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ON THE IOWA TRAIL WITH DEAN’S TEXAS RANGERS

by M. Martin (copyright 2004, all rights reserved)

Introduction
“But those aren’t even Dean people! T hose are Kerry supporters—I
Part One remember seeing them on the street!”
Part Two
Part Three My girlfriend, the inestimable Ms. T , was having one of those
Part Four defining moments. It’s one not many people have—the one where
Afterword 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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