Zephyr Teachout - Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope: Lessons From the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics

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MOUSEPADS, SHOE LEATHER, AND HOPE

Lessons from the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics

ZEPHYR TEACHOUT AND THOMAS STREETER ET AL.

First published 2008 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2008, Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mousepads, shoe leather, and hope : lessons from the Howard Dean campaign for the future of Internet politics / Zephyr Teachout and Thomas Streeter [et al.].

p. cm. (Media and power)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-59451-484-5 (hc)ISBN 978-1-59451-485-2 (pbk) 1. Internet in political campaignsUnited States. 2. Political campaignsUnited States. 3. InternetPolitical aspects. 4. Dean, Howard, 1948 I. Teachout, Zephyr.

JK2281.M68 2008

324.7'3dc22

2007030211

Designed and Typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.

ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-484-5 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-485-2 (pbk)

Contents

Thomas Streeter

Interview with Howard Dean

Thomas Streeter and Zephyr Teachout

Jerome Armstrong

Zephyr Teachout

Bobby Clark

Aldon Hynes

Mathew Gross

Michael Silberman

Pam Paul

Amanda Michel

Larry Biddle

Nicco Mele

Kelly Nuxoll

Josh Koenig

Zack Exley

Kelly Nuxoll

Araba Sey and Manuel Castells

Zephyr Teachout and Thomas Streeter

Redefining the Possible

Thomas Streeter

Technologies, as a rule, have an effect only in particular contexts. China had both moveable type and gunpowder by roughly A.D. 1050, but those technologies did not begin to have their transformative social effects until four centuries later, in the then-ragged and backward countries of Europe. Efforts to use the Internet for political purposes began at least as early as 1996, but it was not until the Dean campaign seven years later that its potential role in politics became undeniable and profound.

This book is a contribution to understanding the role of the Internet in the Dean campaign in context. The Internet clearly mattered in Howard Deans bid to become the Democratic nominee for U.S. president in 2003 and 2004, but how and why it did so is an as-yet-unsettled question. Many claims have been made, of course. The Internet allowed the Dean campaign to temporarily circumvent the mainstream media, it has been said. Or it was the platform for an entirely new kind of grassroots politics, a kind that will eventually lead to the overthrow of everything. Or it was merely a convenient way for the antiwar left to communicate. Or it was an echo chamber that artificially amplified the importance of an inexperienced candidate among a narrow and computer-obsessed slice of the American electorate, producing a bubble that popped on contact with the first real political contest in Iowa.

This book is intended to help take us beyond such conflicting, glib claims and provide a richer understanding. Some myths do not need a book to correct. A look at the public record will show that Howard Dean is not an extreme left-winger or an angry man or a politician who makes more gaffes than others; these, like the false claim during the 2000 campaign that Al Gore said he invented the Internet, are merely canards, seized upon by reporters struggling to find pegs upon which to hang their narratives during the ideological chaos of a national election conducted through a sound bitedependent media.1 (If one had to summarize Deans speaking style, it might be best described as plainspoken and blunt, in a category with that of Senator John McCain, though Dean has on many occasions given speeches of great rhetorical power, most famously his What I want to know speech of February 2003.) Some other common assumptions about the Dean campaign are dispelled in the pages that follow; some readers might be surprised to learn, for example, that roughly half of the campaigns record-setting fund-raising was offline, or that some of the more innovative ideas for the campaign were inspired by Republican efforts.

Readers who suspect that the Dean campaign was a trivial event might want to begin with our concluding chapter, which describes some of the most significant impacts of the campaign. But perhaps the most important impact is that the Dean campaign shattered the stranglehold of a decades-old system of belief about what is possible in American politics. Its not that the old beliefs are gone; merely that they are now contestable. As of this writing, thinking people of all stripes must admit that there remains a huge chasm of uncertainty around the question of whether a Dean or Dean-styled candidacy in the general election would have led to disaster or triumph. The old system of belief about how to get elected to national office still has many powerful proponents, and the debates and power struggles around this issue within the Democratic Party and elsewhere are fierce and complex. But the fact that this debate is happening at all is new. By that day in December 2003 when Al Gore, a practitioner of the old ways, signaled his conversion by endorsing Howard Dean, a wall in the taken-for-granted underlying assumptions of American politics was breached, and the range of what might be considered realistically possible was enlarged.

Why Tell Stories?

When looking back at moments of dramatic turmoil and change, there is a temptation to try to package events according to the needs of the present, to boil things down into easily digestible bullet points. In so doing, we tend to exaggerate the intentionality of actions that were successful; obscure our mistakes, confusions, and ambivalences; and thereby risk oversimplifying and misunderstanding what really happened. The bullet-point understanding of the Dean campaign is already out there: The 2006 elections were crowded with techniques from the Dean campaign, from blogs to Meetups to personally signed fund-raising e-mails, and as of this writing the 2008 elections looked to be similarly crowded. Yet (with the exception of Ned Lamonts campaign in the Connecticut Democratic primary), few of these efforts had the same surprising, galvanizing effects as the original.

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