Insider Volunteer Look at Iowa and the Dean Ads

The campaign is pretty organized, no doubt

The campaign is going mostly scriptless, and in fact they expect and instruct volunteers to "speak from the heart" about why they are supporting Dean and why they came from Wherever USA to do so - a better approach, indeed, than programming people, like robots, to regurgitate fixed, hollow messages.

Meanwhile, the media angle today out here is that Gephardt and Dean have pledged to take off their negative TV ads. Some think they did it because the ads were backfiring in the face of Edwards and Kerry gaining by remaining positive. I suspect that that is true. I saw the Dean ad several times - it is not harsh, but it makes the point about Gephardt (especially) and Kerry and Edwards supporting the war. My view is this: Forget the squabbling about who is and isn't going negative. The ad backfires anyway. Why? Because, by now, most people who are supporting Dean because he opposed the war are already "ones" in the hard count, no?