Ellisblog to the Rescue!

Well, we're in the stretch of the February 3rd primaries and caucuses and still not a negative ad to be had. Ellisblog is miffed. Work with me here, people! You're not going to win if you don't take the front-runner down a peg or three. If you let him win, he will win.

"We can't," say the political consultants to those who seek to upend Senator Kerry. "It boomeranged on Gephardt and Dean in Iowa! And our guy has to appear in the ad! We don't know what to do!"

Please. Get in the game. How do you go negative and negate backlash? Humor! Make 'em laugh! Don't tell me you can't make a funny ad out of John Kerry's 42 positions on the War in Iraq! Don't tell me you can't get a few knowing chuckles out of the "Gulfstream populist." It's not that hard!

One striking feature of this year's presidential camapign has been the uniformly dreadful content of the television and radio advertising. Talk about fighting the last war. The scripts are from campaigns waged two and four and six years ago. It's not that they're similar, it's that they're the exact same scripts. The RNC scripts appear to be from Arthur Finkelstein's reject file.

Doesn't anybody here know how to play this game?

A Great Political Blog

Betsy Newmark lives in North Carolina and she blogs up a political storm. Check it out.

More on Dean

1. Can we stop pretending now that the Dean campaign still exists as a political force? The constituency that supported him remains a political force in Democratic politics and all along the granola belt (from Maine to Washington State) of the United States. But the Dean candidacy is done. He let down the team. The team moves on.

2. The denigration and devaluation of what the Dean camapign accomplished (in terms of organization and fund-raising and political networking) is almost as inane as the major media's coverage of the dot.com collapse 3 years ago. The Internet is the future of politics. The fact that Dean blew up had nothing to do with the fact that his campaign used the Internet brilliantly. The Dean campaign blew up because the candidate and his handlers weren't ready for The Show.

3. Reporters are always sorry to see a good source go. Thus all the sympathetic coverage of Joe Trippi's departure from the Dean campaign. Trippi served his candidate well during the entrepreneurial phase (basically, 2003) of the campaign. He was less effective when the campaign became, in essence, a corporate enterprise. The management of the Dean message in the last three weeks leading up to Iowa was disastrous. And it allowed Kerry back in.

The Dean Database

It's a dot.com gone bust, as the cliche goes, but there is one enormously valuable asset sitting on the Dean campaign's servers. And that's the Dean fund-raising and organization list. Memo to Al Gore: Make sure its backed up six ways to Sunday. Al Gore to Ellisblog: What do you think Roy Neel is doing there, campaign strategy?

Incoherence

In its first major move since returning to its "outsider" message, the Dean campaign has hired a lobbyist to replace Joe Trippi as campaign manager. Note to Mickey Kaus: Do you think he's finished now?

Good Riddance

To the chairman of the BBC. As Renata Adler, in her great book about the CBS v. Westmoreland and Time v. Sharon cases, once said: "there was no fence."

Thanks to reader RM for the author citation correction.

Notes On The New Hampshire Primary

A couple of points:

1. It seems clear from the exit poll data that Howard Dean's consumption of news coverage following the "I Have A Scream" speech in Des Moines did in fact derail the momentum of John Edwards coming out of Iowa. I think a lot of people thought that the story would be Kerry and Edwards from Tuesday to Friday of last week, but it turned out to be Kerry and Dean. And so Edwards (who did gain in the last three days of the New Hampshire primary) didn't get the Iowa bounce he ordinarily would have. Which led to his disappointing fourth-place finish. The Rule of Two (the media can only handle a two-candidate context) is iron-clad.

2. It also seems clear that another iron-clad rule of politics -- that electability is not an argument -- no longer applies. Electability was clearly an issue in New Hampshire, as it was in Iowa. It damaged Dean in both states.

3. General Wesley Clark really is as crazy as a loon.

4. Back in 1995, a kid named Ken Robinson came to our offices in Boston looking for work. I was working then for a public strategies group. Ken wanted to get involved in politics. I introduced him to my friend Jack Corrigan, who was running for Norfolk County DA. Ken ended up running Jack's (unsuccessful) campaign. Ken went on to become a first-rate political organizer and this year, ran the Kerry operation in New Hamphire. Corrigan tells me that Ken built one of the best organizations he's ever seen in modern politics. So you see, Ellisblog helped Kerry! Stop e-mailing me.

And Howard Dean Is Going To Be Secretary of State

"A well-placed source says that the president will 'most likely' drop Dick Cheney from his re-election ticket and his first choice for a replacement is former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani," MSNBC's Jeannette Walls reports.

It's Not Parody, It's True

The New York Times has assigned some guy to cover "conservatives." This is why fiction is dying in America. Because no matter how wacky it is, it can't compete with the morning paper.

Postscript: As Betsy Newmark points out, the first "conservative beat" article was about conservative discontent with President Bush. Among those who describe themselves as conservative, in poll after poll after poll, President Bush enjoys extraordinary support. But never mind.

Exit Poll Issues

Just when the scribes had their Dean comeback story nailed, it turns out the exit poll was wrong! Kerry's going to win by double-digits. Back to Sunday's script! Where did they leave that? Probably at the hotel!