I have heard all of the pundits, official and not, compare Dean's campaign to a dot-com bust. They are wrong. The dot-com companies were all about the money and the hype and not really about the product (or at least a meaningful product). Dean, my friends, is all about the product.
The product that I am talking about is real change. We are not talking about dot-com hype here. We are talking about an America and a Democratic party who actually represent the people who they are hired to represent. We are talking about an America where one is held responsible for sending 500+ innocent men, woman, and, dare I say children, off to die in an elective War. We are talking about an America where we don't buckle to people who want to kill the progress of the Civil Rights movement, The New Deal, and the Great Society.
That is the product, and Dean was all about that product. This is the Killer App to which I refer. Dean and his supporters were like programmers who created the most efficient, robust, and needless to say bad ass Application in history. It was so good that it intimidated people. I mean he wanted to change this country for the better. That App can't work. It looks like it does everything I want it to do. That can't be true. I must be getting some snake oil here or something.
Then here comes the Microsoft campaigns of John Kerry and John Edwards, who stole all the cool little buttons of Dean's killer App and passed them off as their own. It came in a nice little shrink wrapped box and looked really pretty. Dean's App did everything you would ever want it to do, but it wasn't as pretty. People said, "Hey, we can get the Dean App with pretty buttons. I mean, I like Dean's App, but these buttons are just so pretty." Little did the people know that for a while, you can press these buttons, and it looks like you are going to get the result you want. Little did they know that the Kerry App and the Edwards App were just pretty buttons, but when it really came down to doing what they needed, they got the blue screen of death.
I am sure there are a lot of programmers who will read this. I am sure that you guys all have heard the rumor that there are comments in Microsoft NT's code that say "Property Of Digital Equipment Corporation". Analogously, I am sure there are Kerry and Edwards speeches that say "Paid For By Dean For America". The next time I hear Kerry and Edwards talk about the "special interests" I am going to puke.
So the problem with programmers, like myself, is that they are good at creating something meaningful, but they are not as good at selling it. They all thought, hey, this App rocks, and it speaks for itself. They suck at the selling of it, and the business side of it. The Dean people, myself included, just had a hard time with the focus group "plays well in Preoria" people, which happen to be most of the sheople who vote. We would think that anyone who would go for those pretty hack job Apps were just plain old stupid, and there can't be that many stupid people in the Democratic party. That reminds me of something someone said to Adli Stevenson. They said that every thinking man in America voted for him. He then replied that it was too bad, cause he needed a majority.