Respectfully, I disagree. For the campaign's sake, it must review its basic strategy and make changes. It's simply not working as more than a piggybank and Rolodex.

The campaign's use of IT, as Clay Shirky wrote, was half right: get the word out, make Dean a household icon. Tap into the anger. Free the energy. Sign up 500,000 devotees. Raise $40M.

And then spend it on TV ads, not even very good ones?

In fact, communications between HQ and the grassroots were never any good. It was all one way. There were many blogs, going round and round, but nothing traveling from the bottom up to the top.

When I set up the Dean Issues Forum to provide an arena for grassroots involvement with policy, DFA erected a firewall between it and us, so that discovering policies to discuss became as big a challenge as discussing them. We have 40 experts on hold, wondering how to help out. That's the Internet, too, you know. (Click on my name to visit the DIF.)

When some of us suggested a parallel development of more point-to-point communication tools for use by grassroots organizers, the 2,000-5,000 individuals who give the campaign its circulatory life, that idea (actually, a screaming request from the grassroots) got backburned right away. Meanwhile, heroic efforts are underway to to cram that technolgy into blog form.

The Internet strategy keeps evolving, it's true, but if we can't critique where we are, we are going to continue to err and end up bashed bloodly by the far richer and better organized Bush campaign. One of the pressing questions is how to salvage the best of prior strategies for Dean and, if someone else is the champion picked by the people, how to transfer its value gracefully -- and how to have it accepted.

A lot of people don't see the election as the issue. They think this is a theorteical discourse on democracy. Hey, November is only nine months away, for all the marbles. Quoting Franklin, "Gentlemen, there is plenty of time to sleep in the grave."

Bob, I agree with you. Of course we need to critique where we are,etc. All elements of the campaign need scrutiny. I did not write otherwise. In fact, I wrote:

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Nor, of course, does it mean that the Internet strategy worked. The failure of the Dean campaign tells us literally nothing about which elements worked and which didn't.

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Of course the Dean campaign needs to examine EVERY aspect of its efforts, and better do so fast. I am only saying that there's a new, damaging and unsupported meme loose: an assumption that the Internet failed the Dean campaign. It's just as plausible (in fact, I think more so) to say that Dean only got this far because of the Net.

Again, that doesn't mean the Net strategy was perfect, optimal and complete. But before we start arguing about why the Net strategy failed, we'd better get some evidence and clarity about whether it did in fact fail. That's my point.

Based purely on outside observation, I'm tempted to want to revise the metaphor of the "first three minutes after a movie."

IT's "narrative" has just begun. If anything, we've only seen the first three minutes of the movie.

Chuck, well put!

David = I think this is not about vague, sprawling "Internet Strategy" notions the Dean campaign was based upon, but specifically about the way Dean and Trippi embraced blogs and bloggers (who are nearly detested by most traditional journalists).

Underneath all the political noise and commotion of this election, there is a veritable Civil War going on between bloggers and journalists. Whatever wonderful things bloggers can do FOR a candidate, journalists (especially TV reporters) can work wonders AGAINST a candidate's image and just about destroy him. Despite the missteps Dean himself might have made, the press was out to crucify him IMHO.

I had a pleasant chat with a woman reporter from a very well-known newspaper at Dean NH HQ, all nicey-nice until I happened to mention I was a blogger and then she looked at me like I was a LEPER. Anecdotal evidence to be sure, but I think this is a big part of what was happening in the Dean campaign coverage.

H

David, sorry to sound confrontational. We're all working hard to make sense of things. You and I agree on the need for deep analysis (deeper than it's getting so far in the blogosphere).

Let me play on your words: The Dean campaign (so far) has failed the Internet. It's used the wrong tools too often and the right ones not often enough. That comes from a lack of strategy based on an historical understanding of how the net operates.

If your digital experience began with the web, it may be difficult to understand the fundamentals of network-based communications. More than that, if all you're used to Web promoting itself, shouting at you and everyone all the time, which has been the motif since the Boom, then you probably will miss the subtleties of the online environment.

The Internet can serve the campaign well, but first it has to be appreciated for all that it is and not just a narrow, distorted portrait of this vast resource..

We need to strategize first and then become tactical, which has not been the case. We agree, the Internet hasn't failed the campaign.

What is all the B.S. intellectualizing about "lost," "loss," and failure? I'm not a Dean supporter but he got a great start. Now he's dead, lost, out of the race because of a caucas and a primary in two crummy states whose delegate count is insignificant? Looks to me like you Internet moguls got goosed by the conventional press while you were putting time in at the urinals. And you're still standing there. LOL You dropped $40 Million into the coffers and 200 odd thousand voters defeat your candidate? You don't have a clue if you have lost let alone know why you lost what you haven't lost. I'm lost and I'm gone.....

I think to get to the real impact of the Internet, you need to distinguish between the Internet as a tool for democracy and the Internet as a model for it. The Dean campaign used the Internet like a fancy phone tree with cool bells and whistles. They did not run a decentrilized, network theory compliant, open architecture campaign. It was the Internet as a new way to sell books, rather than the Internet as a new way to search books.

More in this piece I wrote for Findlaw.

Please don't confuse the candidate with the campaign with the campaign's tools.

The candidate stumbled (message breadth, likeability, adapting to Iowan communication styles, etc.). So did the campaign in not compensating fast or well enough for the candidate's shortcomings (which we're seeing now). But the system worked: large, diffuse participation; new tactics emerging; lots of local connections. The network worked too well: it propagated the candidate's persona accurately and widely; it didn't isolate or buffer conflicting enthusiasts within the campaign; it encouraged and enabled massively parallel newby initiative without the restraints of proven field experience.

The Dean campaign is adjusting. They're fixing messages, bounding memes, and reinforcing different things.

We'll all get collectively better at this. So long as we don't drain the baby with the bathwater.