11-23-03

By Edward Cone
News & Record

The secret of Howard Dean's success is that his high-tech campaign is not really about technology.

It's the people, stupid.

The former governor of Vermont has zoomed past his rivals for the Democratic nomination in both opinion polls and fund-raising tallies, and his use of the Internet has been a key factor in his rise. But it's technology with a purpose: connecting people to the campaign in a deep way and empowering them to help the candidate.

For the last six weeks I've been reporting and writing a case study on Dean's use of technology; the article is available at the Baseline magazine Web site (the link is at the bottom of this column). I haven't made up my mind about Dean as a potential president -- to tell the truth, I haven't given it much thought yet -- but no matter how he performs in the primaries, I think he will be remembered for changing the rules of the campaign game.

Clearly, Dean is personally and politically appealing to a lot of people. The Internet isn't going to do much for an otherwise hopeless candidate. But for a viable contender, the Internet can be like Miracle-Gro for the grass roots.

Dean is setting records for fund-raising online, but that's just one part of the story. Just as important, his campaign makes it easy for volunteers to organize locally, to meet with each other face to face, to perform tasks like posting fliers or writing letters to undecided voters, to contribute money, and to maintain something like a conversation with each other and the campaign staff.

What the volunteers are doing isn't revolutionary, but the way they are doing it is new. The essential block-and-tackling of a campaign has been made easy and inexpensive and ubiquitous by means of a handful of simple online tools. With a few clicks of a mouse, anyone can get involved. Months before the first primary, Dean has more than 500,000 people registered with his campaign.

One reason that the technology works so well is that for most people it is close to invisible. When two dozen volunteers showed up in early November for a monthly campaign meeting at the Green Bean caf? on South Elm Street, the fact that the gathering had been organized by a Web service called Meetup was not the point. There was work to be done -- the evening's task was writing personal notes to undecided voters in Iowa.

Across the country, hundreds of other Meetups were taking place. A national network of self-organizing support groups was at work on projects coordinated by the campaign but without direct supervision by headquarters. The incremental cost of each Meetup to the campaign was the price of materials -- paper, stamps, pens -- and shipping.

Meetup's power to bring people together gives national and statewide campaigns a way to operate locally -- to practice retail politics at wholesale scale. Other campaigns are using the service, too, but Dean has more than 140,000 Meetup volunteers already signed up, far more than the other candidates put together. eBay cofounder Pierre Omidyar just invested in the company that provides the service, and its role in future campaigns could be significant. "We want Meetup to become one of the default measures of viability for a candidacy or an issue, along with things like polls and money raised," says Don Means, Meetup's political adviser.

Dean's campaign weblog, Blog for America, is another cheap and easy way of involving people. Visitors see campaign news, organizing information, and media coverage -- and they are free to leave comments on what they read, to converse with the campaign and each other. They can find tools that let them set up blogs of their own, print posters and fliers, and click to Meetup and other organizational applications. Again, most blog visitors know or care little about the technology involved.

To let all this happen -- the unsupervised local meetings, the unmoderated comments on the weblog, the unedited letters to potential voters -- the campaign has to give up a certain amount of control. That seems to come naturally to Dean and to his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, who says his experience in the open-source software business was a model for Dean's campaign strategy. But that kind of openness will present a huge challenge to many candidates and campaign professionals.

The open campaign is built on the understanding that interactivity means more than clicking on an online survey or even giving money on the Web. As practiced by Dean, it is attracting volunteers and donors who have not been politically active in the past. That's good not just for Dean but for the entire political process. The Internet has democratized many things in recent years, from trading stocks to booking airline tickets. Now it is in the process of democratizing democracy.

(My case study on Dean's online campaign can be found at www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,3959,1386051,00.asp)

Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.

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