Everything about Howard Dean's "Iowa Perfect Storm" strategy seemed to go perfectly, right up to the point at which Iowans actually started voting in the first-in-the-nation caucuses that began the process of selecting the Democratic nominee for President. As the results started pouring in, one Dean aide noted with cryptic accuracy that in The Perfect Storm of book and movie fame, from which the Dean camp had borrowed its campaign-closing metaphor, the hero did not survive.

It wasn't quite that bad; Dean did beat Dick Gephardt for one of the three coveted exit tickets from Iowa. But the former Vermont governor, who barely a week earlier had topped polls of prospective caucus-goers, finished far behind a pair of US senators whom he had dismissed as hopelessly weighed down by their Washington "insider" status--John Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina. While Gephardt's support collapsed, despite massive help from industrial unions, Dean held on to his hyperenthusiastic base to win 18 percent of the Iowa vote. Unfortunately for Dean, his supposedly superior organization failed to attract many votes beyond that base. Kerry and Edwards divided the undecided voters and those who were jumping off the sinking Gephardt ship, pumping their totals up to 38 percent for Kerry and 32 percent for Edwards. And while the number of caucus-goers doubled from 2000, when Al Gore and Bill Bradley faced off, Kerry and Edwards benefited more than Dean from the expanded pool of potential supporters. Even in liberal Johnson County, home of the University of Iowa and a hotbed of antiwar sentiment, Kerry, who voted for the 2002 resolution that allowed George W. Bush to send troops to Iraq, easily beat Dean. Edwards, who also voted for the resolution, came within two points of beating him too. Across the state, Edwards benefited from a pact with peace candidate Dennis Kucinich, who urged his backers, in precincts where they lacked enough support to win delegates, to caucus with the North Carolinian, who had taken up some of Kucinich's populist economic themes.

So what happened to Dean? As he stumbled in debates and bungled policy pronouncements, the presumed front-runner took hits from all sides--including some of the roughest media coverage accorded a candidate since George McGovern got the "liberal loser" treatment in 1972. Yet, Dean poured time and money into targeting the hapless Gephardt rather than addressing the growing concern among Iowans about his chances in a November race with Bush. Dean was the original "Beat Bush" candidate, but Kerry and Edwards radically altered their campaigns to present themselves as stronger applicants for the title. While doing a reasonably good job of maintaining their senatorial demeanors, both Kerry and Edwards ditched tepid stump speeches for addresses that were thick with the populist appeals that Dean had initiated.

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