"The press still hasn't gotten a handle on what Dean's campaign did with the Internet. Dean's ability to quickly raise massive sums of money from average individuals proved that a candidate didn't have to rely on special interest money and corporate fat cats to fund a campaign.
That proved to be a threat to the Democratic Party apparatchiks, who decided the key to electoral success was to not be too liberal so that the big donors wouldn't get rattled. The party's accomplices in the media also saw Dean as a threat. Years from now, folks will study the news coverage of the Dean campaign as a perfect example of how to take down a candidate with relentlessly negative reporting and imagery. ..."
"There was a reason why so many young people flocked to Dean. He offered an alternative to the tepid, clapped-out, Republican-lite offerings of Democratic Leadership Council-approved candidates like John Kerry and Joe Lieberman. And Dean's campaign organization wasn't afraid to be a bottom-up movement that gave his supporters more of a role in running things than any previous campaign.
At first, this was done because Dean had little money. But the people who donated their time and talent helped kick-start a new approach to politics - what some have called an "open source" campaign; a two-way collaboration between the candidate's organization and its supporters where ideas and creativity flow both ways.
The twenty-somethings that came of age in a world of file-sharing, chat rooms, instant messaging, blogs and e-mail have begun to shape the political process to the communication processes they were comfortable with. It's not going to supplant the old ways just yet, but what we saw with Dean was a start.
But none of that would have happened without Dean's message of hope. His campaign wasn't about "rage," as the press kept saying. It was about empowerment. Unfortunately, the Democratic establishment is not interested in empowering voters and did everything it could to make sure Dean failed."
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