Dean’s Internet Campaign

Quickly becoming one of the young stories of the election cycle is Howard Dean’s effective use of the internet. Ryan Lizza covers it mentioning how a piece of his was fisked,

Anyone who writes critically about Dean can expect his copy to be chewed up by this army of zealous Dean Internet scribes. When I wrote a piece recently that contained a few paragraphs about Dean, a member of the Dean2004 blog team filed an almost 2,000-word entry slicing my article up into sections with labels such as "true," "false," "inadvertently true," and "foolish." Not content with this, the Dean blogosphere recently established a rapid-reaction team called the Dean Defense Forces (DDF)?an e-mail list of hard-core Dean supporters who swiftly push back with e-mails, letters to the editor, blog entries, and phone calls against anyone spreading anti-Dean sentiments. "When he gets attacked, we’ll respond," pledges the DDF’s organizer, Matthew Singer, a 20-year-old college student in Montana who once blogged about Dean on his own site, Left in the West.

What is interesting about this is how decentralized the system works not even using campaign resources. Two problems come to my mind, though I’m sure Trippi has thought of them. First, fisking (an unfortunate technique in the first place) isn’t likely to make its way into the larger discussion unless the refutations are made readable and accessible to the uninitiated. The rapid responses have to be done in a highly public way to matter. Given many reporters are obviously reading blogs this problem may be solved.

Second, there is a potential downside–what happens when a supporter goes bonkers? Does a campaign want to be associated with someone with difficult positions? I mean, the whole anti-evolution movement amongst wingnuts in the Republican Party doesn’t hurt them, but what about a blogger who writes stuff that doesn’t jibe with the campaign? Does it start to influence those who read it and confuse the separation of views between supporters and candidates?

I raise the issue because Dean’s blog links to me and I was thinking about it during the Santorum dustups. Dean went after Santorum for equating gay relationships with various forms of disturbing relationships including polygamy. I argue that while polygamy is almost always a problem in practice, the essential issue of religious liberty for marriage is the same as for gay marriage. Could this ultimately hurt a candidate?

I doubt it–at least this early in blogging, but I can imagine such issues becoming important in the future.

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