I know this bores the hell our of some of you, and I promise to talk about my nonexistant sex life as soon as I think of anything interesting to say, but I came up with a decent distilation of the "Dean Thing" while posting on the ol' Kos during my lunch break today.

There are a lot of people who are political vetrans, but still don't "get" why Dean is the frontrunner. Many of these people live in a world of fear, visions of McGovern dancing in their heads. I try and turn them on to the best of my ability. Here's what popped out today. Consider it a counterpart to my ideas about the candidate himself.

1. The Dean campaign is being run around traditional media. They still pay for ads, but the focus of the campaign is on driving one-to-one interactions. This happens online and offline and includes blogs, letter-writing, door-knocking and a host of other activities. No other campaign has as many volunteer hours to spend or is spending them as effectively.

2. The Dean campaign is being run as a decentralized network and not as a top-down organization. The dominant message from the campaign is "just do it." There is a hierarchy (multiple hierarchies in fact) but that is not the organizational trope that dominates. Without getting into the math of things, networked organizational models allow vastly greater scalability for participation than hierarchies. Greater participation, which equates to better fundraising and most importantly higher voter turnout, is the single most critical factor in outsing Bush from office and maintaining that momentum to get the US and the world back on track. If we get 60% voter turnout, we win.

3. Howard Dean as a candidate represents a novel phenomena in that he seems to be less spin-centric than any mainstram candidate in recent memory. The era of heavy spin began in 1992 with Clinton's campaign and has reached an apotheosis -- almost unadulterated doublespeak -- now with Bush in office. A break from this tradition represents a chance to not only bring the national dialogue closer in line with reality, it also represents the best chance to break through the near-50% approval barrier. You cannot always fight fire with fire, and you can never fight it with fire alone.

4. As a fundraising apparatus, Dean's campaign represents the best chance for fiscal parity with Bush. With point #1 in mind, money still matters hugely in any poltical campaign. No other campaign has as deep a resource pool to draw on or is as thrifty.

5. By capitalizing on a latent capacity among the body politic for social connections (do you have 150 friends? I don't, and I'm pretty connected), the Dean campaign drives itself with a process which is strengthening communities all across the country. This seems critical if we're to beat Bush and maintain the momentum afterwards to freshen up Congress and generally revitalize this American life. If we play by the standard campaign tactics, I believe we're more likely to loose, and even if we win it will be more difficult to maintain energy after the election.