(Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!)
After attending my first (and probably last) Thursday evening Harvard weblog
meeting, I think I understand part of the reason why the Dean campaign
imploded.
There was a lot of agonizing over the Dean/Blog “movement” and where it’s heading, but very little introspection
about exactly what went wrong in Iowa and Everything After. Did the press, the DNC, and every other
Establishment Institution assassinate Dean? Yes. Did Dean / Trippi make critical tactical mistakes in murder-suiciding Gephardt? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. AND…
…To me the failure of the Dean Blog movement to translate into actual on-the-ground votes became clear when Rachel and I arrived and not a not
a single one of our fellow bloggers said hello, introduced
himself (“herself” being distinctly outnumbered), or otherwise
acknowledged the fact that we n00bs were there at all. This same group
cavalierly dismissed the blog-unaware as politically unimportant, and
blithely and without irony discussed the problem of the echo chamber. Hello? There’s a real world out there?
No, the bloggers did not bring Dean’s candidacy crashing down. I
wouldn’t give them that much credit. (Seriously, guys, people have a
hard enough time getting involved in politics; do you really think they
are going to get involved in meta-politics?)
But it is clear to me that the gap between politics in the blog o’
sphere and politics in the world the rest of us live in remains a chasm.
Whatever you feel about campaign finance, voters aren’t just products
you can buy with dollars. Raising money through the Web was the
beginning of a movement, not its end.
Blogs will change the world, yet the world will go on as usual.
(And yes, I am still casting my Massachusetts Democratic Party primary ballot for Howard Dean.)
