Many of my friends are surprised and heartbroken that their candidate, Bernie Sanders, lost New York tonight.
I don’t have a candidate in this race - my candidate was Joe Biden, and he didn’t run. But as someone who has been through a few heartbreaking idealistic campaigns, I know how it feels.
I thought I would share an interesting passage from Clay Johnson’s The Information Diet. His book is about the unhealthy consequences of losing control of the information you consume, and he shares this amazing story about what it was like to work on the Howard Dean campaign:
In the summer of 2003, I packed my bags and headed up to New England to work as the lead programmer for the insurgent presidential candidate, Howard Dean. The staff was reasonably kind — mostly native Vermonters and interns at the time. They liked to pick on this poor Southerner, though; at one point, someone warned me that if I spent too much time outside with my eyes open in the winter, the fluid in my eyeballs would freeze over. I remember shutting my eyes hard and sprinting out across the ice to my car and grasping for the door handle blindly on several occasions. Yankees are tricky, I tell you what.
Cults, startups, Apple keynotes, and political campaigns all have one thing in common: a group of people with delusional loyalty to the mission they’re trying to accomplish. Those of us on the Dean campaign feasted on a diet consisting of the narrative that we would be the ones to remove the evil George W. Bush from office. I ended up gaining a lot from that campaign: about 32 pounds from the constant supply of campaign-contributed Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, and a healthy dose of crazy.
Each morning, the media miners — the folks in charge of watching all the cable news — would feed us clips that told us how well we were doing. The afternoon was filled with blog posts from across the Internet talking about how revolutionary our campaign was. Evenings were filled with watching the latest and greatest episodes of “The West Wing” starring President Bartlett — the fictional president that we assured ourselves was based on Howard Dean, despite producer and writer Aaron Sorkin donating twice as much money in 2004 to the presidential campaigns of Dick Gephardt, Wesley Clark, and John Edwards.
There was also constant speculation: Republican Strategist Karl Rove had said, gleefully, that Dean was the candidate he wanted to win the Democratic nomination. We were emboldened by his claim. They were afraid of us — Karl Rove never says what he means. He must be giving us his endorsement because he doesn’t want to face us! We’d try to find as many facts as we could to support this idea.
That CNN cut to Donald Rumsfeld instead of showing Howard Dean’s speech on tax policy? Certainly evidence that the White House was using whatever it could to keep us off the air. Obviously CNN, too, had become an instrument of this evil republican regime.
The week before the Iowa caucuses, I remember asking the campaign’s pollster, Paul Ford, by how much we were going to win Iowa. His response was: “We’re not. John Kerry is going to win it by 18 points.”
My jaw dropped. I wasn’t sad or disappointed. I was mad at Paul and a little disappointed in him. How could he be such a traitor? Hadn’t he seen the news? He clearly was incompetent. Any fool could see that we’d correctly leveraged the Internet in Iowa and this puppy was in the bag. Howard Dean would win Iowa and go on to beat George W. Bush.
But Paul was right and we were crazy. You know the rest of the story: Howard Dean lost the Iowa caucus by nearly 20 points, and would go on to give a concession speech with a yell that became his defining moment. Only the political intelligentsia would remember his use of the Web. The rest of the electorate remembers him for that terrible scream.
The morning after the caucuses, our Burlington, Vermont, offices were filled with more delusion. One of my colleagues ran up to me as I walked into the office and said, “Clay, did you see the Governor’s speech last night? It was awesome. He’s totally back. We’re going to win this thing.”
We redoubled our efforts — though Dean was down by double-digits in New Hampshire, we could make a comeback. Every primary and caucus after that, we convinced ourselves we still had it. As the weeks went by, as the sinking feeling got stronger that we would lose to John Kerry, we got hungrier and hungrier for any poll that would give us even a slim chance of winning.
If, a month later, you had polled the staff to ask who would win the Wisconsin primary — our line in the sand — we’d have told you it was Howard Dean. And we’d believe, out of desperation, anything that told us we were right.
One of the cruel tricks of the human mind is that when we care deeply about something, we are most vulnerable to comforting delusions. In this case: lazy heuristics, confirmation bias, and cognitive dissonance.
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