The recent blogosphere discussion about Joe Trippi vs Howard Dean got me reflecting on one of the previous versions of this debate: why dean lost the nomination.
One of the more contrarian and, I believe, inspired analyses came from Dave Winer.
Dave's blog post, which was entitled "Howard Dean Is Not A Soap Bar," basically draws the conclusion that the most fatal error made by the Dean campaign wasn't that it relied too much on the Internet, but that indeed, it didn't rely on it enough. Here, Dave states his diagnosis of DFA and what he believes would have been the cure:
...He did raise a lot of money on the Internet, and that's interesting, for sure, and he taught us so much, and if he had gone all the way, I believe he would have survived the onslaught of CNN, ABC and NBC, who were his real competitors, not the other candidates for the Democratic nomination. Read that sentence again, please. That's the core premise of this piece, and the point that all the analysis so far has missed. His challenge wasn't to get the most votes, because that would inevitably follow, once he won the battle with the television networks, a battle which he failed to even show up for.
What we learned from the Dean campaign
The Dean campaign taught us that you can't use the Internet to launch into a successful television campaign to win primaries. By raising money to run ads you play into the gatekeepers, who for obvious financial reasons, have a lot at stake in the money continuing to flow through their bank accounts. At some point he wouldn't need them. If Dean didn't get it, they did. So they proved that in 2004 at least, they still get a veto on who runs for President.
To Blitzer, Sawyer and Russert, to Viacom, GE, Time-Warner and Disney, Kerry seems safe, but Dean is dangerous, he routes around them, he goes direct. To accept his candidacy would be to accept the end of television-dominated politics. They aren't going to let this happen, any more than the record and movie companies are going to roll over for P2P distribution.
Had Dean fully embraced the Internet the campaign would have helped flow good news and bad about all the candidates. They would have followed Rule 1 for Internet candidates, run a real weblog. Then, when the inevitable smear came from CNN (who protests that the candidate actually had the gall to behave like a human being instead of a soap bar) -- key point -- the voters would have known where to tune to get a variety of viewpoints.
...and here he gives a vision of the future of online campaigning:
I'm an engineer and a writer, and after years of work on content management, editorial interfaces, syndication and desktop tools, delivering a variety of viewpoints to thinking citizens is something we can now engineer. Technologically we're ready to route around the news channels. Had Dean decided to help develop the human network of citizen journalists, providing coverage not just of his campaign, and not just the good spin of his campaign, he might have been able to survive the onslaught of the television networks.
It will eventually happen. Some day, maybe in 2008, we will elect a President who is not subject to the veto of the television networks. In the meantime, the techniques that the Dean campaign could have used are available to any candidate running for local office because the networks don't reach below the national level. The competition there is with local television and local newspapers, which are shrinking rapidly.
In war it's best to zig to the zag of your enemy. In this case, Dean zigged to their zig, and lost. But in doing so, he showed us clearly how to do the zag. The challenge is to find a candidate with the courage to use the new technology to route around the television networks. We know how to do it, the Dean campaign removed all doubt.
What I find so powerful about Dave's thesis is that, beyond its defiance of conventional wisdom, it posits another dialectical framework for understanding the future of our cause: the 'net versus television. Others, obviously, have stated this dialectic before, but I haven't seen it applied in quite this way. Dave essentially says that television, as a centrally controlled medium, has an inherent tendency towards conformity, and a bias in favor of central sources of power and message/news control. Thus, the GOP and the conservative movement, as the current governing party and ethos of the nation, will have a built-in advantage in election competitions conducted principally through the medium of television.
So, any campaign plan for Democrats and believers in social and economic progress (as the current out-of-power and insurgent party) defeating movement conservatism must include a strategy for undermining or "going around" television's dominance as a news and information source.
Dave's basic plan for this is to make "being bloggable" a strategic imperative for campaigns and candidates. Bloggable candidates and campaigns would be people or campaigns interesting enough to fascinate the blogosphere (which as a the new dominant vehicle for net-based news distribution)which will in turn spark the spontaneous and simultaneous political activism (online and offline) that itself makes for great news copy. And because the TV cameras, the tv anchors, the beat reporters, and the columnists, all tend to go where the news is, TV will simply handover its power to the Internet, and correspondingly will undermine the current party of government (the GOP).
Think of it as the Drudge effect.
Anyway, I encourage you to read Dave's piece. It's terrific and though-provoking, and it's a classic in blog political writing.