Clay Shirky is renowned for his knowledge of network effects, and has applied it to an analysis of the Dean campaign and it's fall. It's an excellent analysis yet it fails terribly to explain the loss and does so for the very same reasons that he claims to have undermined Howard Dean.
http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/02/03/exiting_deanspace.php
Shirky's main premise is that the Dean campaign fooled itself by turning the race into an internet-centric event; a techie movement instead of the feet-on-the-pavement political campaign that it should have been. He faults the campaign for failing to reach beyond the insular world of the web and reaching the real target - the voters.
But I have to ask, how much time did Shirky spend knocking on doors himself? How many times did he set up a table downtown and pass out literature and engage passersby in political discussion? How many party functions did he attend where he discussed the political wishes of the electorate? Did Clay do exit polling after the primary to evaluate the motivations of the voters?
Well I and tens of thousands of Dean supporters did, and from what Shirky wrote I'd wager that he didn't do any of these things. Yet for all his criticism of the Dean campaigns internalized focus on the internet and of its lack of "real" outreach, he contents himself to sit in front of his keyboard and judge the campaign based entirely, as far as I can tell, on his view of events from the narrow perspective of his computer. This isn't objective analysis - it's projection.
From here in the trenches, I see his analysis as little more than naval-gazing fluff. Contrary to the opinions he has formed by reading websites and watching big media, our internet effort was only the tip of the campaign iceberg: We devoted by far the bulk of our labors on the ordinary and traditional campaign strategies and tactics and in person-to-person outreach.
Furthermore, neither Howard Dean nor his supporters ever considered this to be an internet based campaign. This was a fiction pushed forward by an army of lazy reporters who never bothered to look at the ground war being conducted. We would be holding a mass meeting of Dean supporters and the reporters would troop in to cover it and all they could ask about was the internet aspects of the campaign. No matter that the room was filled with real, live people, the story in the paper the next day would be all about the "internet campaign."
Shirky's focus on the failure of the campaign to capture real voters is also off-kilter. Our campaign was hugely successful until about the middle of December, when the tone in big media turned negative against Dean - a turn documented by media watchdog organizations. The timing of this twist was suspiciously cooincident with Deans comments about re-regulating the media conglomerates. Consider this tin-foil hat thinking if you like but I saw it quite clearly.
If you look at the polls in the months leading up to the Iowa caucus, you will see that the more that Dean campaigned, the better his favorable/unfavorable ratio became. Just before New Hampshire, that ratio stood at an unbelievable 74/9. This wasn't based on internet statistics, but from major polling sources. Following the Iowa caucus, these numbers dissolved in what could only be termed a flood of negative media - since nothing else changed.
Our state's exit polling told one overwhelmingly consistent story:
Q: Who did you vote for?
A: John Kerry
Q: Why did you vote for Kerry?
A: Because he has a better chance of beating George Bush.
Q: What makes you think that?
A: That's what everybody is saying.
Q: Who is "everybody."
A: Why, it's all over the news.
The only lessons I can draw from this is that big media has the power to break a candidate and that voters did not pay attention to the race until the last minute - when the momentum had suddenly shifted to Kerry. It says nothing at all about the internet as a campaign tool or Dean's use of it. True, the campaign made some mistakes but even taken together those mistakes were insufficient to explain the last minute break in the polls.
For Clay Shirky or anyone else to critique the Dean campaign as a failure of internet based politics based on what was said over the web or on the nightly news is foolishly naive, totally self-serving and highly innacurate.
If the internet contributed to Dean's loss it was because too many of the same people that are now rocked back in their easy chairs commenting about the Dean campaigns problems didn't get off their asses and get involved. If they had, the post-mortems would make some sense.
You know who you are.