shirts, but no one was interacting with them. I don’t know what the deal was.

After the breakfast we went canvassing. It seemed like maybe everything would be ok. We got a lot of people who weren’t planning on going and I spent a lot of time trying to convince them to go. I had a map with the caucus location — which I had found myself, no one with the campaign gave it to me. I was struck by how many people had no idea where their caucus was.

That morning, I had been struck by how big the picture of Kerry and Edwards was. I remember seeing the new Dean ad with the white background and remember being really underwhelmed and disheartened by it.

Then we went to the caucus. I went in, they had told us that morning not to put up any signs and if we walked in not to put on Dean stickers. We had to go in and not do any canvassing or campaigning. We were hyper-aware that they would be watching for signs that we were trying to secretly caucus. So we were very careful to just observe.

When we got in [to the caucus], there were Kerry signs everywhere, Edwards signs everywhere. The precinct chair had taken over the stage for Kerry. There were giant round “Real Deal” Kerry stickers on either side of the stage and the precinct chair was running the business of the precinct from this Kerry stage. The Edwards people had one wall marked off and they were very organized. You could see lots of Dean people but they weren’t organized at all and were just wondering around. One woman had a homemade, “Dean is right to be mad” sign and Dean people gravitated to her.

Lots of people coming in hadn’t made up their mind. The Kerry people came in and sat on risers on the stage behind the precinct chair. It was well lit and it just looked like if you wanted to be upright and popular you would just go up there. The lady with the homemade Dean sign had brought cookies and one of her neighbors, a man I had talked to — he’d given me shit about being from Texas — he’d agreed to vote for Dean if she gave him cookies. She brought him a plate of cookies and he took them and got up on the stage and passed them out to the Kerry people.

There was no one in charge for the Dean people. This SEIU guy put on an official yellow Dean shirt. No one gravitated to him. He wasn’t working the room. He obviously didn’t know what to do. So the woman with the sign and the cookies brought him over to her. But after the cookie thing she was completely deflated. So then they do the count; Kucinich and Gephardt didn’t make the cut, the Gephardt people went to Kerry and the Kucinich people went to Edwards.

Thre was a guy clearly from Massachusetts on his cell phone pacing around and calling in with numbers going back and forth from the gym to the auditorium. When I left I heard him saying “wer’re going to win, we’ve got this wrapped up.”

By then we were on the way to Valair Ballroom for the Dean victory party. I walk in there and the press were hanging out and talking to the Deaniacs. Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson were standing there. And Begala and Carlson were saying, this is going to hurt Dean but he’ll be strong in New Hampshire. Glen Maxey was there and he was saying, “we’ve got a national organization, we’ll recover, Gary Hart lost because he didn’t have a national organization.”

Harkin spoke, then Dean came out and did his speech. No one there heard the scream. The room was LOUD. No one even noticed Dean screaming. I was in the third row and I didn’t hear a thing. When we left no one was talking about it.

We left and everyone was bummed that we didn’t win. We were hungry driving around looking for a place to eat. We found a hotel bar that was serving food and Chris Matthews was there hanging out. Paul Begala was in the restroom and he says to me, “your guy really screwed up.” I thought he was talking about the loss.

Then we get back to the bar and they were showing the scream in an endless loop. Matthews didn’t say anything about the scream when he was talking to us.

SallyNSF was talking to a camera guy and arguing with him about the scream and saying that we didn’t hear it. And the camera man is saying that it’s all about the edit. And we were saying that if it’s edited in that it’s not real. And he was saying no, it happened, it’s real. It was weird to me that Begala had said that because earlier we’d been talking and I was imploring them to give Kerry the same scrutiny that they gave Dean.

Later , I went to the county convention for Dean. My wife was right on the edge of going to New Hampshire but right at the end she didn’t go. We switched to Kerry as a block and I went to the state convention.