There are so many post-mortems of the Dean campaign. I’m going to
save most of my thoughts for awhile, for a few reasons.
First, the campaign was in many ways a victim of its own bad management
and divisive internal politics, generated by the senior-most leaders of
the campaign fighting with each other.
There is no reason to dwell on the puts and takes of these struggles,
except to say that some of the most damaging problems facing the
campaign had nothing to do with the inherent strengths and weaknesses
of the strategy or of the campaign’s use of technology and the net.
Second, much of what we learned from inside the campaign is of
strategic interest to other campaigns. Most of this knowledge
needs to stay secret until the first Tuesday in November.
Our nation is in the early stages of the presidential election—a
revolution, we hope, that removes George Bush. Those inside the
web team of the Dean campaign had a pretty good vantage point from
which to tell what was working and not working—and were blessed with an
unparalleled national community political laboratory within which to
experiment. Much of what we learned will be taken into other
campaigns in the coming days and weeks.
My academic writing on this subject will appear after the election.
Third, there is much that we don’t yet understand about social change
and the web. There are numerous open strategic questions among
those who are most deeply involved in web politics. There is a
next generation of experiments to be carried out—at web-speed—starting
later today.
BTW, see you at the Thurday night club tonight.
