Political Pooper Scooper

Tom Schaller at DailyKos has a pretty good account of his caucus experience. Todd Dvorak of the AP offers an account similar to my own. In fact that is my precinct, and my wife, Sharon, provided the quotes for his lede.

This has been a pretty hectic week, and I've been trying to digest everything that happened. Our caucus was pretty bitterly fought, and I think it would be useless to deny that there's hard feelings. I've been coming up with my own spin on what happened, trying to accentuate the positives.

Those positives? Well, he did better than Gephart, which seemed to be a large part of our organizational goal. Did that, though the price was pretty high. Turnout seemed pretty high, which is a great thing to see if you are "small-d" democrat. Both Kerry and Edwards are taking it more strongly to the president, including some of the ideas that Dean promoted.

But still, even though Dean came in second in Johnson Country, you can't but feel like you got your butt whipped. I found my old Night of the Mary Kay Commandos Bloom County book just before the caucuses. Milo looked pretty wrecked the day after the election, as Opus, the "political pooper scooper" carried him off. Okay, I felt more like Milo than Opus.

UPDATE: Schaller's expanded on the "how" Kerry won in Iowa in this piece for The American Prospect Online. The question is, though, does Kerry have similar operations in place for the rest of the country? Does he have the money and time to set them up? Part of what drew me to the Dean campaign was their approach for using technology to recruit and organize their volunteers, but the technology game that Kerry's folks played was far smarter, and also very interesting. Also updated to a better link for the AP article.