The following diary was originally posted in December of 2003, when Dean was the presumptive front-runner. The online Dean presence was significantly more organic than the TR and uprate brigades of today. Moreover, the site at that time was around 70% Dean, the rest split between other candidates(I was for Gephardt). I'm posting this diary to show you that what you've seen in the last two months on this site is not new. The difference is that now, the press tends to pick up on our little fights here, and spreads the often toxic messages to the wider public. The discourse here is increasingly vicious, ugly and small.
The Open Threads, Comment Boards and the Diaries have become a Dean Echochamber much like the oft mentioned Beltway Echochamer. Neither is helpful. It will merely lead to stagnation and eventual death. The development of censorship on this board by many individuals is more of a tactic of the despised Republicans than 'real' Democrats.
The value of blogs comes from their creation of an interactive community for people to express their views. That community cannot prosper when dissenting views are immediately shouted down or in most cases automatically rated down.
Kos may do technical work for Dean but I doubt/hope he does not intend this site to be Blog for America II.
The power of the Dean campaign is in its "advance work." They can make themselves look bigger than they are and in doing so recruit people to a winning cause. However, you should keep in mind that there are people, like myself who see some of the behaviour on these boards that frankly are disgusted by what they read.
Below is a fairly tame example:
"Insiders"=those who understand politics? No wonder I support Dean. I guess the insiders are the ones who understand that supporting the war, NCLB, tax cuts, medicare demolition, and the PATRIOT act is actually a route to victory in 2004. As long as you're filibustering those judges, everything else is hunky-dory, right?
"Drinking the kool-aid"? If that's what you think political organizing is, you can go philosophize on the futility of doing anything, in fact the inevitable counter-productivity of human existence, in some Left Bank cafe with your friend Derrida. Meanwhile, the rest of the world gets out of bed in the morning, puts on its shoes, and goes out to earn a living.
President Gore? Not after you nihilists fritter the Democratic party away in an orgy of self-aware champagne-flute-clinking and polite titters. "oh, those lowly Dean neophytes. They have no idea what they're doing." Meanwhile, the Bush-DeLay machine wipes us out.
Nope, we have to win. And you have to 1. shut up, or 2. mimic the party line, as we, the Dean people, dictate. Otherwise, there is no place for you in an America polarized into a Nazi ruling party and a community of oppressed dissidents. Assert your moral purity now, or leave the debate.
Let me propose a pre-emptive stab-in-the-back campaign: if Dean loses, it is because of doubters and pessimists who would rather see their skepticism vindicated than a free country. They write posts like this, and they self-fullfillingly prophesy that 'no southern polticians will want to campaign with Dean' or the like.
Purge the party of all of them, and build our uniting myth around a small community of the 'elect'--those who do not sell out.
There are many regular posters that I respect, Bob Johnson, BriVT, Chris Bowers, Trapper John, DHinMN and many others, however many of the other folks who populate this board act like children. They take the slightest success and talk it up as if its sewn up the election. It will be VERY HARD to beat Bush. They have gotten better at GOTV and field operations than we have and they have a shitload more money to devote to it.
The main problem with grassroots campaigns is that there is not the same control of message AND conduct that accompanies a typical campaign. Anything that the grassroots does that is a success will get credited to the grassroots but anything any member of the grassroots does to fuckup or say the wrong thing reflects on Dean. The Dean "Movement" (really really bad choice of wording BTW, has revolutionary overtones) if measured by this board is wholly out of touch with the rest of the country. That said grassroots campaigns are incredibly important, but only if they are part of a synthesized whole.
Fortunately, Blog for America and the comment boards of DailyKos do not stand as the measure of Dean's support nationally. He has made remarkable in-roads elsewhere (read: SEIU and AFSME) and the strength of his candidacy is a testament.
I should also note that those who speak in messianic terms about Dean (and yes there are a lot, and not just online) scare the shit out of a lot of regular people. You are not seeing anything fundamentally new about Dean except in campaign strategy. He is just as much a politician as all of the others. Perhaps he may seem new to the many people that Dean has brought into the political system because they weren't paying attention before.
Finally, for those who 'despise' the insiders, the DLC, the media, and anyother scapegoat that they can think of for their woes I will offer them another scapegoat: those who don't vote. These folks are merely conforming to a system created by the people who have left it (in many cases causing more to leave).
In other words, quit thinking that the world is out to stop Howard Dean: they are not. Quit blaming whoever comes readily to mind for any reversals. Quit bitching, get off your ass (great for those who are already working for Dean Gephardt or whoever) and do something bigger than yourself. And don't just confine it to working for Dean do something local as well, help a Democrat get elected to your City Council, you State House, etc. because it won't matter if Dean is president and he's got a 50 vote Republican margin in the House and 10 in the Senate. BTW, the 'insiders' that so many of you folks despise are working on this stuff too.
Election 2004 will not be zero-sum. We need to help everybody out even those we disagree with. Always be open to dissenting views or you are just as guilty as GW Bush for you lack of intellectual curiousity.
You know the rest of the story.
Be civil. We came together behind Kerry, but given the one-upsmanship we've seen recently, I think it will be difficult to heal the wounds we daily inflict around here.
Update:
Link to original diary, with its 36 comments, which was a fair amount back then.