Dean scream  The Dean scream, also known as "I Have a Scream," was a speech delivered by Vermont governor Howard Dean on January 19, 2004 at the Val-Air Ballroom in West Des Moines, Iowa. That night, the presidential candidate had just lost the Iowa caucus to John Kerry and wanted to reassure his supporters he was going to win. The speech involved Dean loudly listing states he would win to an extremely raucous audience before screaming "YAAAAAAAHHH!!!!" Within four days, it was broadcast 633 times on national news networks and cable channels. The audio used in the airings of the scream was from Dean's unidirectional microphone, which decreased the volume of the background noise to the point where only Dean's voice was hearable; this didn't reflect the actual volume of the room that night, as the crowd was extremely loud. Following the scream, Dean continued to lose more primaries and suspended his campaign following his third-place result in Wisconsin. This has led some professional writers who retrospectively cover the speech to label it a political gaffe that destroyed the campaign; however, Dean and his campaign staff have claimed he would've lost regardless of the scream due to poor campaign organization. Additionally, Christine Pelosi, "Pacific Standard", and historian Robert Thompson analyzed Dean's probability of being president was already wrecked due to little party insider support, the Iowa loss, and the media's previous painting of Dean as too tempered for the presidential position. Vermont governor Howard Dean's 2003–04 presidential campaign began as a huge success in its first several months, garnering popularity from the press and American citizens for his left-leaning populism and anti-Iraq War beliefs; as of fall 2003, he was number one in almost every poll throughout the United States, including those in Iowa and New Hampshire. Campaign webmaster Adam Mordecai described all of the campaign staff feeling "invincible" initially. However, the amount of press reportage on Dean left little room for the other Democratic candidates to be covered; thus, the Washington establishment, other candidates' campaigns, and the mainstream media focused on his hot-headed public moments to show him as having too little sophistication for the presidential position. Dean was conscious of this and tried to moderate his tone, but often failed as he gave in to the excitement of his audience. Dean's rankings in the polls started to decline in the three weeks before the Iowa caucus due to the poor operation of his campaign team. Dean blamed his staff for setting it up to be a fight against another primary candidate, that being Dick Gephardt; Mordecai stated a broken voting system caused around "half" of votes for Dean to not be accepted; and "CNN" correspondent Kate Albright-Hanna attributed his decreased ratings to the "crazy" image of Dean and his supporters brought upon by the press and the campaigns of his opponents.