How the Internet Invented Howard Dean -Wired

[Rose Siding]

just a few snips>

It is 83 days before the Iowa caucuses, and I'm sitting at a small table on a private jet above Colorado getting a pure dose of Internet religion from Howard Dean. "The Internet community is wondering what its place in the world of politics is," Dean says. "Along comes this campaign to take back the country for ordinary human beings, and the best way you can do that is through the Net. We listen. We pay attention. If I give a speech and the blog people don't like it, next time I change the speech."
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I like Dean's pugnacity, his antiwar stance, and the way he is challenging the timorous leaders of his party. A couple of months ago, before I took this assignment for Wired, I sent him a hundred bucks over the Web. But the Contribute button on Dean's Web page hardly accounts for his dominance. One key to his online popularity is the harmony between his message and the self-image of the Internet community. "A lot of the people on the Net have given up on traditional politics precisely because it was about television and the ballot box, and they had no way to shout back," he says. "What we've given people is a way to shout back, and we listen - they don't even have to shout anymore."
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"We consider it our job to deliver Marin County for Dean," says Katy Butler, a volunteer I talk with at a Seniors for Dean meeting in San Francisco. Under normal circumstances, this would be a worthless contribution. Small, rich, liberal Marin County could hardly matter less. But because the entire Dean system is densely linked, the distant work of all the local groups feeds back into the campaign. Local letters to the editor are copied and sent around by email, graphics and videos are shared among groups, and technical assistance is distributed. A local and national volunteer infrastructure arises with almost no help or supervision.
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The day turns into an endless series of encounters with Dean enthusiasts, and what interests me most is to see at meeting after meeting the speech-making function of the candidate distributed among the participants. The speakers are often diffuse and sometimes sentimental; nonetheless, these are hot political speeches, not support group-style confessions or narrowly personal tales. Accustomed as a I am to the low style of television and talk radio, to the mumbling of recalled California governor Gray Davis and the swaggering of recently installed governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, I am stunned to hear such high-quality mini-rants in the living rooms and restaurants where random Dean supporters have gathered for mutual encouragement and tactical coordination. These are the Dean blogs come to life.

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http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.01/dean.html?pg=2&topic=&topic_set=

[Cha]

1. California! Here they come!

"In terms of real political power, the end-to-end architecture has complex implications. Tactically, the local Dean groups are very powerful. "Ideas from the grass roots don't have to go back up to headquarters to be adopted," says Weinberger. "The Dean campaign instead gives you the tools to instantiate your ideas without involving headquarters." But since none of the grassroots groups are officially tied to the campaign, there is no guarantee of influence over policy. Dean is free to ignore the political wishes of any of these groups, and he often does. In many conversations with Dean supporters, I find them arguing against his positions on guns, on the death penalty, on trade. But other, more important factors bind them strongly. They admire Dean personally, they despise the current administration, and they love the structure of the campaign, which brings them together, gives them an opportunity for political conversation, and offers them the pleasure of collaborative work.'