[Air-l] qual and quant

[Mark D. Johns]

At 12:20 PM 1/24/2004 -0500, you wrote:
>PS: At the risk of going even further out on a limb, I think that's what
>happened re Howard Dean in Iowa. The 20-something Meetup/Moveon campaign
>was so bloody imageable, from the NY Times Sunday mag. to Wired.
>Meanwhile, Kerry just kept organizing in traditional ways, but nobody
>wrote stories about that. (Of course, Dean was ahead in the polls till the
>last week, but why spoil a good story?)

         As an Iowan and a caucus participant, Barry, I'd say your 
observation is half right.  The 20-something first-timers and Dean's use of 
the Web all made good copy for the media, and Kerry was well 
organized.  But Dean had a pretty fair organization from any traditional 
perspective also, and nobody but nobody was better organized than Gephardt, 
who had the labor unions working for him.  Perhaps the least organized of 
the "serious" candidates was John Edwards, who came in a strong second 
(32%) with Kerry (38%), to Dean's and Gephardt's very distant third (18%) 
and fourth (11%) respectively.  Edwards' organization was minimal, yet he 
did very well.  In fact, by some counts Edwards had more voters than Kerry, 
but because of the Byzantine caucus math, did slightly poorer in the 
delegate count.
         The pundits talk organization because they understand it, but the 
truth of the matter is that most of the caucus participants had had the 
opportunity to actually see and/or meet several of these guys in person in 
the weeks prior to the caucuses.  If they hadn't seen them personally, they 
all  had a trusted friend or neighbor who had. They were sick of the phone 
calls (6 to 10 per day at our house), the TV spots (average 150 per day per 
local broadcast station according to the University of Wisconsin ad watch 
project), and the direct mail (mostly from the better organized campaigns, 
Dean and Gephardt especially).  People weren't talking about the media 
messages, but they were talking a great deal about personal impressions.  I 
think the real story here is how relatively LITTLE impact the organizations 
and the media had, and how MUCH Iowans wanted to feel as if they were 
circumventing those to decide on the basis of personal experience with the 
candidates.
         When I saw Kerry in person (twice) I was rather shocked at how 
much better he came across than he did in his TV spots.  I was likewise 
shocked at how poorly Gephardt played in person compared to his television 
persona.  Edwards seemed to come across well both interpersonally and in 
mediated form, but the event of his I attended was filmed and segments of 
it made into his two most frequently aired TV spots, so my analysis there 
may be biased by having been present at the taping of the spots.  I didn't 
have opportunity to see Dean, but many who did said things like, "he isn't 
like he looks on TV."  (By the bye, I heard second hand from someone who 
had been at Dean's "non-victory" celebration and saw his now infamous 
"yee-haw!" or "I have a scream" speech in person, and thought it lots less 
weird than it looked on TV.)
         As a media studies person, I know most of the nation will not have 
the benefit of personal experience, but will decide on the basis of the 30 
second spot, the 10 second sound byte, or the one minute scan of the home 
page, so it's questionable how it will translate beyond Iowa, and perhaps 
New Hampshire.  But I really think that the Iowa result was because when 
people saw Dean and Gephardt "up close and personal" they didn't like what 
they saw and felt the media had deceived them.  Just the opposite with 
Kerry and Edwards, who looked in person as good as, or better than, they 
did on TV.  The news media simply failed to consider the power of 
non-mediated encounters.

------
Mark D. Johns, Ph.D.
Asst. Professor of Communication/Linguistics,
Luther College, Decorah, Iowa
http://faculty.luther.edu/~johnsmar/
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"Get the facts first. You can distort them later."
     ---Mark Twain