TPM Cafe Book Club....books about the legacy of the Dean campaign.

[madfloridian]

There are two books recently out about various aspects for our party about the campaign and what it meant. It is rather moving to read the posts this week, as it is the first week I have actually come to the realization...or perhaps the first time I have admitted it to myself...that we really might not "have the power" to change things after all.

I really did believe it, and only recently am I seeing that the phrase Howard Dean used might not be true for many many years to come. He said "You have the power". You can change things, he said, not me.

I told a person who called from the DSCC tonight that same thing. She sounded rather wistful, and said she agreed. That we might not have the power after all. That it lies elsewhere for now. We both agreed that the people could eventually bring change by demanding it and not accepting the old way of compliance with the GOP ideals. But not right now.

Here is the link to the various posts by people who have contributed to the two books.

This Week: The Legacy of the Dean Campaign

TPM Book Club

Welcome to TPMCafe's Book Club table. This week we're hosting a discussion on Garrett M. Graff's new book, The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House, and Zephyr Teachout and Thomas Streeter's Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope: Lessons from the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics.

Zephyr Teachout was first to post.

Reflections on Power and Language in Internet Campaigns

Tom Streeter and I argue in the final chapter of Mousepads, Shoe Leather and Hope that decentralized power is different than decentralized tasks. The internet enables both, but the former increases democracy, whereas the latter increases heirarchical control. The Dean campaign decentralized power; many campaigns have borrowed the tools and innovations from that cycle, but primarily for decentralizing tasks.

Zephyr also mentioned the "language" of the campaign in addition to the decentralization.

The language of the Dean campaign was strong, elegant, and civic; it did not focus on the rhetorical habits of the past generation ("are you better off now than you were…"; "pocketbook issues") but instead put the public, and the idea of a shared public good, at the center of the rhetoric. Even when talking about health care, the language was public and moral. Much of this came from Dean, but a civic language infused the entire campaign.

Aldon Hynes, Jerome Armstrong, Garrett Graff have written posts as well. Aldon says the most important lesson was this.

My experience of the Dean campaign was that everyone believed what Gov. Dean said when he told us volunteers, “The biggest lie people like me tell people like you, is that if you vote for me, I’ll solve all your problems. The truth is You Have The Power.”

I thought Tom Swan's post was great today. He was aka Swanny on the Lamont campaign.

Looking Forward: Prospects for Carrying on the Legacies of the Dean and Lamont Campaigns

It is difficult to write about the legacy of the Dean campaign because the forces that catapulted that campaign are still actively trying to change the public discourse and it will be years before the real impact can be measured. It should be noted that much of the leadership of the Lamont campaign was active in Connecticut on the Dean campaign and had even spent some time in New Hampshire for the primary.

The Dean and Lamont campaigns in many ways were closer to movements than any other recent consultant driven political campaigns I can think of. They challenged political orthodoxies, threatened Washington insiders, and provided hope and opportunities to be involved for thousands of people at the grassroots level in a personalized way.

The campaigns were a visible part a larger change in American politics. We were blessed with candidates that had the courage to take significant risks and were willing to speak out against George Bush’s illegal war in Iraq, but the candidacies were only a part of the change.

Here is the website they set up for Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope, with excerpts and articles.

I have felt I could make a difference and help fix conditions in the party that allowed us to drive this country into a war of pre-emption with no end. I finally, after watching Congress at work, after watching the so-called strategists say meaningless things on TV...realize that perhaps I no longer believed what I believed in 2004.

I believed that we had to stay steady and hang in there, donate to the party and vote loyally...that we would make a difference.

I am trying to still trust, but it appears lately there is an agenda already pre-set that doesn't need us and in fact finds the netroots rather cumbersome to have hanging around.

I hope I am wrong.

[madfloridian]

1. Interesting comment from Jerome....

"as the campaign gets a baseline poll, crafts messages, focus-group test them, and then cut an ad that's also focus-group tested. It usually takes weeks. That could all be done over the internet in a couple of days, at a savings of tens of thousands of dollars. Sure, it's tactical, but doing things like this opens up a whole different way of thinking-- one that's more open to realizations and opportunities coming out of the blue.

Right now, we seem to be going in reverse in some ways, with the Democratic Presidential campaigns mistakenly viewing the netroots and the online world of Democrats as some sort of interest group, instead of the majority of voters. It's going to ebb and flow like this for a while, as a generational change happens-- as politicans move from reading a print copy of USA Today to reading online. Traditional campaign infrastructures still dominate. In the long run though, the netroots, representing a more open and decentralized interaction with the population, is going to become the central nerve of the successful campaigns. How those campaigns operate is still to be created. Dean's campaign showed the way to start moving in that direction."

Doing campaigns the netroots way

[PassingFair]

2. Putting this one on my must read list.

I certainly don't feel the same way about any
of today's candidates.

:(

[madfloridian]

3. I know what you mean. I found a picture of some of these folks.

at a reunion at the ACME conference in Burlington in 2006.



In their first re-union since the 2004 election, key staffers of the Howard Dean presidential campaign pose after a panel-discussion at Action Coalition for Media Education biennial summit in Burlington, Vt., Oct. 6-8, 2006. From left: Kate O'Connor, Tom Huges, Amanda Michel, Aldon Hynes and Zephyr Teachout. See: acme2006.wordpress.com/

[killbotfactory]

4. I supported Dean last time

I was completely demoralized after the "Dean Scream". The way the media handled that was completely unfair and absolutely insane. If Dean had just lost fair and square without all that nonsense thrown at him I would have felt much better about the entire process, but they were so obviously trying to destroy his campaign, I couldn't believe it. The worst part is that so long as that kind of treatment is directed at rivals in the campaign, only the supporters of the candidate care, and everyone else dismisses them as sore losers or whatever. The problem is that they will turn that kind of smear machine against anyone they want. No one is safe. Free and open discussion about these issues on the internet and across blogs blunts the impact and power of the media conglomerates and whichever agenda they are pushing at the time. According to the media, an anti-war candidate simply wasn't viable, and even in this race there is only one candidate who opposed the war, who has any ground organization worth mentioning. Only one. And he has a more progressive record, and most importantly, twenty years experience organizing and empowering ordinary people. Something that Dean lacked and which ended up destroying his chances once the media turned their guns on him. It didn't help that Trippi pissed away money on advertisements he stood to profit from.

After that loss, and the "loss" of Kerry in the general, I had pretty much written off our democracy. The deck is stacked so thoroughly against anyone who threatens the corrupt power structure in this country, it's demoralizing and seems like a juggernaut ordinary people are powerless to stop. It makes it easy to give up, but that's no excuse. Dean didn't give up, he took over the DNC and got us to move away from the DLC fear-mongering insider jackasses, and , like magic, we started winning elections again. I just hope we are smart enough to continue the trend, and not succumb to the insider DLCers nonsense, which is really just a more polite way of saying "vote for the status quo or you're all going to die".

[PassingFair]

5. I am trying not to lose heart, too.

Waiting for Dr. Dean's next move.

His doggedness inspires me to keep giving to
politicians like Russ Feingold and Henry Waxman.

Jan Schakowsky, Pete Stark, etc. Chris Dodd (even though
he IS DLC, good behavior IS good behavior)got a
Christmas present this week....

I stopped giving to the DNC, and it broke my heart,
but I can't support the democrats at large anymore.

Individual progressives only, and locals.

Until we can elbow the DLC out of the way, there's no
point in supporting the party as a whole, when they
will use it to support pre-picked corporate candidates.

:cry:

[madfloridian]

6. Trouble is, he's paying salaries for the state directors.

Money not given to the DNC means that the program in the states will suffer.

But I am to the point that none of it matters.

The program has seen results many times, but without donations from regular people it could suffer.

[madfloridian]

7. I wonder what's changed between this comment by Dean in 2005

and now? I read it quoted somewhere and remembered how it made me feel he would continue to speak up.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/politics/30dems.html

SNIP..."And Dr. Dean, signaling again that he might not be a go-along, get-along party chairman if elected, noted disapprovingly that Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader, had said he would support making Justice Antonin Scalia chief justice if President Bush nominated him.

"I don't think that's where most Democrats are," Dr. Dean said. "I sympathized with him, because many times in the campaign I said a few things like that without thinking through the implications of what I was saying."

Something is going on in the DC circles. They either really believe they are acting in a winning way.....or they just plain scared to speak out.

Dean now always agrees with the congressional leaders. I won't guess at the motives for it.

But that 2005 statement gave me hope for change.

[ellisonz]

8. Well there are limits...

...to what can be done.

:(

[madfloridian]

9. Zack Exley has added a post to this collective effort at the TPM Book Club.

http://bookclub.tpmcafe.com/blog/bookclub/2007/dec/21/no_more_internet_people

"Today, field operatives who cut their teeth in the Dean campaign are running, or playing huge roles in, several of the most important early primary and caucus campaigns for the top Democratic candidates. The way all field operatives in this campaign season work has been completely transformed by forces that were first unleashed in the Dean campaign.

Zephyr and other writers in this series have picked apart the subtleties of distributed tasks vs. distributed power and other philosophical questions. Those are important subjects. But I'd like to step back and recognize a fundamental development that first appeared in the Dean campaign that has helped to change everything about campaigns: the simple expectation that one should be able to get involved in a campaign by signing up or searching for events online"