Howard Dean blogs on his own blog

From Howard Dean on his own blog today:

The most extraordinary moment for me during the sleepless summer tour, out of alot of extraordinary moments was in Seattle. I looked out over at least 10,000 people, a thick crowd all the way back to the buildings, and for the first time in a long time, I was nervous, not because of the speech, but because I realized that I had a huge responsibility, not just because we might win, but because you are all counting on me.

Now, I really do hope that Howard Dean wins the nomination, and then the Presidential election, for two reasons. One negative: the world cannot afford a second second Bush term, because one term when he was running for re-election was enough; a second term when he’s going to be a lame-duck towards the end (surely nobody thinks that if Bush won a second term Cheney would run for President afterwards) would be a disaster.

And the other positive: of all the candidates running for the Democratic nomination, Howard Dean appears to me to be the one that makes the most sense. He’s harnessing the Internet to create a genuine grassroots movement, bringing people back into politics that had previously given up; he’s not afraid to speak his mind, but will change it if he decides his previous position was wrong; he appears to have his head screwed on, to have thought things through, and can consider issues with a greater degree of complexity than Imperator Bush.

Let’s mention the Internet again. I was dissapointed a while ago that Howard Dean didn’t post to his own blog that much. Nonetheless, his blog has been a great success: it’s the blog of the campaign, not the candidate, and it genuinely brings across the feeling of a team of campaigners working together to make sure that the next President of the United States will be the one who gets the most votes. Sure, it would be nice to hear from the candidate himself, other than transcripts of his stump speeches, but the important thing is the comments - campaign manager Joe Trippi understands this:

We knew [the old blog] was cute (and ugly), but it didn’t have a comment section. We wanted to have a blog where people could comment — where there was interaction, and where we were building a community and a narrative of the campaign.
[…]
The comments section is just such an amazing thing. Little things you never would have thought of: Zephyr [Teachout] came up with the idea of having a poster that was downloadable and printable for each state, with a goal of getting a million of these posters put up — for example, “New Hampshire for Dean” — as a way to get visibility going. We put that up with the links of all fifty states and immediately afterwards, one of the first comments was, “I’m registered to vote, I’m working overseas in London, there’s a lot of American expats here, and you know, you really, I’d love to have an Americans Abroad for Dean poster that I can put up and that my friends overseas can put.” Two minutes later another post comment was, “I’m in Spain, and you guys shouldn’t forget about us, you should do Americans abroad.”

This is my 7th presidential campaign, but in every other campaign, the campaign never would have known that it had screwed up by not just creating the fifty-first sign. It’s a small thing, but within ten minutes we had an “Americans Abroad” poster up with the rest, blogged about it, said, “hey, you’re right, you caught that.” And then right after that, someone posted, “Hey, you know, Puerto Rico’s not a state, but it votes for President of the United States — votes for the nominee — and there’s a lot of us down here, could you make a Puerto Rico for Dean sign?” All this is happening in the space of an hour.

There’s this interaction going on between the campaign and every hole that we haven’t plugged, or thought about. They’re plugging it for us and saying, “Hey, you forgot this, you need one of those,” and we’re building them on the spot and putting them up for everybody to download.

I used to work for a little while for Progeny Linux Systems. I always wondered how could you take that same collaboration that occurs in Linux and open source and apply it here. What would happen if there were a way to do that and engage everybody in a in a presidential campaign?

And now Howard Dean has, in some polls, a 20% lead in New Hampshire in his nearest rival. Conventional wisdom says that, now that his rivals have had a few months to dig for dirt, and he’s the front-runner, he’ll have to face his most serious test (apart from, obviously, the next ones), and it’s now his campaign to lose. They point to other insurgents in the past who have peaked early and then lost. They say that he has to avoid making a major mistake.

Here’s why I think he won’t blunder in a major fashion: because the folk on the comments section of his blog will tell him as soon as he does, and he’ll be able to correct it. The Dean campaign are having a real-time conversation with their supporters and electorate, and they’re doing this so fast, in Internet time, that by the time the media have decided that Dean has blundered, he’s solved the problem and they no longer have a story.

Still, it will be nice to read more Dean blog entries.