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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
The Web has found its candidate for president, and his name is Howard Dean.
Jul 3, 2003 | Late on Sunday night, Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's presidential campaign manager, posted a short note on the campaign's blog to thank Dean's supporters for a successful three-month period of fundraising. Since April, Dean had raised $6.3 million, more money than any other Democratic candidate -- but with the end of the financial quarter approaching in less than 24 hours, Trippi had one more request for Howard Dean fans all over the Web: "We are going to make one last push to $6.5 million tomorrow and see what happens," he wrote. "We need your help -- spread the word that this campaign is rolling -- that we are making history together. Get one more person to sign on to the campaign and contribute."
The cash poured in. By 10 a.m. on Monday morning, Dean had collected $70,000 through his Web site. At 11, he was up to $115,000. Every half hour, Mathew Gross and Zephyr Teachout, the campaign's full-time bloggers, posted updates on the money count, adding, along the way, further incentives for people to pry open their wallets.
"Howard Dean will personally call five donors, selected randomly, who contribute on the Internet today," Gross wrote at 11:30. But by that time it appeared that few incentives were needed. The unofficial network of blogger activists who agglomerate around Dean, a web of folks who spend seemingly every spare minute studying the rhythms of his campaign, had already been activated. These people watched the numbers and pressed their friends and neighbors to give and give some more. On Dean Nation, the oldest and most popular Dean blog, the day was renamed the "$7 million Monday" -- which was fast becoming true. Dean's one-day tally is astonishing: $287,000 by 2 p.m., $380,000 by 4 p.m. Then $593,000. $645,000. $757,000. And by midnight, $802,083, bringing Dean's total for the quarter to more than $7 million.
Meet Howard Dean: physician, former governor of Vermont, and presidential candidate from the great state of Blogland. The Dean campaign is enamored of the Internet; more than any other candidate in history, Dean has put the Web at the center of his run to the White House. He's certainly not the first candidate to raise large sums online. In the 2000 presidential primaries, both John McCain and Bill Bradley found that their Web sites could generate millions. But Dean's money success -- which comes seven months before the first primaries and while the candidate's poll numbers are in the single digits -- as well as his substantial first-place finish in MoveOn.org's online primary, is not, his campaign insists, the point of his Internet strategy. Rather, the money and the MoveOn showing are evidence of a larger truth: When you assimilate the culture of the Web, you'll win the blessings of the Web. In today's connected world, those blessings are not insignificant.
The breadth of Dean's online universe -- which stretches across e-mail, the Web, wireless instant messaging, a broadband television station, and, for folks who feel there's more to life than just computers, Internet-aided real-world "meetups" -- can hardly be overstated. At the center of this storm is Dean's Blog for America, which gives supporters a peek into the campaign's daily goings-on. The blog, says Gross, allows Dean fans to feel they're in some way part of the campaign. "Most people are using the Internet as a means of broadcasting a message," Gross says, "but what Blog for America does is give people a chance to send us instantaneous feedback." People do this, he says, through the comments box for each blog entry, and some of them do it by setting up their own blogs -- and people at the Dean campaign seem to love reading these blogs.
"It's kind of like a routine for me," says Trippi, the campaign manager, who explains he caught the "blog bug" in April 2002, before Dean became a candidate. "What happens is, I spend a lot of my day talking on the phone with supporters. It's pretty easy while I'm doing that to check out all these sites."
Dean's success online is especially striking when you consider that the campaign more or less stumbled onto it. The blog and Dean's use of the Meetup service to plan campaign events -- which has already garnered more than 50,000 supporters around the country who've pledged to meet, celebrate, and do a bit of work for the campaign on the first Wednesday of every month -- were ideas suggested to Dean by people on the Internet. Trippi and others in the campaign were quick to see the potential in these tools, but "wouldn't we love to say that we planned it all this way?" says Courtney O'Donnell, a campaign spokeswoman.
In the past, Dean's rivals, all of whom have a very traditional, one-site Web presence, have pooh-poohed his campaign's Internet savvy. "Some of [Dean's] Meetup events look like the bar scene from 'Star Wars,'" an unnamed aide to another candidate told the New Republic in May. But when called for comment on Dean's Internet strategy in light of his success on Monday, many of Dean's main rivals didn't want to talk about it.
A spokesman in Joseph Lieberman's office did say that he was pleased with his own campaign's online efforts, which raised "thousands and thousands that we did not expect to." And recently, John Kerry's campaign also joined Meetup; about 4,000 people have signed up for events for the Massachusetts senator.
But political experts don't seem to know what to make of Dean's Internet strategy. Many of them have discounted it. Donna Brazile, Al Gore's 2000 campaign manager, told the Washington Times on Wednesday that she was "skeptical" of Dean's boasts about what the Internet could do. And William Mayer, a political scientist at Northeastern University, says that he's "not convinced that a whole lot of his success is attributable to the Web." The skepticism is understandable: When you slip into Dean's online world, with its all-Howard-all-the-time ethos, one can easily mistake the obsessive love of a certain activist few for something larger and more momentous. But it is easy to wonder how real it all is.
But if you ask that, says Karl Frisch, a professional political consultant and a full-time Dean blogger, you have to also ask whether the alternative political reality -- that of the "Washington media establishment" -- is any more "real." "How many times have they been wrong?" Frisch asks.
