A Dirty Tricks Campaign Against Dean in Iowa?

Howard Dean is upset.

Yeah, yeah I know. Big surprise there, huh?

Specifically, he's upset over what he perceived as a series of dirty attacks against him in Iowa.

Apparently, he is upset of the campaigning techniques of his opponents.

He has accused the John Edwards campaign as portraying Dean as an "elitest from Park Avenue in New York City." Now if I remember correctly, everything after the word "elitest" is a biographical fact.

He also accused the other candidates of having "their folks really beating up on the people who went in, trying to get them to change their minds..."

He even railed aginst "the phone calls and all that stuff under the table..." as "not particularly good for democracy."

"I never dreamed that would happen," Dean said. "And I don't think that's a healthy thing for democracy. It's enough to have it go on for weeks and weeks in the press, but when it goes on inside the caucus, I don't think that's good," he said.

OK, the Edwards campaign attack of Dean as elitest does expose the Edwards campaign as slightly hypocritical, as they claimed to be running only a postive campaign.

But the phone calls and, I'm assuming that when he describes campaigners "beating people up" that he means that they are campaigning right up until the people get to the door, not they actually, physically beat them up, are both simply part of the campaigning process. The whole idea of politics is to sell the voter on the concept that your ideas are better than the other guy's. In regular sales, the selling ends when the deal is closed. In politcs, the selling stops when the vote is cast.

Dean needs to get a little thicker skin if he's seriously planning on going all the way in this campaign. What he has seen in Iowa is but a little taste of what the rest of the campaign will be like.

Politics is nothing more than the sale of ideas for a vote. In sales, you sometimes have to deal with rejection, even when you absolutely believe that you have the better offer because your opinion isn't the one that counts - it is that of the consumer (or the voter in this case) that counts. The voters are telling Dean that they didn't like his message. Instead of whining about it, he needs to spend more time trying to figure out how he might better close the deal.