Jon Lebkowsky has some interesting things to say about
the Net's role in the Dean campaign and its implications for the future of politics here and abroad:
"Political analysts talk about Dean's success in raising money via the Internet, but they miss the social value of the campaign's clueful Internet strategy. In the past, grassroots presidential campaigns tended to fail because they couldn't compete with established party machinery in reaching enough voters nationwide to win an election. The first grassroots presidential campaign to make at least some use of the Internet was Ross Perot's, and he at least succeeded in influencing the outcome of the national election. ...
"This isn't just about Howard Dean. The relationships and activist communities that emerge from this campaign, the real sense of empowerment, will persist whether Dean wins this particular election or not. And activists everywhere will use these and increasingly better tools to form coalitions, and ordinary citizens will expect and demand increasingly sophisticated platforms for participation in Democratic governance. The genie, as they say, is out of the bottle."
(full disclosure: Jon's a colleague. I still think he's right.)