On The Iowa Trail With Dean's Texas Rangers-- Introduction

On The Iowa Trail with Dean's Texas Rangers-- Introduction

http://www.earthwire.net/dean/iowa/default.asp

ON THE IOWA TRAIL WITH DEAN’S TEXAS RANGERS by M. Martin

(copyright 2004, all rights reserved)

Introduction Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Afterword

“But those aren’t even Dean people! T hose are Kerry supporters—I remember seeing them on the street!” My girlfriend, the inestimable Ms. T , was having one of those defining moments. It’s one not many people have—the one where you personally realize the extent to whic h most media is nothing but a goddam lie. We were drinking wine and relaxing after a grueling 18 hour bus ride from Iowa. T o amuse ourselves, we had turned The Daily Show to see their take on the Iowa Cauc uses. T he c auc uses had been held the day before. We had been there as volunteers for Howard Dean. Ever sinc e I had pic ked up a c ouple of newspapers on the way bac k in Oklahoma City, a pic ture of the events in Iowa had been emerging in mainstream media…one that differed profoundly from what we had witnessed. We had expec ted Howard Dean to rec eive slightly better treatment at the hands of The Daily Show than he had rec eived from more c onservative pundits—after all, Jon Stewart’s largely youthful audienc e is c ut from the same demographic c loth as most Dean supporters. Our expec tations were wrong. T he misrepresentation of Dean went so far as to interc ut shots of the governor passionately rallying the troops with “reac tion shots” of people on the verge of slumber. Just one problem: those people happened to be at a John Kerry rally. In the days before the c auc uses, a widely-quoted MSNBC-Zogby poll showed Kerry leading Dean. You might c onsider this a self-fulfilling prophec y—but for the fac t that Kerry’s “lead” (in fac t, the point spread between all four lead c andidates) was less than the inac c urac y margin of the poll itself. In effec t, the pollsters were saying they didn’t have a c lue, they just liked Kerry—yet this semi-educ ated guess was widely reported as sc ientific ally derived hard fac t. Virtually no mention was made in any US-based mainstream media of the thousands of volunteers of all ages who had c ome from all over the c ountry to work for Howard Dean. What little mention oc c urred trivialized, misrepresented, and ridic uled both volunteers and c andidate. T he purpose of this ac c ount is to set the story straight—and share some personal observations based on mine & Ms. T ’s shared experienc e as members of “Dean’s T exas Rangers.” Continued >>

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09/05/2009 07:32 AM