August 27, 2004

I just read Steve Johnson's superb essay on how emergence maps to the Dean campaign. Steve distinguishes emergence that clusters and emergence the copes. Clustering causes growth, as in more people signing up for Dean or giving him money. Coping adapts to new situations and develops more complex forms, as in adapting to life after being the presumptive frontrunner. Not only was the Dean campaign's emergence of the former sort, Steve argues, but it's hard to envision how emergence of the second sort could work with a national campaign since it depends on local observation.

Feels real right.

March 25, 2004

Micah Sifry, who I've gotten to like an awful lot as a writer and as a person - how can you not like someone whose next book is titled Is That a Politician in Your Pocket?: Washington on $2,000,000 a Day? - asks if Dean has a second act.

March 01, 2004

Fascinating article in the Washington Post by Howard Kurtz about the dysfunctional nature of the Dean campaign organization. Reading it makes you realize that the notion that the campaign's infatuation with the Internet brought it down is a point of view that only someone infatuated with the Internet would propose. Far more destructive were the personal and organizational frictions caused by a small-town campaign suddenly going national.

Dean disputes the accuracy of the quotes in the article.

February 23, 2004

Brian Dear has posted a graph of the number of sign-ups at the Dean site. He wonders what caused the changes in course at points A, B and C.

Good question.

February 19, 2004

That's what AKMA is calling the Doctor from Vermont. (That AKMA is too durn clever!)

I had been putting strikethroughs through the campaign blogs listed in my blogroll as they bit the dust, one by one. But then I accidentally blew up the entire right-hand sidebar and didn't bother re-striking them when Hylton restored it (thanks!) and I re-tweaked it.

So, here's a teensy predicament. Dean should get a strikethrough, of course. But his blog is still active and Dean has indicated that he's going to try to convert his campaign into some type of grassroots organization. To strikethrough or not to strikethrough? So far: Not. (Three strikethroughs and he's definitely out.)

I like much of what Dana says. He's clear-headed and hugely passionate at the same time. And a heck of a writer. (FWIW, he's angrier at Kerry than I am.)

I also like Joan Walsh's piece in Salon. Joan has impressed me as an open-minded, sharp-edged critic and reporter. Two snippets:

The fact is, Dean was electable -- he just didn't get elected.

It was fun for a while, but in fact, taking back the country from hardened political brawlers like Karl Rove won't involve a lot of fun. And if it feels like fun, you're probably not taking back the country.

The first deserves more ink and thought, of course. The second strikes me as not quite right: If it's only fun, then you're probably not taking back the country. But I'd argue that a distinctive element of a successful Internet campaign will have to be that it's fun. Realistic, nitty-gritty, organized down to the alley-and-doorbell level, integrated with traditional organizing techniques...and damn fun.

Then, sigh, there's Sarah Schweitzer and Glen Johnson's by-the-numbers "recap" of the Dean campaign, in The Globe. I've twice (1 2)before criticized Schweitzer's reportage (without remembering that it was the same person) as exemplars of The Master Narrative (in Jay Rosen's words) at work. She's still practicing her "craft." The story she recounts of Dean's rise and fall is in fact the story of the media's shaping of stories around the Dean campaign. I'm sure she thinks she's just telling the objective truth, and that's what's most disturbing.

February 18, 2004

Here's the transcript of his comments. Link to video here.

Yes, I'm sad. I thought we had a chance to make some deep changes in politics and, more importance, in governance...your normal populist stuff. And I think we still have that chance. It's just going to take longer.

At least, in part due to Dean's campaign, we have a real opportunity to elect a Democratic president. It's a start. And for the rest, the Dean campaign has given us some models for connected activism wedded to hope.

February 17, 2004

Political philosopher Peter Levine pooh-poohs the Internet side of the Dean campaign: "I don't buy that the 'distributed' methods pioneered by Joe Trippi will do anything to improve our democracy." He cites a Washington Post study that found that the median family income of those contributing to the Dean campaign was $54,117 and the fact that in NH Dean did best among those with postgraduate study under their belts. Further, he writes, W "has raised more than twice as much money through the Internet as Howard Dean. This suggests to me that online fundraising will soon be part of the standard arsenal of an 'establishment' candidate."

First, Peter may well be right: The experience and experiment of the Dean campaign ultimately may prove to have done nothing to improve our democracy in the long run. For example, it's easy to imagine how a single, devastating terrorist attack could effectively put the military in charge of our country. (The Internet then would likely be the last forum for free speech...until it too was "secured.") Short of that calamity, it's certainly easy to imagine that politics-as-usual continues for years and years; money and power provides a heap o' inertia.

Even so, it seems clear to me that the Dean campaign in the short run has certainly improved our democacy if only by bringing more people into it. Further, it sure seems to me (i.e., anecdotal "evidence" ahead) that the participants felt a sense of involvement and ownership unusual in the dreary, broadcast slugfests that have become the norm in politics.

Second, Peter sees nothing in the Dean campaign other than more efficient fund raising. That, to me, is to miss what's most interesting about the campaign, but also the most fragile: The campaign's attempt to allow the ends to connect directly. Maybe that was a bad idea. Maybe it would not have spread beyond the early adopters. Maybe it would have created a new elite. Or maybe it could have made candidates more accountable to their supporters in a way that I believe Peter would like. We don't know. The experiment has been cut short either because its hypothesis was false or because its candidate lacked appeal, or both. We don't yet know.

But it's important that we know that we don't yet know.

February 13, 2004

Jay Rosen has written one of his typically brilliant, nuanced analyses.

Here's the EULA for the rest of this blog entry: By reading the following concluding paragraphs from Jay's article, you hereby promise to read the rest:

Transparency--a buzzword but not only a buzzword--is a first casualty of Realpolitik. "We weren't trying to keep the Net roots out of the loop," Trippi explained. "We were trying to keep John Kerry out of it." You cannot afford transparency or deliberation as the race intensifies. Could this be announced? Impossible. And so your distributed supporters, organized in affinity style or by weblog, had to sense it happening, or read between the lines of what the campaign was saying. What alternative was there? E-mail 300,000 of your best people and ask them to keep it quiet? "The press reads the blog."

That was the tipping point, in the story Trippi told to E tech. Net politics had done a lot, and confounded the establishment. But it was still immature, only half developed. A lot of people feel that way about Trippi himself...

February 12, 2004

Trippi's started a blog, and so far it's feisty and good. The latest entry includes a link to the transcript of his session at the Digital Democracy Teach-in. A previous one gives a convincing explanation of his financial stake in the campaign.

February 05, 2004

Salon's blurb for Katy Butler's piece titled "Losing my religion" captures it well:

A novice political volunteer explores what went wrong with Howard Dean's campaign and, with guarded optimism, looks to a future without him.

It articulates some uncomfortable truths. More precisely, it strikes me as a truthful account of one person's uncomfortable path. It obviously doesn't speak for all Deaniacs, but all Deaniacs ought to listen to it carefully.

February 04, 2004

Clay, in an email message, raises a good point about my response to his analysis of the Net's role in the Deanies' self-delusion. He asks if the Dean campaign would have spent $40M leading up to Iowa and NH if it hadn't (delusionally) expected to win and go on to raise more money.

Clay's right: For all their wariness about the outcome, ultimately I believe the campaign did think it was going to win big in those two states. (The $40M blow-out may also have been a bet-the-farm strategy. I don't know.) But how much of that expectation was based on Internet fever? E.g., had the polls accurately reflected the vote, would the Dean campaign have believed it was going to win just because there was so much Net activity? I don't think so.

That the Internet helped fuel the delusional belief seems undeniable to me. How it fueled it Clay lays out beautifully. How much it fueled it is much harder to figure out, and is deeply important because if we get it wrong, we will set false assumptions about what the Net is good for in political campaigns.

February 03, 2004

Clay has a thoughtful, fair-minded and important assessment of why we (i.e., supporters) ever thought Dean was going to win in a walk:

The easy thing to explain is why Dean lost - the voters didn't like him. The hard thing to explain is why we (and why Dean himself) thought he'd win, and easily at that. The bubble of belief, which collapsed so quickly and so completely, was inflated by tools that made formerly hard things easy, tricking us into thinking that getting votes had become easy as well — we were all in Deanspace for a while there.

It's a long-ish piece and I'm not going to try to summarize it, in part because it's too well written (damn that Clay!) and I hope you read the whole thing.

I agree with just about everything the article says. Even so, I think Clay overstates the role of the Internet in our self-delusion: One big reason I thought Dean was going to win quickly was that the polls said he had a huge lead. So, the question isn't simply "Why did Deaniacs think Dean would win easily?" but also "Why did the electorate favor him on clipboards but not in voting booths?" The answers to that question are not pleasant for any Dean supporter to contemplate.

And it wasn't just the polls that led us to believe he was a happenin' guy. In August, crowds of unprecedented size — 5,000, 10,000 — showed up to hear Dean speak. I traveled on the press bus for one leg of the "Sleepless Summer" tour and heard two well-known, hard-bitten journalists for major media outlets whispering to one another: "Have you ever seen anything like this?" "No, and so early in the campaign!" Those crowds weren't an Internet phenomenon, but they had a lot to do with convincing me that Dean's support was wider spread than it has so far turned out to be. (Sure, I was naive, but it wasn't an Internet naivete.)

So, I find myself agreeing with Clay's warnings about how a candidate's Internet campaign can create an unfounded perception of electoral strength, yet also worried that readers will come away with an exaggerated view of the Internet's role in that perception. It wasn't just the Internet that led us into false optimism.

I also want to dispute Clay's assumption that Dean himself thought he'd win easily. I don't know about Dean, but I can tell you that in private conversations I never heard Trippi and Zephyr Teachout express any complacency. A few months ago, when Kerry was raising barely enough money for donuts and tolls, and the press was piling on him for slipping so far back into the pack, I dumbly asked Trippi and Zephyr if they still worried about Kerry. They looked at me like I was nuts —"Damn! There goes my whuffie!" I thought — and said "Absolutely!" Then they went on for a few minutes about how the campaign could turn around in an instant, the need to organize on the ground, etc. So, in my experience, the leaders of the campaign didn't suffer from the hope-inspired delusional thinking that gripped many of us.

Further, despite Clay's belief that the campaign needed to tell supporters that talking on the Internet isn't enough, the message to get out and organize, to change people's minds and create political momentum the old fashioned way, was and is a campaign drumbeat. The social software the campaign created, for example, is focused not on Orkutian ratings and Friendster datings, but on enabling people to organize local events in the real world.

I know this response sounds negative because I'm hitting only on my points of disagreement — that while Clay is right, IMO, about some of the Net's deleterious effects, there were other important causes of our delusion, and the campaign management in my experience did not suffer from the delusion — so let me say it explicitly: Clay has written an important article from which we need to learn and learn quickly.

Disclosure: I still think Dean would make a better president than Kerry and is more electable against W. I still support him.

Campaigns aren't just complicated, they're complex. No single factor can explain what happens, any more than one can pin the Civil War on a single event or even contain it within a single field of study.

There's a good reason for this: social phenomena operate simultaneously on multiple, irreducible planes. Wars, movements, campaigns and the like all consist of individuals. The individuals constitute sub-groups and groups, each with emergent properties. (By "emergent" I mean that the properties of the group are different from the properties of the individuals, and those properties and behaviors can be quite surprising.) We can't understand social phenomena without considering all the planes — we need to be able to talk about "the campaign" and "the Iowa ground organization" as well as about the specific actions of specific individuals — but the planes don't fit together very well: they are irreducible going down and emergent going up levels of abstraction.

So, there is no hope of a definitive account. History is like that. And we're like that: as mortals, to see at all we can't see everything. So, we deal with it through narratives and the grander narratives we sometimes call "myths."

But we're not off the hook. We can only work the narratives out through spirited conversation about specific threads. You say that the Civil War was fought over states rights, and I might adduce evidence that it was "really" about the economics of plantation-based agriculture. You say that the Dean campaign failed in Iowa and NH (and 7 more states today, very likely) because the Internet distracted it from real world organizing, and I'll argue that it failed because it tried to go around the existing political structure...and we'll very likely agree down the road. Or maybe not.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I liked Thomas Schaller's explanation in Salon of what went wrong with the Dean campaign in NH and Iowa.

January 31, 2004

I know nothing at all about Roy Neel, the new "CEO" of the Dean campaign. I found David Isenberg's piece alarming. I have mixed reactions to Neel's explanation of the campaign's new strategy. But here's different testimony. It's from a message Stephen Spoonamore sent to a mailing list (used with permission):

Mr. Neel has a reputation of probity, capacity and trust.

He has worked with those on the left and right, and earned the respect of nearly all who he has worked with. I know several people who think very highly of this man. My one brief interaction with him was directed and clear.

Mr. Neel seams to me to be a nearly perfect match for my understanding and experience of who Howard Dean is, and how he ran the state of Vermont where he won my respect as a moderate Republican.

As I read Mr. Neel's record, he has worked for the best interests of the nations citizens. Our citizens are both "the people" and the "the companies" Both of these groups. When the people and the companies respect each other we make our nation a better place. I am very weary, as a citizen and responsible business owner, of hearing rants against business.

It is fairly clear at this point Mr. Trippi made some brilliant choices and some poor choices. It is also clear to many people who knew Howard before he was "Trippied" out that the Rock Star Dean was a something none of us really understood. Rightous? Yes. Parsimonious? Yes. Sharp-Tounged? Yes. But a Rock Star? No. Mr. Neel is far more closely aligned with the nature of the Dr. Dean as a person. Mr. Trippi is a true believer and inconoclast and brought those tools to the table. Mr. Neel is pragmatist and systematist and will bring those tools instead.

In any case. Dr. Dean, not Trippi or Neel is the candidate.

I still believe Dr. Dean would make a fine president. A president who would be a uniter and not a divider. A president of probity and meritocracy, not of secrecy and cronyism. Perhaps now and perhaps too late he has a team who may be able to reach out to a larger public than the Perfect Stormers. Strange things happen in strange times. But the many Moderate Rs like myself, and a growing number of conservative Rs as well could find a place beside a strong D. Under Trippi, our money was welcomed, but our input and thoughts were whole-heartedly shunned. Under Neel I think that may change.

Jason Lefkowitz raises the unpleasant but necessary questions about the $35M Dean fund burn-through and Trippi's possible conflict of interest:

...everything I've heard and read about Trippi is that he's an idealist who likely failed to sweat the details, rather than came up with any conscious scheme to defraud DFA. But the problem is, we don't know how it happened! The blog is silent on the Trippi/TMS conflict-of-interest issue; Dean and Neel aren't saying anything; and Trippi is pledging his ongoing support for his old boss.

I don't know what the money facts are, but I am certain that Trippi was genuinely on fire about the vision Dean is putting forth: Connected citizens taking their country back. To end the speculation, Dean should remember the point he made about conspiracy theories emerging when an organization keeps the lights off.

The Dean blog has posted a transcript of Deborah Norville's itneresting-but-softball interview of Trippi. She doesn't ask Jason's questions.

I laughed at Jon Stewart's "interview" with Dean.

January 30, 2004

David Isenberg writes harshly about the record Neel, the new "CEO" of the Dean campaign, has compiled as a lobbyist for the incumbent telco's:

If Roy Neel declares support for Dean's Internet Principles, he alienates his oldest friends. It'd be like Dick Cheney marching against the war.

Yeah, from what I've read about Neel's background, I hope he's going to stay away from Dean's nascent Internet policy.

"The Dean campaign is the WebVan of politics," two people have told me in the past 24 hours. If by "is" you mean "is profoundly different from," then I agree.

WebVan gained momentum not because there was demand for it but because a huge top-down investment — an initial $400M from private investors (10x the investment in the Dean campaign, btw) — made it look like a good idea. The Dean campaign, on the other hand, gained momentum because there was genuine, bottom-up demand: People stood outside holding signs, flocked to late night rallies on frozen tarmac, donated 75 bucks each, went door to door, hosted parties to write letters to other citizens. WebVan could only have wished for such demand!

The comparison isn't merely wrong but, I believe, intends to trivialize the Dean campaign. WebVan was about making shopping more convenient. The Dean campaign is about reconstructing a democracy currently ceded to the incumbent powers. WebVan's failure left some people much poorer (and a few people much richer). If the Dean campaign fails, it will leave a different sort of legacy: a loosely-knit, ardent network eager to continue the work.

So, sure, there are points of comparison between the Dean campaign and dot coms such as WebVan: The seething of ideas, the willingness to experiment, the hope, even a measure of admirable foolishness. And, in a superficial way, if Dean fails it will be because there wasn't enough demand for "the product" — in politics, if you don't get more than half the "market," you're toast. But the failure of everything from marriages to literary careers can be chalked up to lack of demand. That superficial point of similarity should not be allowed to obscure the very real differences: The Dean campaign was driven by fervent, bottom-up demand while WebVan's momentum came from a few rich investors.

For a thoughtful and entertaining argument that the Dean campaign indeed was like a dot com in the bubble, see Seth Finkelstein.