Reply #20: …self-aware, and capable of reacting to the shifting winds of a political…

[w4rma]

Dean's army goes offline

Aware that the computer-geek vote will not be enough to elect Howard Dean, the front-runner's supporters are fanning out to organize minorities, blue-collar workers and retirees.
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Sept. 9, 2003 | Steve Chaffin, an attorney who is the unofficial coordinator of presidential candidate Howard Dean's campaign in Ohio, has been working in Democratic politics for about 20 years. He doesn't remember ever seeing a candidate attract the kind of people who come to Dean. "They're all intellectuals," Chaffin says. "They're lawyers, doctors, engineers, very creative people."

Chaffin considers this a generally positive thing, but he worries that because Dean has relied greatly on the Web as a campaign tool, the candidate's message has not been widely received by "blue-collar people" and minorities. This concern, which has popped up repeatedly in the media, is shared by many other Dean supporters, including Richard Hoefer, a San Francisco filmmaker who believes that the campaign has been too "blog-centric." Asked if he thinks there's a homogeneity to Dean's base, Hoefer responds, "You mean whitey?"

In June, when he surprised commentators by beating his opponents in the second-quarter fundraising race, it became clear that Howard Dean was using the Internet like no other presidential candidate in history. By building connections with the Web's leading bloggers, the campaign created an online movement around Dean's bid -- and it used the movement to get cash, mainstream media attention, and dominance in the polls. Since then, the Web has been nothing but kind to Dean: The cash has come in faster (the campaign reportedly expects to collect more than $10 million in the third quarter, which ends on Sept. 30), the media has become much more interested, and Dean's poll numbers have skyrocketed.

But is Howard Dean's campaign too wired? Is Dean attracting too many people who hang out on the Web all day -- wealthy, Internet-savvy, mostly white people, including a healthy dose of what the NYT called "the tongue-studded next generation," as the New York Times put it recently -- while failing to win over more traditional Democratic constituencies?

Some Dean supporters are starting to think that's the case. But what's remarkable about Dean's grass-roots organizers is that many already seem to realize that it's time to do something about minority outreach; the connected hive of Dean supporters, held together by blogs and hundreds of Yahoo groups, is, in a sense, self-aware, and capable of reacting to the shifting winds of a political campaign.
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http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/09/09/dean_outreach/index_np.html