Knight Ridder News Service: The Net President

San Jose Mercury News; Saint Paul Pioneer Press

Presidential Aspirant Howard Dean Seeks to be a Candidate of the Web and by the Web. Support for Dean’s Campaign has Spread Like Wildfire in Chat Rooms and Through Blogs, in Part Because Organizers Understand the Self-Governing Nature of the Internet.

By Dan Gillmor

On July 10, Zephyr Teachout posted a short note on the Weblog for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. She was looking for programmers to help on several projects, one of which would let volunteers around the country create a social network to share their best ideas more efficiently.

She quickly got scores of responses. Members of an unaffiliated group called Hack4Dean, since renamed DeanSpace, were among those who answered the call, and a site she’s calling “Visible Volunteers” is taking shape.

Teachout, 31, heads “Internet outreach” for a campaign that is rewriting some of the rules of politics. Dean’s team isn’t the first to use new media in a national race. However, more than any previous campaign, the people running this one truly get the meaning of the Net.

Earlier this month, the campaign’s home-page headline told of a “Great American Conversation.” It was an apt expression.

What’s happening here is fundamentally different from the politics of the latter 20th century, when choosing our political leaders turned into little more than a television show and voters were nothing more than consumers. If 2004 is the first post-broadcast election, Dean’s campaign has put itself in a strong position.

“Broadcast politics tells people they don’t count,” says Joe Trippi, Dean’s campaign manager. This bottom-up operation, as he terms it, is sending the opposite message.

More than a quarter of a million self-announced supporters later, it seems that people are listening, communicating and participating, using a variety of online tools, from Weblogs to chat boards, to help move the former Vermont governor from an asterisk to a leader. A few examples:

– Dean supporters have used Meetup.com, an online service that helps people organize real-world gatherings, to hold hundreds of organizing meetings — including almost 500 last Wednesday night. More than 80,000 supporters have signed up, about 10 times the number supporting rival presidential candidates.

– Hundreds of online mailing lists, fund-raising sites, Weblogs and support-Dean Web sites have popped up without active involvement by campaign officials.

– Money is pouring in via the Web, with more than $3 million arriving the last week of June as a financial-reporting period ended. In July, the campaign raised more than $500,000 in small Net contributions in just a few days — a counterpoint to a $2,000-per-plate fund-raising luncheon where Vice President Dick Cheney raked in some $300,000.

Such grass-roots efforts show that when everyday people are motivated to act, power and influence can flow from the edges to the middle, not just the other way around.

There’s still a traditional hierarchy at the center of the Dean campaign, at his national headquarters in Burlington, Vt.

But the profound insight of the campaign’s Net-working — which raises huge risks along with opportunities — is in trusting people out at the edge to become the campaign, too.

The campaign tries to give them some additional online tools, but the people out at the edges are not under no one’s orders but their own.

“What’s going on in Austin?” Trippi asks rhetorically. “We don’t have a clue. We’re just assisting.”

Trippi is a self-professed techno-junkie who attended San Jose State University and has close ties to Silicon Valley and the tech industry. He’s also a longtime heavyweight political operative, having worked many local, state and national political campaigns. (I first encountered him in Iowa in 1988, when I was covering U.S. Rep. Richard Gephardt’s first presidential contest and Trippi was deputy campaign manager.)

Serendipity pervades the entire Internet effort. Dean’s blunt style and positions have inspired a remarkable number of regular folks to get involved, frequently using emerging Internet services to self-organize. Trippi and his colleagues noticed the activity early, then encouraged and took advantage of it. Crucially, they haven’t even attempted to control it.

Trippi has assembled a smart, dedicated staff for the online operations. They include Webmaster Nicco Mele, who had been working on technology for several progressive groups in Washington. Karl Frisch moved from California after rejuvenating the state Democratic Party’s once-lifeless Web site.

A lawyer and activist, Teachout started as a field director and had to learn basic hypertext markup language (HTML) when she moved to the Internet outreach job. Now she’s remarkably at home with the arcana of online tools. The campaign’s official blogger, Mathew Gross, is an environmental studies graduate and author who found his way here in part because Trippi, an avid follower of online political discussions, was familiar with his Weblog writing.

The campaign blog itself (www.blogforamerica.com) has drawn some criticism for not reflecting Dean’s own thoughts, except for the rare (and largely unrevealing) times when the candidate posts something.

Dean would be wise to do more blogging himself, to get his thought process out there in ways that other candidates have not. It’s a time-consuming process, of course — presidential candidates have impossible demands on their waking hours.

Still, the campaign blog does reflect the campaign and the personalities of the people who have become vital communicators with the activists and other Americans who want to understand the phenomenon or take part in it.

The campaign’s online supporters have poured in hard work and passion and, for the most part, shown remarkable political savvy.

But not always. As the Washington Post reported last month, the self-proclaimed “Dean Defense Forces” (www .deandefense.org) have urged supporters to e-mail journalists whose coverage is deemed inaccurate or otherwise unworthy.

Reporters who’ve covered Apple Computer know the routine, having been bombarded for years in sometimes organized campaigns to scold us for being insufficiently worshipful of the Macintosh. It’s one thing to be told of a mistake, but another to be harangued by followers of a cause, however well-meaning; they end up harming their own movement.

That’s just one small example of the risks associated with putting such power into the hands of workers who don’t actually work for you.

But the opportunity for Dean outweighs the hazards.

Trippi says it took the confluence of three circumstances to make the self-organizing campaigns possible. First, there was a candidate who energized people. Second, the Net is now mature, with sufficient presence in people’s homes.

Maybe most important, he says, was “understanding how not to kill it” — in other words, how to throttle back on the traditional command-and-control system on which campaigns have operated for so long.

The Dean crew realized that they can’t possibly be an effective clearinghouse for all of the good ideas that are spawned in the grassroots camps. That’s why they asked online for help in creating a database designed to help individuals and groups find each other and draw on each others’ skills.

One is Ka-Ping Yee, a doctorate candidate in computer science at the University of California-Berkeley who’s in Cambridge, Mass., this summer on an internship with IBM. He hopes that the Visible Volunteers site will be “a hub where people can coordinate their activities and turn words into action,” while DeanSpace (www.deanspace.org) will be more about having an enormous conversation.

Ping, as he calls himself, was skeptical about the need to create a social network among volunteers, as Teachout insisted was necessary. “To enable and promote commitment, you have to start with trust,” Ping says. “And trust is tremendously enhanced by the power of human contact.”

In the end, that notion is at the core of Dean’s rise to prominence. His campaign has used the tools of communications and collaboration to assist more human contact, bringing together people who have a cause and want to take it to others.

Will Dean take this all the way to the White House? Who knows, but maybe this kind of conversation can spread into the governing part of the process, not just the electioneering. At the very least, the Dean effort has brought back into the process some people who’d given up, and these tools will inevitably find their way into other campaigns and causes.

“If we win,” says Trippi, “we’ll have done something for democracy.”

Win or lose, they’ve done a lot already.

August 18, 2003 | Filed Under Dean, News Mentions 

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