A portion of the punditry can’t resist comparing the campaign to the tech boom of the ’90s–an overinflated bubble that left its naive believers drenched in soap scum.
Try telling that to the architect of Dean’s strategy, campaign manager Joe Trippi. “It wasn’t a dot-com bust,” he insists. “It was a dot-com miracle.” Point taken. It was only through the Internet that an obscure former governor raised more bucks than a pack of better-known heavy hitters. It was only through the Internet that a new force in politics–impassioned Web logs by overcaffeinated advocates–was able to penetrate Big Media’s immune system and spread the word through the hustings. It was only through the Internet, specifically by way of the groundbreaking service Meetup.com, that self-organizing groups of Deansters were able to hold thousands of gatherings around the country. The Internet provided Howard Dean with an amazing launchpad, and if there was any fault, we can look to the candidate’s inexperience in the big-time-politics equivalent of rocket science. As tech observer Esther Dyson noted at a conference on digital politics recently, “The best way to kill a bad product is with good advertising.”
In retrospect, we’ll come to view Dean’s Internet boost as less a miracle than an inevitability. To say that the marriage of politics and the Net wouldn’t have happened without Dean or Trippi is like saying that without the Kennedy-Nixon debates, television would not have dominated campaigning for the last 40 years. Someone else would have exploited the fact that this most powerful of media is now nearly ubiquitous, and future campaigns are going to come up with even more sophisticated ways to use the Net. “People will look back on the Dean campaign and say, ‘What a primitive thing’,” says Trippi.
In the short term, the Internet will continue to be a factor in the current election; Dean himself pledged last week to move his Web operations toward the twin goals of beating George W. Bush and promoting the issues that were part of his run. Trippi had already decided to begin a Web-based grass-roots movement to push liberal issues. This puts both men in line with the successful MoveOn.org operation, an Internet-centered, Berkeley, Calif.-based group that’s going to spend millions this year to try to unseat the incumbent president.
All this is strong stuff, but I anticipate an even more powerful revolution to come when the disruptive grass-roots power of the Net is corralled not in elections but in governing. The Internet makes it possible to mobilize no-longer-silent majorities, who will make their voices heard in the same way that a measly 600,000 Net supporters did for Howard Dean. Trippi says that the idea is something the Dean forces never had time to articulate, but he is rapturous about the possibilities. “If you ever had millions of Americans in concert with a president who’s talking about health care, or real campaign-finance reform, he could say, ‘I’m going to bring up this bill–send all the lobbyists away because the American people are going to come screaming in’.”
Imagine if a national leader decided to grab this tiger’s tail in an effort to bring affordable health care to the millions of uninsured families. He or she could launch a multipronged cyberassault on the special interests, fueled by the passion and desperation of millions of citizens who are either fed up with their health plans or panicked because they can’t pay for one. Bloggers would spread sob stories. Legislators would be flooded with real e-mails from real constituents. Instant-response e-mails and postings could quickly refute fearmongering ads. Maybe, just maybe, a chronically intractable national crisis could be resolved.
The prospect is so delicious that I decided to venture onto the Web myself and pluck down 19 bucks to reserve a new domain name: healthcareforallamericans.org. I vow to turn over the name to the first president with the savvy and commitment to work the next miracle in politics and the Internet.
