Manchester Union Leader - Dean is Rewriting Campaign Rule Book

[helleborient]

Read this article and you will understand exactly why many of us are so excited about this campaign - the empowerment and the involvement of ordinary people! Thank you Howard Dean and Joe Trippi!

http://www.theunionleader.com/prez_show.html?article=28818

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Excerpts...

"Simply, Howard Dean is running the most radical campaign in a generation. The former Vermont governor's political team is reinventing how campaigns are run, rejecting a decadelong trend toward near-Orwellian campaign centralization (which has reached its apotheosis in the Bush administration) and trading that control for a more energized group of supporters."


"Not wanting to suffer a similar fate, and admiring how successful the Bush team was, the Clinton campaign - as both Democratic and Republican campaigns have done since - put a premium on research. Facts became the offensive and defensive weapons of choice. Scores of young operatives now have cut their teeth poring over pages of the Congressional Record, digging in statehouse archives and tracking their opponents' every move. What's more, they are acutely aware that the other side is doing the same thing to them, adding a layer of caution to every step."


"As a result of this desire to be "on-message," campaigns are run from the top down. The campaign's senior staff spends hours making sure that the allied groups, surrogates and satellite offices are reading from the same script. The Clinton team took this a step further by setting up a "war room" in Little Rock, Ark., to quickly respond to incoming charges and to coordinate the daily dose of the campaign's message. In this world, dissent from the plan is a distraction not to be tolerated, and the war room is the enforcer.

Dean has a message, and undoubtedly has a staff of researchers combing through Sen. John Kerry's voting record and every word ever published about retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark. But the Dean campaign has rejected this top-down model of rigid message discipline and replaced it with a model that uses the Internet to empower its supporters with a huge degree of freedom."


"While thousands of supporters of campaigns from Clinton '92 to Bush '04 had the heady feeling of being part of something larger than themselves, the Dean operation has offered them more. It has been able to use the Internet to enable its supporters to take an active role in the campaign - a luxury once reserved at this stage to voters only in Iowa and New Hampshire and political junkies willing to move there."

[Cha]

1. It's so wonderful to be a part of

"this radical campaign"...especially after the last 3 years of the bushcoup and the radical decline in our Democracy.