Last December, Jerome Armstrong, a Dean supporter from early on and a political blogger who runs the MyDD blog, posted an item criticizing Joe Trippi, at the time an advisor to Dean, for how he was running the campaign. "I said he was full of crap," Armstrong says. "My basic thing was, Dean needs to come out of the chute and aim for winning Iowa and New Hampshire," but Armstrong had read an article in which Trippi seemed to be saying that Dean could do OK if he merely placed second to Al Gore -- who had not yet bowed out -- in those states. To his surprise, Armstrong got an e-mail message from Trippi. "He said, 'Give me a call, let's talk.' And then he asked me what I thought they should be doing with the campaign. I said, 'Get a blog.'"

Rick Klau, another long-time political blogger and an executive at a software company in Illinois, called the Dean campaign last summer asking if he could help them out with anything. "At the time the campaign was just two people in an office," he says, but several months later Dean's people called him back and asked him what they thought the campaign should do to get the word out. "One of the things I said was, 'You need to have a weblog.'"

Then, in March, Mathew Gross, who had previously written for MyDD, moved to Burlington from his home state of Utah and began working with the campaign. Gross wrote a memo to his bosses at the campaign, saying, "I think we should get into the blogosphere." Trippi, who had just been made campaign manager, knew all about the blogs by this point. "And so he said, 'Let's do it.'"

The campaign's use of Meetup came about in much the same haphazard way. In January, Aziz Poonawalla, a 29-year-old graduate student in Houston and the proprietor of Dean Nation, received an e-mail from William Finkel, the outreach coordinator at Meetup, pointing out how great the service would be for political organizing. Poonawalla saw that a few hundred Dean supporters had already signed up with the service, so he plugged it on his blog. Hundreds of people began signing up for Dean on Meetup, but it was a while before Trippi endorsed the service.

"It took the campaign a few more months to notice that they had the nascent grassroots organization that they wanted to build already growing right under their noses!" Poonawalla said in an e-mail.

Now, by many accounts, Trippi tracks the Meetup numbers religiously (on Tuesday, the count passed 50,000), and he sees real political value in having all those people pledged for Dean. "He's brilliant in the way he's starting to use these people to work for the campaign," says Anna Brosovic, a Unix system administrator in Arlington, Texas, who also blogs on Dean Nation. On Wednesday night, for example, thousands of people are expected to meet for Dean in 230 places around the country to launch their "Adopt an Iowan" campaign. The supporters will write letters to Democrats in Iowa telling them to remember Dean during the Iowa Caucus, which will be held early next year. The idea "was generated from supporters who said the people of Iowa have such a powerful influence on these elections and we'd like to connect with them," said O'Donnell, a campaign spokeswoman. (To comply with election laws, the Dean campaign will cover the cost of postage to Iowa.)

Getting people involved in this way might seem a bit wacky; whether a letter from a Dean supporter in another state can influence an Iowan is certainly up in the air. But it's precisely the Dean campaign's willingness to involve people in its effort in these unconventional ways that seems to resonate with his supporters. Everything about Dean online seems calculated to keep voters engaged. "Dean's site gives you a million things to do every day," Frisch says. The campaign, from the outside, appears malleable, open to suggestions from all who want to offer them.

But what's odd about Dean's blog is how strangely absent the candidate seems from the process. Dean only occasionally posts entries. After Monday's fundraising success, Dean posted a short note of gratitude. More often, though, the blog features the routine observations of the campaign staff. A not untypical post goes like this one, from a staffer named Kate O'Connor, posted on Sunday evening: "It's around 8:30pm and we are driving (in a hybrid vehicle!) from New Hampshire to New York City. We took the red-eye in from Las Vegas last night so we are a little tired. Matt is taking pity on me and has agreed to post a series of pictures from our day in New Hampshire so I don't have to write it all out! I hope you enjoy them!!"

If you're a skeptical journalist, you might be tempted to ask whether this attitude is genuine; is there something calculated about the nonchalance? Does Trippi pay attention to what bloggers say because he really cares, or because he knows -- and he knew before anyone else -- that they could be a key to electoral victory? "He obviously knew what they could do," says MyDD's Armstrong. "He was able to see early on that the Internet could be what he calls the 'perfect storm of democracy,' where the Net activism connects with the right candidate at just the right time."

And there may even be some sound political theory to support Trippi's use of the Web. Markos Zuniga, who runs Daily Kos, one of Trippi's favorite political blogs, says: "Traditionally the Democratic Party has been beholden to special interests. For the Democrats it's been labor unions and environmental organizations. I have nothing against those interests, but the problem is that the rank and file of the party have never been represented -- it's the people with money that get a say. What the blogosphere does is create this online community where people from all walks of life can support the party, and if the party plays its cards right, it can have these people rallying around the party instead of around their own special interest. They could be more like Republicans, who've had all this success by rallying around their party."

Recent Stories