First of all, this massive flash animation is cool. A bit heavy handed -- man does Dennis sound nutty from time to time; not what he says so much as how he says it -- but very cool nonetheless. And now on to matters of more substance.
There's been a lot of punditry in the past week that my man Howard Dean is peaking as a candidate. With three magazine covers and an efficient high-throughput/small packet fundraising engine, I look at it as "Dean cracking into the mainstream" rather than "Dean peaking." Let's think about it for a second.
It's still real early in the primary cycle. At this point in the 1992 process, Bill Clinton was still a hilbilly lawyer that no one thought stood a chance at anything. This time around the stakes are considerably higher, so it's natural to see things being stepped up. Still, Dean has a lot of room to grow in terms of national name recognition, and in any place where his brand equity is comperable to the other candidates he's in the top tier. He's officially arrived in the lead pack, true, but that's no reason to believe his forward momentum is slowing.
A significant portion of politically-inclined Americans remain interested but steadfastly undecided on their primary candidate of choice. For many Democrats -- those who's involvment generally comes to pulling a lever, if that -- Summer 2003 is far too soon to even begin seriously thinking about making a choice. While you can make a case that most party activists have picked a side, that doesn't mean anyone has peaked.
The exciting thing about Dean is that he's getting a lot of people more involved than they've ever been before. A quarter million signed up to get campaign email, 75,000 attending meetups nation world-wide. Dean talks about getting three or four million new participants in this process, and his campaign is serious about it. That doesn't just mean more voters -- though that's obviously the proof in the pudding. It means more people campaigning, more people having a stake in the process, more people awake and breathing. The internet provides a platform to organize this kind of distributed/decentralized campaigning, and while people would have scoffed at the notion six months ago, the theory is being put into practice with brilliant results.
And here's the kicker: the Dean campaign is just warming up. I know this because I have my hand in a number of pies which aren't quite ready to come out of the oven. Everything you've seen up until now is the work of a simple strategy, a good candidate, a powerful message, and a campaign that knows how to get out of the way. The real magic has yet to begin. There's a massive reservor of grassroots energy steadily growing larger, waiting to be unleashed. The humble beginnings you're starting to see now -- hand-written letters to Iowa and New Hampshire for instance -- are just a taste of what's to come. As meetup gatherings transition in pupose from solidarity to recruiting to action, prepare for a wave of people-powered Dean projects, open to anyone's participation. They'll range from from good-old door knocking to concerts to presence in parades, and they'll be organized without any direct coordination from campaign HQ. They will launch careers and change lives. They will reclaim the dignity of America.
We've got a beautiful scale-free organic network cooking here, and there's no sign that it's slowing down. Every new person who signs on adds exponential power to the system. The only reason people say it's peaking is that they've never seen anything like it. People have been declaring Dean as "peaking" for about two months now. They can't concieve that this new kind of organization, this new kind of spirit, has a chance of supplanting the old hypnosis of the boob tube which has been the hallmark of US Politics for the past 40 years. But it will.
Dean's campaign is offering something truly new: a place at the table for anyone who wants it. Rather than populist rabble-rousing or handing out didactic talking points or attempting to take on the role of strong father/protector, Dean appeals to the angels of our better nature to take a stand in our own lives, a stand for our country, for our future, to get involved as leaders on our own level. Dean's campaign represents an restoration of the American civic spirit; the sort of thing Nader talked about but could never deliver. It is about participation, bi-directional communication and in-person politics, about being a part of what's happening as it happens, because this is the only way it has a chance of happening. It's up to us.
Tune in, turn on, but don't drop out. We're turning this mofo around.
