Permit me to indulge in a bit of timely nostalgia: Two years ago to this very day, on a chilly (but not bitter) winter night, fifteen New Yorkers of all stripes crowded into a
tiny bar in lower Manhattan for the very,
very first Dean meetup ever. Perhaps a couple of hundred other Americans were doing the same thing in different spots around the country.
We were from Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan; we were young and not so young; we were black, white and Asian; we were gay, we were straight - in other words, we were a quintessentially New York crowd. And above all, we were excited about this guy named Howard Dean, who was running for president and saying the kind of things we had all been longing to hear.
Our enthusiasm, though, was tempered a bit by our uncertainty. No one had heard a peep from the campaign (which had only posted a link to Meetup.com on its website a few days earlier - quite some time after Jerome Armstrong first started promoting it at MyDD). Meetup (the company) had also never done political gatherings before, so they were not in a position to offer much guidance, either.
What struck me most - what surprised me most - was that I alone among this group had previously worked on a political campaign. Fourteen other people who had never been directly involved in politics before were showing up to help a guy who was at 1% in the polls. It was really quite remarkable, and it pointed to one of the Dean campaign's greatest strengths and most lasting legacies: Howard Dean helped bring legions of new people into the political process. And it started on Day One.
Looking back, on that night New York for Dean was born, I see that a number of ideas that we came up with on our own were later implemented on a broad scale: Yahoo groups, individual group websites, DVD handouts. And if you take a look at this report I filed with the original Dean Nation blog the next day, you'll see that the guys out in Portland, Oregon were thinking the same things. It's as though the nascent netroots already had an intuitive sense about what direction things should take.
On that night, I admit I never imagined Howard Dean had a real shot - I never imagined he would get even a fraction as far as he did. But he did, and we all know the role we in the netroots played in getting him there. As Dean comes full circle and gets ready to assume the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, I'll never forget that he was truly People-Powered Howard from the very start - and I am sure he will not, either. The spirit that was kindled at those very first meetups lives on and now will only grow stronger.
I can't wait to see what the future holds.