President Dean? Maybe not. We may not be ready to elect Howard Dean as President of anything, but we should be ready to learn some things from the way he's run his campaign so far. For some of his opponents it may already be too late for that.
It used to be "First in war, first in peace ..." but now it's "first in the polls." That's where Howard Dean has been these last few weeks and the way he runs his campaign has a lot to do with it.
Back in 1968, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota rode a wave of dissatisfaction with America's War in Viet Nam and the energy of thousands of student volunteers to win primaries in New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Oregon and shake up the entire nomination process. Dean's campaign lacks a compelling central issue like the Viet Nam War, but it has a lot of the same energy, mostly because Dean has some tools that Gene McCarthy could only dream of.
It isn't just the net. That's a given now. We've moved beyond using the Web to help organize volunteers the way Jesse Ventura did when he ran for Governor of Minnesota.
It's no longer 2000 when John McCain used the web to raise a million dollars in just 48 hours and develop support that helped him win the New Hampshire primary. We've even moved beyond the 2002 mid-term elections when less than half of the operating campaign Web sites accepted donations.
This time around all the major contenders for the Democratic nomination have Web sites. They all let you make a donation and sign up for email. With the exception of Al Sharpton, they all will let you sign up to be a volunteer, but then his site doesn't offer a candidate biography either.
Dean is using two tools more than any other candidate. One of them is a Web site called meetup.com that was designed to help organize local interest groups so they can have actual, local, physical get-togethers. The other tool goes by the intriguing name of "blog."
"Blog" is short for "Web log." A Web log is a daily diary kept on the Web and filled with links. Only two other candidates, Edwards and Kerry are using this tool at all and their efforts are pallid and controlled compared with Dean's.
The other two have link lists to other sites and blogs, but the lists include only a fraction of the number of links Dean has put together. Kerry, for example, lists 37 links of all types. Dean has 87 blog links alone, plus long lists of links to official and unofficial Web sites.
The style is different, too. Kerry and Edwards give us the usual campaign stuff. There's mostly staff-written material and formal announcements of in-person and media appearances.
Dean has that stuff, too. The writing is more emotional, though, and there are more stories. The stories are about "official" campaign events, and about locally organized meetups. And Dean's blog has more key postings from folks who aren't officially part of the campaign. They're just supporters.
"Just" supporters? It turns out that the real difference between Dean and everybody else is that he treats his supporters like a giant, self-organizing staff of experts. The key to that is giving up control, reversing the great political campaign trend of the last decade or so.
For years the trend has been toward more message discipline and more spin control. Campaign organization has become more centralized and more controlled from the top. Howard Dean is going in the other direction, toward less centralized control and toward more participation.
For years politicians have tried to use their carefully crafted, thoroughly researched and tested messages to help people feel that they were part of something big. Dean has managed to help them feel that way by actually involving them.
The big news story of the past few days has been Dean's decision to forego federal matching campaign funds. Most of the news coverage concentrates on the political context. Dean is the first Democrat to ever decline that money and until recently he was saying he'd accept it. But that's not the real story. The real story is how the decision was made.
Dean made the decision to forego matching funds after hearing from his supporters. They used all the technology resources available to get all the participation they could. The result was a decision where supporters had real input. That's powerful stuff.
Dean is in front right now, but that could change. The race to the White House is a marathon that snakes its way through primaries and conventions to the final day of reckoning. There's a lot that could happen along the way.
Howard Dean's character will be tested. His past will be probed. We'll learn a lot more about him and whether or not we want him to be president. But we already know a couple of things about him.
We know that does stand for some things. His early and articulate opposition to the war in Iraq made him stand out from the crowd. That's what originally drew the supporters that he's used technology to inform and involve.
We also know that he's willing to trust the people in a way we haven't seen in a while. He's used technology to reach out, but also to gather in ideas and energy. Most importantly, he's listened to what his supporters have had to say and made them part of the campaign.
We don't know if Howard Dean will become a historical sidelight, like Eugene McCarthy or if, years from now, we'll see him as running a winning campaign in part by mastering a new technology, the way Kennedy mastered television. We don't know if he'll be like Jimmy Carter, spending all his effort and creativity on an effective outsider campaign for the White House, only be frustrated in the exercise of its power.
We don't know where this campaign will lead, but we can be pretty sure that the way Howard Dean has run his race for the presidential nomination will change political campaigns for a long time.
