Reaping what was sown in 2004

[eridani]

We have a congresswoman from NH who ran using her network of friends that connected while working on Clark's campaign. And one from the midwest (KS?) that started with her network of friends from the Dean campaign. I'm betting that there are far more local campaigns than we will ever hear about whose organizational cores were derived from one of the self-organized campaigns of 2004--Dean, Clark, or Kucinich.

2004 exposed the both the potential and the limitations of the Internet as a tool. Much more experienced and wiser candidate partisans now know that wearing out shoeleather locally is as important as wearing out mousepads. The US News & World Report had a really good analysis (sadly no longer available online) of Kerry's Iowa win, which they attributed to the fact that Kerry focussed on what mattered most--convincing the local Dem leadership (PCOs to district and state chairs) to support him. Dean volunteers and the smaller number of Kucinich volunteers mostly focussed on comparatively clueless process newbies. The Dean volunteers who inundated the state were not talking to the people who knew the local process, and in fact distracted the campaign from talking to the most influential locals.

We all learned a lot. I canvassed for the first time in 35 years, and ran into a great deal of cluelessness and indifference (thus curing myself of the common progressive delusion that people are actually paying attention). I saw that a great deal of building local involvement in local Democratic organizations had to be done or it didn't really matter who I backed for president. And I for sure noticed the difference between what Nader asked of me in 2000 (get me into the presidential debates) and what Kucinich asked of me in 2004 (join my local party organization and talk to my neighbors).

What this all means is that lots of those who participated in the Dean and Kucinich campaigns (Clark had little presence in my state) are now or are becoming the people that national candidates are going to want to talk to in 2008. This year I participated some in the MoveOn phonebank, but only after my local GOTV work had been done. Not only is their interface vastly more useful than it had been in the past (reflecting the growing sophistication of national netroots tools), but all of our local new Dem party members are far more likely to be clued in about what they need to do on the ground.

Something old (shoeleather)
Something new (mousepads)
Something borrowed (more consistent messaging)
And more states will turn blue.