Last week I compared the Dean campaign to a dot-com startup; BusinessWeek spun the same theme today:
How did it happen?
Much like the tech titans of the Nineties, the Dean juggernaut fell
victim to its own hubris and gaffes: an unhealthy “burn rate” that
depleted its venture capital, a belief that pouring money into
advertising would create unstoppable momentum, and an unproven product
— the candidate himself — that didn’t live up to the hype.
I would agree in every point except the last. Clinton
White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart is quoted as saying, “But when
people looked underneath the hood, [Dean’s] product wasn’t there.” This
statement not only mischaracterizes Dean’s appeal, but also the dot-com
movement.
When you look at how jobs are being outsourced overseas, at the real
New Economy that Ebay represents, and a myriad other significant and
irreversible changes to our lives that the Internet wrought, you see
that the companies may not have had their acts together, but the
product really was there.
Likewise, Dean was and is the Real Deal for many of us who were
tired of the Clintonian “New Democrats” who were playing the
out-Republican-the-Republicans game. Dean has forced the party back to
its roots. (The very idea that Dean is some sort of radical liberal
simply shows how far to the right the national dialogue — not
necessarily the national sentiment — has swung).
If Dean is the .com startup, John Kerry has been Microsoft in the
way he’s embraced and extended” Dean’s message. Let’s see if his change
of message comes from the heart, or whether he’ll execute the final
step of the Microsoft strategy (extinguish).
