The New York Times really wants Dean to win, it seems, and on Sunday it ran a second big write-up that promotes the Dean campaign in the New York Times Magazine:
***** New York Times December 7, 2003 The Dean Connection By SAMANTHA M. SHAPIRO
. . . For each person who decided to arrive unannounced at the Dean office, dozens more stayed home and appointed themselves director of one unofficial Dean organization or another. There are now 900 unofficial Dean groups. Some of the activities undertaken on behalf of Dean qualify as recognizable politics: people hand out fliers at farmer's markets or attend local Democratic Party meetings. Others take steps of their own invention: they cover their pajamas with stickers that say ''Howard Dean Has a Posse'' and wear them to an art opening, or they organize a squadron to do ''Yoga for Dean.'' They compose original songs in honor of Dean. (About two dozen people have done that; another man wrote a set of 23 limericks.) They marry each other wearing Dean paraphernalia. Overweight supporters create Web pages documenting, in daily dispatches, their efforts to lose 100 pounds in time for Dean's election. One woman, Kelly Jacobs of Hernando, Miss., took it upon herself to travel around the Memphis area for 15 weeks, standing on a single street corner for a week at a time, to promote Dean. I saw a middle-aged man at a garden party in New Hampshire preface a question to Dean by saying he was associated with Howards for Howard. Dean nodded, as if the man had said he was with the AARP.
This national network of people communicates through, and takes inspiration from, the Dean Web log, or blog, where official campaign representatives post messages a few times a day and invite comments from the public. The unofficial campaign interacts daily with the campaign in other ways as well. When Jeff Horwitz, a full-time volunteer, needs help compiling the news articles that make up the staff's daily internal press briefing, he e-mails a request for help to a list of supporters he has never met, asking them to perform Internet news searches at certain times and then e-mail him the results. ''Ten people will volunteer to give me a news summary by 8 a.m.,'' Horwitz explains. ''People in California, which means they have to get up at 4 a.m.'' A number of campaign staffers are in regular contact with Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, 14, who lives in Sitka, Alaska. Growing up on a remote Alaskan island, Kreiss-Tomkins has become especially adept at finding pen pals and online friends, and he now uses that skill on behalf of the Dean campaign, recruiting supporters through the Internet and then sending lists of e-mail addresses to the campaign.
Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, says the campaign's structure is modeled on the Internet, which is organized as a grid, rather than as spokes surrounding a hub. Before joining the campaign, Trippi was on a four-year hiatus from politics, during which he consulted for high-tech companies, and he can be evangelical on the subject of the Internet and its potential to create political change. (A team of Internet theorists -- David Weinberger, Doc Searls, Howard Rheingold -- consults for the campaign.) Trippi likes to say that in the Internet model he has adopted for the campaign, the power lies with the people at ''the edges of the network,'' rather than the center. When people from the unofficial campaign call and ask permission to undertake an activity on behalf of Dean, they are told they don't need permission.
. . . By organizing its national network of Yogis, Howards, Dykes and Disney Employees for Dean, the campaign built an alternative to institutions like the D.L.C. Dean has raised $25 million, mostly through small checks -- the average donation is $77 -- and those checks have placed Dean at the top of the Democratic fund-raising pack.
Dean's opponents have begun to mimic the trappings of his campaign. Many of the Democratic candidates now have blogs. Even President Bush has one, though comments from the public -- an essential element of Dean's blog -- are not allowed. The Dean campaign tracks online contributions with the image of a baseball bat (at one point, the Web site added a new bat for every $1 million raised); shortly after the Dean campaign raised its first million dollars, John Kerry's campaign took up the Web icon of a hammer. But Dean's Internet campaign dwarfs those of his rivals. In the third quarter of 2003, Kerry raised in the vicinity of $1 million online; Dean raised more than $7 million. A typical post on the Kerry blog receives, on average, 18 comments, while Dean blog posts generally receive more than a hundred. The Dean Web site is visited with roughly the same frequency as the White House Web site. . . .
The campaign sees political involvement in the way ''Bowling Alone'' does, as related to participation in civic organizations -- to people getting together socially. People at all levels of the Dean campaign will tell you that its purpose is not just to elect Howard Dean president. Just as significant, they say, the point is to give people something to believe in, and to connect those people to one another. The point is to get them out of their houses and bring them together at barbecues, rallies and voting booths.
Dean supporters do not drive 200 miles through 10 inches of snow -- as John Crabtree, 39, and Craig Fleming, 41, did to attend the November Dean meet-up in Fargo, N.D. -- to see a political candidate or a representative of his staff. They drive that far to see each other.
I attended one meeting of a handful of Dean supporters in the basement of the public library in Hooksett, N.H. It felt as much like a support group as a political rally. As they did at Clay Johnson's meet-up in Atlanta, everyone went around the circle describing what drew them to Dean, usually in very personal language. Bob and Eileen Ehlers haltingly explained the problems their children, in their 20's, have with health insurance, while Tony Evans nodded sympathetically. No one was asked to volunteer at a phone bank, although people were asked to bring their friends into the campaign.
After the meeting ended, everyone lingered in the library to talk. Greg DeMarco, a computer salesman, told me, ''My wife and I have met more people in Hooksett through the campaign than we have living here.'' . . .
[Zephyr] Teachout [32, the campaign's director of Internet organizing], sitting at the very edge of her seat, tells me that ''the revolution,'' as she calls it, has three phases; the first is Howard Dean himself, the second is Meetup.com and the third is the software that Rosen, Johnson and Brooks work with: Get Local, DeanLink, DeanSpace. ''DeanSpace,'' Teachout says, ''is the revolution.'' . . .
Get Local is a program that lets supporters organize local events independent of the campaign. The software allows supporters to contact one another and plan gatherings, as well as download fliers they can customize with phrases like ''Dean, this spud's for you.'' Brooks monitors the efforts, making sure no one inserts bad words on campaign signs or organizes for nefarious purposes. He also composes missives to be fired off to Dean supporters' cellphones.
Teachout recruited Johnson to create DeanLink, a version of Friendster for the Dean campaign. On Friendster, users are able to see friends of friends up to four degrees of separation and read the comments their friends have written about them. DeanLink invites supporters to link to one another in the manner of Friendster -- ''Introduce yourself! Make a new friend'' -- and also to invite friends from outside the campaign to join. DeanLink lets supporters know one another as more than an e-mail address or a name on a mailing list; they can check out one another's photographs and interests online. They can also post flattering comments about other supporters, a move cribbed from Friendster's ''testimonials.'' (Julie Reeve, Johnson's crush from Atlanta, for instance, writes on Johnson's DeanLink page that he is ''fun to work with.'') Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins has about 500 DeanLink pals.
Zack Rosen was a creator of DeanSpace, ''the revolution itself.'' He started the project, originally called Hack for Dean, after reading about Dean on the campaign Web site for 20 minutes. ''I just knew this is the guy,'' Rosen says. He recruited an unpaid team of nearly a hundred programmers, including his friends Neil and Ping, to write software for the campaign that would allow the many disparate, unofficial Dean Web sites to communicate directly with one another and also with the campaign. Typically, to reproduce information from one Web site to another, a user has to cut the information by hand and paste it into each Web site, a laborious process. The software that Zack's group built allows any Dean Web site to reprint another's stories, images and campaign feed automatically, as if they have a collective consciousness. It also will provide a ''dashboard'' for the people in Burlington, where the campaign can track patterns on its unofficial sites and observe which content is most popular.
The effect that Teachout says she hopes the software will create sounds like the experience of being in a tight-knit community: seeing people you know, responding to them, being acknowledged. Teachout speaks about these ideas as if she is reinventing the concept. She says that Meetup.com, is emerging as the ''ritual'' element of the new Dean community. ''It's like church, the central place where people go to get inspired.''
Teachout likes to ''thesaurusize'' words on the computer. Right now, she tells me, she is hard at work looking for a word to replace ''citizen.'' ''It would be a word to describe someone for whom politics is a part of their personal life and social life,'' she says. ''I think I am going to ask the bloggers for suggestions.'' . . .
Rosen, Johnson and Brooks work with headphones on. When they pluck them off or accidentally unplug them, ballads bleed into the quiet office. ''When the human touch is what I need, what I need is you,'' a computer wails one night at 4 a.m. ''Sometimes, when I look deep in your eyes, I swear I can see your soul,'' another computer chimes in. Watching them work from their battered easy chair, I find it impossible to tell if they are gazing at the filmy, pixilated image of a Julie or the face of a new Dean supporter or a line of code; whether the peer-to-peer communication they are struggling with is related to the 2004 election and the fragmentation of American public life, or is something more private. . . .
Samantha M. Shapiro last wrote for the magazine about settlers in Israel.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/magazine/07DEAN.html> *****
Novel "cyber-autonomist" infrastructure effortlessly coopted by the Democratic Party politics. . . .
Critics of the Democratic Party ought to take note of how smart and resilient it is. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>