Boston Globe: Net Gains for Dean

Candidate Increasing Funds, Support Via the Web

By Joanna Weiss

Of all the technological tools they have used to draw people to Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, staffers never expected to get so much buzz from a baseball bat.

As cyber things go, it’s not especially high-tech: a picture of a bat, posted on Dean’s website, www.deanforamerica.com during the June fund-raising drive. Supporters who reloaded the campaign website every half-hour could watch the donations grow, like mercury rising in a thermometer. When it was first proposed, some staff members thought it was, frankly, a little cheesy.

But ever since the June drive ended, die-hard supporters have posted pleas on Dean’s campaign “weblog,” begging the staff to “bring back the bat.” Soon enough, it returned, as a cheerleading tool for one of the campaign’s more audacious ideas: last month’s “Cheney Challenge,” in which the campaign famously earned nearly $500,000, surpassing the $300,000 Vice President Dick Cheney took in at a South Carolina fund-raiser.

It’s a small sign of the how the online masses have managed to steer Dean headquarters in Burlington. Dean has stood out among his rival candidates because of the intensity of his Internet operation; online donations drove his unexpected fund-raising performance in this year’s second quarter, when he bested Democratic rivals to raise $7.5 million. In recent months, his campaign has staffed some Internet-related positions that wouldn’t have existed in the 2000 race: “head blogger,” “national meetup coordinator,” “head of Internet outreach.”

And some of the ideas that have most defined Dean’s online operations - and some of the computer programming behind them - have come not from hired hands, but from volunteers.

“It was really driven from the grass-roots side,” said John A. Miller, 34, a New York volunteer and electrical engineer. “People with technical skills, they were impressed by his message and his delivery and just started doing what they knew how to do, which was technical stuff.”

So Miller and other New York volunteers helped the campaign develop a tool that helped supporters organize their own events without direction from headquarters. Another renegade crew of programmers set up hack4dean

.org, dedicated to helping people set up their own pro-Dean websites. Someone else set up a site that turns Dean icons into iron-on T-shirt decals.

To be sure, the Dean campaign has made use of some already-developed grass-roots tools and paid its share of Internet consultants - including a key player in MoveOn.org, a Democratic political action committee that has organized people in opposition to the impeachment of President Clinton and the war in Iraq. In June, MoveOn.org held an online primary, which Dean won with 44 percent.

But Dean’s “Internetization” has just as often been an unplanned, unruly process for a campaign that didn’t start out with a technical agenda, or even a technically-savvy candidate. (In 2001, the Rutland (Vt.) Herald reported that, according to Dean’s lawyer, the governor didn’t use a computer in his office or have a state e-mail account. Now, as Dean has proved that riding the Internet wave can be effective, rival campaigns are scrambling to catch up. And political consultants are struggling to define exactly why Dean has become the Internet candidate, whether that support can extend beyond a wired core, and if others can reproduce his early success.

Many of Dean’s online supporters appear to be people in their 30s and 40s, people who are familiar with the Internet, aren’t skeptical of the political process, and haven’t taken part in many political campaigns, said Marc Olsten, whose firm in Amherst, Mass., Summit Collaborative, has studied Internet participation.

Many are attracted by the very act of joining like-minded people, Olsten said, and by some of the offshoot groups that have established on the fringe of the campaign. In many cases, he said, “They’re not going to Dean; they’re going to ‘Soccer Moms for Dean.’”

Of course, Dean’s supporters also agree with the basics of his platform. And in some ways, Dean’s agenda came at an opportune time for Internet activism, said Rob Stuart, senior vice president of Advocacy Inc., a Philadelphia-based company that helps groups do grass-roots organizing on the Internet - and is doing some paid consulting for two other Democratic presidential hopefuls, Senator Bob Graham of Florida and Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri.

Dean’s antiwar message spread quickly through an online network that had been set up to oppose the war in Iraq. Before long, word about Dean was also buzzing through the “blogosphere,” a network of individual websites - called blogs - that comment on daily events, link to one another, and attract comments from readers.

Mathew Gross started out as one of those bloggers, posting thoughts about Dean from Moab, Utah, on a popular blog called mydd.com. Early this year, he volunteered to work for the Dean campaign, proposing that the candidate should have a blog of his own.

On March 14, from Burlington headquarters, Gross - now on staff as head blogger - launched the first Dean blog, at deancalltoaction.blogspot.com.

“It was honestly an ugly little thing when it started off,” Gross said. Now, nearly five months later, it has a slicker look, a new name (www.blogforamerica.com), and a central role in the campaign. Gross updates it frequently with news clippings, notes from the trail, and organizational cheerleading, and says it draws 25,000 viewers and about 1,000 postings per day - largely comments about campaign strategy or news reports, as well as questions and suggestions for the campaign staff.

For some, the blog itself - the chance to take an active role - is a part of the campaign’s appeal.

“Before the Internet, if you didn’t live in Iowa or you didn’t live in New Hampshire, you were told to wait,” Gross said. “The message was, send us money and wait, and if you’re lucky, your candidate will still be around by the time you get to vote.”

Over time, the campaign has introduced other tools to help rank-and-file volunteers organize. One website allows people to link up for local canvassing drives by posting events they’re planning or searching for events near them - passing out Dean literature at Boston Common, for example, or manning a Dean station outside a Ziggy Marley concert.

Zephyr Teachout, who runs the website as Dean’s head of Internet outreach, likens the site to “a bulletin board in rural Vermont.” She said it has forced the campaign to shift its own behavior. When a Rhode Island supporter started recruiting people to wear Dean T-shirts at an upcoming environmental event, Teachout said, the campaign didn’t have to be involved.

“In a traditional campaign, it would be a big, belabored decision: Do we do coastal cleanup? How many people will show up?” Teachout said. In this case, the campaign isn’t involved at all, she said.

The website was, in large part, the work of Miller and other New York volunteers - many of them engineers, graphic designers, and programmers - who met in a Lower East Side bar in February, at the first Dean gathering sponsored by the Web company Meetup.com.

Established in January 2002, the company uses online tools to match people who share specific interests with venues where they can gather each month.

“We didn’t create Meetup for political purposes,” spokesman Myles Weissleder said. “We built it for knitters and Elvis fans and pug owners and whatnot.”

Near the start of the year, the company set up events for every presidential candidate, he said. Dean’s have grown the fastest by far. His Dean’s August Meetups, held last Wednesday, broke some of the company’s internal records, drawing 419 individual gatherings (plus 70 more, organized by the campaign itself) and more than 80,000 participants - more, by nearly a factor of 10, than the next-most-popular presidential meetups have drawn.

Lately, the Dean campaign has been working to harness the events. For this month’s gatherings, Meetup coordinator Michael Silberman sent out information packets, instructing Meetup volunteers to hand-write letters in support of Dean to individual New Hampshire voters.

At a health club in Lebanon, N.H., that night, nearly 150 Dean supporters sat with instructions and paper, writing dutifully. Some were 30-something graduate students; some were middle-aged real estate agents; some were seniors with walkers. Many had never gone to the Meetup.com site; they had learned of the event through the Dean website or an ad in a local newspaper or word of mouth.

And for this broader group, less technically-inclined than the original Dean crowd, the new terminology required some adjustment. At one point, a Dean staff member encouraged the crowd to use a new blog for local Dean supporters. A few frustrated hands shot up in the audience, along with somebody’s vexed cry: “What’s a blog?”

Sarah Schweitzer of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, 1. Web developers Jim Brayton (left) and Karl Frisch handle Internet design at Dean for America Headquarters in Burlington, Vt. / AP PHOTO 2. Students working at the Dean for America headquarters in Burlington, Vt., discussed Internet-campaign ideas Thursday. Dean’s online campaign has proved strong and wide-reaching. / GLOBE PHOTO / ALDEN PELLETT

August 11, 2003 | Filed Under Dean, News Mentions 

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