Sunday, November 16, 2003

By Maeve Reston, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

BURLINGTON, Vt. -- At the end of a show-stopping week for Howard B. Dean in which he received the endorsement of two powerful unions and became the first Democratic candidate in history to reject public financing, his third-floor headquarters was humming and the phone was ringing so often the receptionist kept running out of lines.

	Online Chart: The Online Campaign

Volunteers were responding to dozens of e-mails from people wanting to help, and a new recruit wandered in the front door to offer his time, in part because he was angry that his brother had been shipped off to Iraq with the 1st Armored Division the day before.

But the real power center of the Dean machine may be a crowded corner several steps from campaign manager Joe Trippi's office, where members of the 10-person Internet team stationed under a sign reading "Mission Control Dean" spout unintelligible chatter about "cookie problems," bandwidth and "simultaneous streams."

Mathew B. Gross, the 31-year old director for Internet operations, scrolled for noteworthy suggestions on the campaign's official blog, an online message board where supporters can talk to one another by posting comments and ideas, as Karl Fischer edited video from Dean's labor endorsement speech so he could put it up on the Web for supporters to watch on "Dean TV."

Jascha A. Franklin-Hodge, the campaign's 24-year old systems administrator, had kicked off his shoes and was speed-dialing Web vendors to ask about getting more bandwidth to handle the Web site's ever increasing traffic.

Webmaster Nicco Mele, 26, was in Washington, D.C., at an Esquire Magazine event celebrating his own appearance in the magazine's "Genius Issue."

And Zephyr Teachout, Dean's Internet outreach director, was sending in updates for the blog from somewhere near Tulsa, Okla., on her 100-city nationwide tour aimed at firing up the supporters, many of whom began organizing for Dean through the Internet.

On the wall above the mission-control corner, someone had stuck up a "Bob Graham for President" bumper sticker and scrawled underneath, "one down, nine to go."

Few dispute that the Dean campaign's shrewd use of the Internet is one of the key factors that has rocketed the former Vermont governor from being a long shot candidate to the front-runner in the Democratic race. Many Internet scholars say that the way the campaign has made it possible for supporters to contribute online, connect with one another locally through "meet-ups" and a service called "Deanlink," while participating in the decision-making process -- such as the recent Internet vote on whether Dean should opt out of public financing -- has transformed political campaigns forever.

"If you think about the arc of development of the Internet in politics, it's now impossible to think that in 2008 any serious candidate won't have the [Deanlink] model, the blog model, the contributions model," said Harrison "Lee" Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which studies the impact of the Internet on family life, communities, and civic and political life. "The Dean campaign has taken Internet politics to a new level."

"If [former Minnesota Gov.] Jesse Ventura was in some ways the person who showed people how a renegade campaign could organize itself with new tools," Rainie added, "and if [Arizona Sen.] John McCain showed how people could do fund raising online, then Howard Dean is showing people how a much more comprehensive Internet package can work for a candidate."

Trippi laughs now about the fact that when Dean was governor of Vermont he was actually the last governor in the nation to get an e-mail address.

"We never tried to fool anybody into thinking [Dean] was some kind of Internet wizard," Trippi said. "He has gone from [saying] 'What's a blog?' to 'I want a blog' to . . . saying 'Hey, can I blog?' "

Back in December and January, Dean kept coming back from the campaign trail telling Trippi that he was frustrated by the amount of energy his campaign was generating and the inability to use it. He kept telling Trippi he wanted to run a "decentralized campaign."

"He didn't realize he was talking about the Internet," Trippi said, "but there were enough of us here [who said], 'Hey, there's already a bunch of people out there that are trying to find out about Dean on the Net, so let's embrace that. . . . The rest is history."

As Trippi and other campaign aides explain it, the success of the campaign's Internet operation and its candidate have become intertwined in a cycle that they hope will catapult Dean to the nomination.

As supporters began to feel more involved in the campaign both online and offline through in-person "meet-ups," the donations began pouring in. The campaign raised $14.8 million last quarter, more than three times that of the other major candidates, and about 50 percent of that money came in through the Web.

Soon Dean had become the most successful fund-raiser of the Democratic candidates. As he shot past other candidates in contributions, he began to look more "electable" to Democratic Party leaders who had once had their doubts that anti-war, fire-breathing candidate from tiny state like Vermont had broad appeal.

The most recent convert is Gerald W. McEntee, president of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, who finally put his union's 1.4 million member muscle behind Dean last week after becoming convinced that Dean's fund raising and grassroots organization, largely fueled through the Web, could propel him to the nomination. And the cycle goes on.

Today, Gross says that when you combine the Internet traffic on the campaign's official blog and its Web site, the Dean sites are getting as many hits as the White House. The campaign of retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark is also on the move in Internet traffic, but despite adapting similar tools for their Web sites -- such as blogs and "get local" tools -- most other candidates lag far behind.

Thousands of supporters have hooked up with other Dean fans in their ZIP code through "Deanlink," where supporters can post their pictures and information. Some joke that "Deanlink" has become a sort of online dating service for supporters. More than 141,000 supporters have now signed up at www.meetup.com for monthly Dean meet-ups in their areas. Clark's campaign, which began as an online draft movement, is the next runner up on the meetup.com site with 44,200 supporters signed up.

At the Dean campaign back in April, about 3,000 people were reading the blog each day. Gross says his internal statistics now show that some 40,000 people read the blog daily. And the Internet team is constantly passing ideas from bloggers on to the policy staff, Gross says.

The campaign slogan, "People Powered Howard," for example, came from a blog comment and when a blogger in California wrote that he had voted to opt out of public financing and added that "the tea is in the harbor," Gross said his comment immediately topped the campaign's press release and went "like lightening out into the Dean universe."

"People made T-shirts and fliers [using that comment]. The grassroots just moves like a grassfire," Gross said. "While [the campaign] creates some of what's happening, we really also serve as a mirror to what the grassroots people are doing. And that, I think, is our strength. It's the notion that 5,000 people are going to come up with better ideas than five people. So how do you get 5,000 people into a room to talk about the campaign? Well, the Internet is really the only effective way you can do that."

Internet scholars, like Rainie at the Pew project, say Dean's success came from merging online interest with traditional methods of campaigning. Hundreds of Dean supporters have organized house parties in communities where access to the Internet is not as prevalent, which is one of the reasons why his supporters bristle at the criticism from the rivals that Dean's base of supporters is limited to well-off, 30-something techies who spend all their time on the Net.

Trippi likes to tell a story about the first Dean rally in Austin, Texas, during the summer, which was announced by sending out e-mails to the 481 people on the campaign's Austin e-mail list.

"We got to the park and there were 3,200 people there," Trippi said. "A 100 people we e-mailed had gotten together and leafletted the entire Latino community, and leafletted every polling place for a municipal election [that was going on]. Four or five days later, there's 3,200 people in a park wanting to see Howard Dean.

"My guess is over two-thirds of them didn't own computers. How did that happen? The Internet."

The bloggers themselves say the Dean campaign has created a vibrant online community that allows them to have a far broader discussion about politics than they could have offline with friends or in their neighborhoods.

"The blog is my source of energy. I'm on it every day checking in," said Darrell L. Lewis, a Democrat from Clear Lake, Iowa, who was one of several dozen bloggers who responded by e-mail within hours to a reporter's questions posted on the blog. "The Internet gives us unprecedented access to the campaign. I've not been bashful in making suggestions either. It amazes [me] how I might suggest we need to improve something and in a matter of days it is done."

"Never before in my life have I been so politically energized as I am now," he added. "At 50 years old, [it] feels like the good [old] days back in college when there was fire in my heart."

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