Dean again

I just re-read David Weinberger’s quotes from the Trippi speech last week, because something felt funny the first time I read it, and this time I found it, where Trippi says:

The Dean campaign has been proof-of-concept for a number of novel political tools and tactics, and for that, their place in history is assured. However, Trippi comes this close to blaming the voters.

The problem with the Iowa speech was not the scream, it was that Dean seemed unable to take in the loss. (The NY Times reported that he’d failed to prepare a concession speech.) Any speech he gave should have included a recognition that, given the choice, the citizens in Iowa had placed him third, and a renewed commitment to connecting with voters in the future.

Instead, they got a big fuck you in the form of all the states where Dean was going to win, states that obviously didn’t suffer from whatever had caused the Iowans to fail in their duty to seal his position as frontrunner. (The scream was interesting for another reason — much of the hullaballoo came about because of online remixes, undermining the sense that the replays were nothing but a big media plot.)

Blaming the voters is now the hallmark of the Dean campaign. This is a grand tradition, of course — a bad carpenter blames his tools; a bad programmer blames his users. Dean is in Wisconsin, telling voters to pay no attention to the previous results — those people in Tennesee and Missouri and Virginia et al are all sheep. His campaign has become a caricature of the style of politics he has often criticized, continuing because he has the money to support it, despite a resounding 0-16 string of failures in which he’s come in 4th or worse more often than he’s come in second. This is almost the definition of special interest politics — the success of his fund-raising tools shields him from having to listen to the people whose support would have given legitimacy to the idea of populist politics.

We need to learn from what the Dean campaign did right, but any analysis that tells the story of the campaign without mentioning its rejection by the people who really matter is a hair’s breadth from suggesting that voters suffer from “false consciousness”, the grownup version of “I know you are but what am I?” Once you are willing to substitute your own judgment for that of the voters, you’ve basically spat on the democratic ideal.

We are seeing the last internet campaign. The advantage of having the Dean story play so big is that everyone was watching. None of this was lost on Karl Rove, or on Terry McAuliffe. Given what Dean was able to do with internet tools, they will become a key part of the fall campaign, and so completely integral by by 2008 that they won’t rate more than a mention, much less a cover story in the NY Times magazine.

So those of us watching Dean thinking “This is it — the campaign we’ve been waiting for” were, in a way, correct. This is it, or rather that was it, before Dean decided that he could run a populist campaign without the support of the populous. The big surprise, to me and to many of us, is how little it mattered. Though Trippi said “It’s all about money”, they blew through $40M to surprisingly little effect.

So there is good news for democracy from the Dean campaign, but it’s not the good news Trippi would have you believe. The good news is this: a campaign can use internet tools to help create extraordinary successes in fund raising and generating name recognition and getting good poll numbers, can even have its candidate anointed frontrunner before the first vote is cast, and all of that, taken together, is still not enough to get people to vote for a someone they don’t like.