Politics by other means

The Internet may have made Howard Dean, but Dean didn't make the Net -- and his campaign's woes don't faze digital democracy's true believers.

By Scott Rosenberg

Feb 10, 2004 | Weeks ago, when plans were laid for the Digital Democracy Teach-in, the event -- a gathering of pundits and participants in the burgeoning world of online political organizing -- looked poised to turn into a coronation party for the Internet's own candidate, Howard Dean. With the stark collapse of the Vermont governor's electoral fortunes, the conference instead threatened to turn into a wake for his flash-flood movement.

As Joe Trippi, Dean's former campaign manager and the architect of his Internet strategy, kicked the day off Monday with an alternatingly rueful and defiant campaign retrospective, an urgent question hung in the air, invoked by the keyboard-clicks of serried ranks of bloggers: What the hell happened to Dean that he fell from the top of the heap so fast? And did his fall turn all his ballyhooed innovations into so much digital-dream scrap? Meanwhile, all the consultants and the columnists and the lobbyists who have been boning up on "social software" tools want to know: can they go back to sleep now?

The Dean debacle is a whodunit with a gaggle of suspects: The media did him in. No, his opponents dirty-tricked him. Or his newfangled online tactics backfired. Or maybe the voters just didn't like the guy.

Everyone here at the Digital Democracy Teach-in, part of this year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, had a different explanation. Though Trippi stuck to his loyalist line that Dean still has an "excellent chance of turning things around in Wisconsin," even he lapsed into the past tense while offering his interpretation of why the campaign he ran until two weeks ago tanked. And though he described the Dean saga as not a "dot-com crash" but a "dot-com miracle" -- one that used Internet-based tools to catapult an unknown candidacy and catalyze a sense of political involvement -- his talk had a morning-after melancholy cast.

Dean's doom, he argued, was sealed with Al Gore's endorsement. Not that the former vice president placed some sort of Curse of the Hanging Chads on the candidate. Rather, Trippi declared, the Gore nod set off alarms in the other campaigns, and in the media -- alarms that Dean's previous, more offbeat achievements in record-level fundraising and grassroots buzz had failed to trigger. The response, Trippi said, was: "Kill Howard Dean right this second. Cause if we don't kill this son-of-a-b right now, he's gonna be the nominee." And so Dean was "hammered" for a month before the caucus in Iowa.

"For about 12 months, the question was, change versus the status quo, and for 12 months, Dean dominated the campaign. Al Gore endorses him, and now the press says, if you vote for Howard Dean in Iowa, he's the nominee. Are you ready to do that? The people of Iowa did not reject Howard Dean, but they said, no, not yet."

In Trippi's interpretation, the front-loading of the primary calendar -- a ploy by the party establishment to hobble insurgent campaigns, in his view -- meant that Dean's campaign had no choice but to go all-out for wins in Iowa and New Hampshire to create a sense of inevitability. But that same inevitability, he charged, is what triggered the attacks that hobbled Dean at the polls. By that logic, there was no way Dean could win.

What of the Dean campaign's legendary online machinery? Couldn't all the blogs and the Meetups counter the forces who were demanding, "Bring me the head of Howard Dean"?

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