http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/21/arts/21RICH.html

Napster Runs for President in '04

by Frank Rich


ven after Saddam Hussein was captured last weekend, all that some people
could talk about was Howard Dean. Neither John Kerry nor Joe Lieberman
could resist punctuating their cheers for an American victory with sour
sideswipes at the front-runner they still cannot fathom (or catch up
to). Pundits had a nearly unanimous take on the capture's political
fallout: Dr. Dean, the one-issue candidate tethered to Iraq, was toast —
or, as The Washington Post's Tom Shales memorably put it, "left looking
like a monkey whose organ grinder had run away."


I am not a partisan of Dr. Dean or any other Democratic candidate. I
don't know what will happen on Election Day 2004. But I do know this:
the rise of Howard Dean is not your typical political Cinderella story.
The constant comparisons made between him and George McGovern and Barry
Goldwater — each of whom rode a wave of anger within his party to his
doomed nomination — are facile. Yes, Dr. Dean's followers are angry
about his signature issue, the war. Dr. Dean is marginalized in other
ways as well: a heretofore obscure governor from a tiny state best known
for its left-wing ice cream and gay civil unions, a flip-flopper on some
pivotal issues and something of a hothead. This litany of flaws has been
repeated at every juncture of the campaign this far, just as it is now.
And yet the guy keeps coming back, surprising those in Washington and
his own party who misunderstand the phenomenon and dismiss him.

The elusive piece of this phenomenon is cultural: the Internet. Rather
than compare Dr. Dean to McGovern or Goldwater, it may make more sense
to recall Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. It was not until F.D.R.'s
fireside chats on radio in 1933 that a medium in mass use for years
became a political force. J.F.K. did the same for television, not only
by vanquishing the camera-challenged Richard Nixon during the 1960
debates but by replacing the Eisenhower White House's prerecorded TV
news conferences (which could be cleaned up with editing) with live
broadcasts. Until Kennedy proved otherwise, most of Washington's wise
men thought, as The New York Times columnist James Reston wrote in 1961,
that a spontaneous televised press conference was "the goofiest idea
since the Hula Hoop."

Such has been much of the reaction to the Dean campaign's breakthrough
use of its chosen medium. In Washington, the Internet is still seen
mainly as a high-velocity disseminator of gossip (Drudge) and rabidly
partisan sharpshooting by self-publishing excoriators of the left and
right. When used by campaigns, the Internet becomes a synonym for "the
young," "geeks," "small contributors" and "upper middle class," as if it
were an eccentric electronic cousin to direct-mail fund-raising run by
the acne-prone members of a suburban high school's computer club. In
other words, the political establishment has been blindsided by the
Internet's growing sophistication as a political tool — and therefore
blindsided by the Dean campaign — much as the music industry
establishment was by file sharing and the major movie studios were by
"The Blair Witch Project," the amateurish under-$100,000 movie that
turned viral marketing on the Web into a financial mother lode.

The condescending reaction to the Dean insurgency by television's
political correspondents can be reminiscent of that hilarious party
scene in the movie "Singin' in the Rain," where Hollywood's silent-era
elite greets the advent of talkies with dismissive bafflement. "The
Internet has yet to mature as a political tool," intoned Carl Cameron of
Fox News last summer as he reported that the runner-up group to Dean
supporters on the meetup.com site was witches. "If you want to be a
Deaniac," ABC News's Claire Shipman said this fall, "you've got to know
the lingo," as she dutifully gave her viewers an uninformed definition
of "blogging."

In Washington, the only place in America where HBO's now-canceled "K
Street" aroused histrionic debate, TV remains all. No one knew what to
make of the mixed message sent by Dr. Dean's performance on "Meet the
Press" in June: though the candidate flunked a pop quiz about American
troop strength (just as George W. Bush flunked a pop quiz about world
leaders in 1999), his Internet site broke its previous Sunday record for
contributions by a factor of more than 10. More recently, the dean of
capital journalists, David Broder, dyspeptically wrote that "Dean failed
to dominate any of the Democratic candidate debates." True, but those
few Americans who watched the debates didn't exactly rush to the
candidate who did effortlessly dominate most of them, Al Sharpton. (Mr.
Sharpton's reward for his performance wasn't poll numbers or
contributions but, appropriately enough, a gig as a guest host on
"Saturday Night Live.")

"People don't realize what's happened since 2000," said Joe Trippi, the
Dean campaign manager, when I spoke to him shortly after Al Gore, the
Democrats' would-be technopresident, impulsively crowned Dr. Dean as his
heir. "Since 2000, many more millions have bought a book at Amazon and
held an auction on e-Bay. John McCain's Internet campaign was amazing
three years ago but looks primitive now." The Dean campaign, Mr. Trippi
explained, is "not just people e-mailing each other and chatting in chat
rooms." His campaign has those and more — all served by countless sites,
many of them awash in multi-media, that link the personal (photos
included) to the political as tightly as they link to each other.

They are efficient: type in a ZIP code and you meet Dean-inclined
neighbors. Search tools instantly locate postings on subjects both
practical (a book to give as a present to a Dean supporter?) and
ideological. The official bloggers update the news and spin it as
obsessively as independent bloggers do. To while away an afternoon, go
to the left-hand column of the official blogforamerica.com page and tour
the unofficial sites. On one of three Mormon-centric pages, you can find
the answer to the question "Can Mormons be Democrats?" (Yes, they can,
and yes, they can vote for Howard Dean.) At www.projectdeanlight.com,
volunteers compete at their own expense to outdo each other with slick
Dean commercials.

But the big Dean innovation is to empower passionate supporters to leave
their computer screens entirely to hunt down unwired supporters as well
and to gather together in real time at face-to-face meetings they
organize on their own with no help from (or cost to) the campaign
hierarchy. Meetup.com, the for-profit Web site that the Dean campaign
contracted to facilitate these meetings, didn't even exist until last
year. (It is not to be confused with the symbiotic but more conventional
liberal advocacy and fund-raising site,

MoveOn.org.) Its success is part of the same cultural wave as last
summer's "flash mob" craze (crowds using the Internet to converge at the
same public place at the same time as a prank) and, more substantially,
the spike in real rather than virtual social networks, for dating and
otherwise, through sites like match.com and friendster.com. From Mr.
Trippi's perspective, "The Internet puts back into the campaign what TV
took out — people."

To say that the competing campaigns don't get it is an understatement. A
tough new anti-Dean attack ad has been put up on the campaign's own
site, where it's a magnet for hundreds of thousands of dollars in new
contributions. The twice-divorced Dennis Kucinich's most effective use
of the Web thus far has been to have a public date with the winner of a
"Who Wants to Be a First Lady?" Internet contest. Though others have
caught up with meetup.com, only the Wesley Clark campaign is racing to
mirror Dr. Dean's in most particulars. The other Democratic Web sites
are very 2000, despite all their blogs and other gizmos.

"The term blog is now so ubiquitous everyone has to use it," says the
author Steven Johnson, whose prescient 2001 book "Emergence" is
essential reading for anyone seeking to understand this culture. On some
candidates' sites, he observes, "there is no difference between a blog
and a chronological list of press releases." And the presence of a poll
on a site hardly constitutes interactivity. The underlying principles of
the Dean Internet campaign "are the opposite of a poll," Mr. Johnson
says. Much as thousands of connected techies perfected the Linux
operating system's code through open collaboration, so Dean online
followers collaborate on organizing and perfecting the campaign, their
ideas trickling up from the bottom rather than being superimposed from
national headquarters. (Or at least their campaign ideas trickle up;
policy is still concentrated at the top.) It's almost as if Dr. Dean is
"a system running for president," in Mr. Johnson's view, as opposed to a
person.

In that sense, the candidate is a perfect fit for his chosen medium.
Though his campaign's Internet dependence was initially dictated by
necessity when he had little organization and no money, it still serves
his no-frills personality even when he's the fund-raising champ. Dr.
Dean runs the least personal of campaigns; his wife avoids the stump.
That's a strategy befitting an online, not an on-TV, personality. Dr.
Dean's irascible polemical tone is made for the Web, too. Jonah Peretti,
a new media specialist at Eyebeam, an arts organization in New York,
observes that boldness is to the Internet what F.D.R.'s voice was to
radio and J.F.K.'s image to television: "A moderate message is not the
kind of thing that friends want to e-mail to each other and say, `You
gotta take a look at this!' "

Unlike Al Gore, Dr. Dean doesn't aspire to be hip about computers. "The
Internet is a tool, not a campaign platform," he has rightly said, and
he needn't be a techie any more than pilot his own campaign plane. But
if no tool, however powerful, can make anyone president in itself, it
can smash opponents hard when it draws a ton of cash. Money talks to the
old media and buys its advertising. Dr. Dean's message has already
upstaged the official Democratic party and its presumed rulers, the
Clintons. Thanks to the Supreme Court's upholding of the McCain-Feingold
campaign finance reform, he also holds a strategic advantage over the
Democratic National Committee in fund-raising, at least for now.

Should Dr. Dean actually end up running against President Bush next
year, an utterly asymmetrical battle will be joined. The Bush-Cheney
machine is a centralized hierarchy reflecting its pre-digital C.E.O.
ethos (and the political training of Karl Rove); it is accustomed to
broadcasting to voters from on high rather than drawing most of its
grass-roots power from what bubbles up from insurgents below.

For all sorts of real-world reasons, stretching from Baghdad to Wall
Street, Mr. Bush could squish Dr. Dean like a bug next November. But
just as anything can happen in politics, anything can happen on the
Internet. The music industry thought tough talk, hard-knuckle litigation
and lobbying Congress could stop the forces unleashed by Shawn Fanning,
the teenager behind Napster. Today the record business is in meltdown,
and more Americans use file-sharing software than voted for Mr. Bush in
the last presidential election. The luckiest thing that could happen to
the Dean campaign is that its opponents remain oblivious to recent
digital history and keep focusing on analog analogies to McGovern and
Goldwater instead.

The Bush people are coming late to the digital party, and that's good. Several things have popped up that make us laugh. The Secret Service took away George's cellphone, for eavesdropping concerns. So at least we are spared the spectacle of seeing him poke at buttons cluelessly. Don't think for a minute that rich princes like him or Gore or Kerry have ever operated an ATM or debit card in their life (or carry cash for that matter.)

Also the White House availed themselves of the software options on the .gov website to disallow emails that seem to be multiples. (EFF just won a case against the Forest Service for the same discriminatory practice) The White House website is the hardest site in history to navigate through to leave an opinion.

I think the arrogance of having too much money will rebound against the GOP, as they rely on the tried and true method of television advertising. Indeed the necessity of raising TV money has distorted the job description of a politician. Bush, Edwards, Kerry, Lieberman and Kucinich aren't doing their jobs, running the country. They're too busy out on the campaign trail, hopscotching across the country.

Americans are staying away from the election booth in record numbers, because they are disgusted by TV advertising. The American public quite wisely sees through the deceptive 30-second simplicity of political ads. Therefore, it would only hurt Dean to indulge in same, and hire the usual pollsters and ad agencies.

Joe Trippi the campaign manager has been most forthright in proclaiming his disgust with television. That is heartening. But I fear that the Dean Team will indeed indulge in the practice. Not only are they too underfunded to compete toe-to-toe in a pissing match, they will be diverted from the innovations they have pioneered: outreach, delegating of authority, and "ripple in the pond" organizing.

The Dean Internet Campaign has given hope to people that their vote will count and ideas will get a hearing.

We hope that Trippi's background in venture capital in Silicone Valley will give us a real shot at establishing a candidate that understands Open Communications Policy (A "hands off the internet" protocol if you will)

That is anti-regulatory in its essence; and a corollary belief that one must be extremely carfeul in getting in the pocket of Sumner Redstone, David Geffen, Eisner, Haim Saban etc. Taking Hollywood money automatically means crippling the internet. Look at Clinton, f' Christ's sake.

If nothing else, a Democratic victory would be hasta la vista to Michael Powell.

Moveon.org tipped the scales with the FCC Repeal. They assisted 750,000 phone calls, faxes and emails to Congressional offices. But it wasn't enough. Congress waited until it died down, then let the Powell measure pass through in a budget request. We didn't do enough. Let's pick up the internet cudgel and try try again.

Howard Dean, while interesting, is overrated. He is under fire from his own party for refusing to be a centrist. He is a left wing wacko, who will prove unelectable.
Tomsong states in another post re: Hatch, that a bio should be posted-"biased or not..."
I dont like hatch anymore than you do Tomsong, but Ill bet you screamed with the loudest at Fox news "fair and balanced" liberal fiasco.
This site has become nothing more than a forum for liberals, it has little to do with riaa.
Posts like tomsongs, wherein he foists opinion and allegation as fact have become commonplace.
He happily mentions out of context President Bush AWOL story, yet declines to mention that Dean got an exemption from the draft during the Veitnam war for a disability (bad back)-then promptly went skiing!
Tomsong has shown that he, like many others are merely left wing conspiracy theory kooks, out of touch with the majority. I cannot endorse a government of the minority, and as this site no longer serves as a forum for rational debate or action, I withdraw my support.
To that know me, code in particular-know they have my enduring respect and best wishes.
You may delete this post now, or bash me, or support my view. I will not return to see.

~time flew~

Well thats your choice zeitgheist. I don't exactly agree that it has become a forum for liberals, though their may have been more posts that leaned toward that ideology. As I posted on Code's topic about the upcoming holidays, one great thing about this community is being able to come together and discuss various issues, despite age, background, and mentality.

More liberal posted may simply mean the site is attracted more people who are concerned about issues like anonymity of the internet and the RIAA(and labels). Another large reaons is the upcoming presidential election in 2004.

Now while some posts may have a liberal leaning, I think they have a right to do so if thats how they feel, and others can discuss why or why not they agree with them and bring up other points.

I really don't consider Tom's post to be that liberal. He states that many of the democratic candidates are not utilizing the internet to its full potential. In Dean's case he is, and its a remarkable event thats going on, whether Dean wins the presidency or not. While Dean can be liberal there are other things, as the article has said he flip-flopped on, and if I'm not mistaken he is for gun rights, not stricter management of them.

I don't know you very well, but I think its an unfortunate decision to leave for this. Best of luck on whatever path you choose.

Suikio

Moderates and even those on the Right who care about freedoms belong at this site just as much as the Lefties. Just because "liberals" tend to care more about personal liberties than "conservatives" does not mean there is no such thing as a "libertarian" point of view.

You will probably see more right wing bashing than left wing bashing on this site, but don't run away if you care about these issues just because you get offended by the some-what false political divisions and partisanship. Agree to disagree on things we don't agree about and continue the fight against the RIAA.

I am a big lefty myself, but there are several "liberal" dems I want thrown out of office. (Boxer, Feinstien, etc.)

Shmoo, of Electric Gypsy
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