I have two thoughts to share, and we can go from there. The first thought is about power, the second about language.

Tom Streeter and I argue in the final chapter of Mousepads, Shoe Leather and Hope that decentralized power is different than decentralized tasks. The internet enables both, but the former increases democracy, whereas the latter increases heirarchical control. The Dean campaign decentralized power; many campaigns have borrowed the tools and innovations from that cycle, but primarily for decentralizing tasks.

Power is decentralized when participants have a meaningful chance to change the structure—what Jonathan Zittrain calls ”generativity.” Power is not decentralized every time a person participates. A supporter can make phone calls, door knock, forward emails, but not be encouraged to strategize on her own; she has little more power than a person sending in a video entry to a Cheerios contest for a new ad campaign. I regularly participate in the newspaper industry by reading papers, but that doesn't give me power to change the structure.

Why should we care? Distributed power leads to distributed responsibility, which is good for a healthy polity.

People who have been involved in political decision-making are more likely to participate intelligently and make good electoral decisions, understanding the challenges, and having insights into character traits that will serve the public good well. They are more likely to think about the public good, having had to justify their positions to others in public language.

We should also care because decentralized communities keep shaking up races; a decentralized candidate will win soon, if not this year. Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul have transformed the Republican race in the last few months; they have the most decentralized campaigns of any I’ve followed. (Neither has a massive online toolkit, notably; both have used the internet to encouraged communities of supporters who do not wait on the campaign’s command to act.)

The second thought is about language. The structure of the political rhetoric of a campaign, or a time, will tell you much about how healthy the democracy is. When most political rhetoric is heard in speeches, the speeches matter; when most political rhetoric is heard in ads, those ads matter; when it is heard and read online (as it is now), the content and structure of the online communications become incredibly important.

The language of the Dean campaign was strong, elegant, and civic; it did not focus on the rhetorical habits of the past generation ("are you better off now than you were…"; "pocketbook issues") but instead put the public, and the idea of a shared public good, at the center of the rhetoric. Even when talking about health care, the language was public and moral. Much of this came from Dean, but a civic language infused the entire campaign.

But it was not just civic, it was lovely. I think that one of the undersung strengths of the Dean campaign—and one reason it was so damn interesting, whatever else it was—is that there happen to have been a great number of extremely good writers on it. Joe Trippi is, among other things, one of the best epic storytellers I’ve ever met.

The book shows off some of the other great writers. Read this from Online Communications Director Matt Gross’s chapter in Mousepads:

This particular winter was a restive one. During the days I would go up onto the mesas north of town, where thumper trucks—the physical manifestation of George Bush’s energy policy—crawled over the bunchgrass and saltbrush and pounded the desert floor, listening for the telltale echo of natural gas deposits on the edges of the national parks. At night I would sit in my office in my half-gentrified duplex next to the trailer park, reading at 56k the news of Bush’s imminent invasion of Iraq. That winter, the larger world—the world of politics and the east and world affairs—had refused to recede, and the silence of the desert had grown maddening.

Or this from Meetup Manager Michael Silberman:

With his head half-cocked, Trippi started drawing circles on the meager whiteboard. He had spent weeks just trying to get someone to put the Meetup button on the homepage of our website, so he sure as hell wasn’t going to let us screw up one of the potentially most important tools to this insurgent campaign. “Okaaaay. This is what traditional campaigns look like. And the military. And broadcast television.” On the whiteboard, Trippi drew the outline of a hierarchical organizational chart—sharp horizontal and vertical lines at ninety degrees that expanded downward like a family tree. “You have the campaign manager, state field directors, county organizers, precinct captains, etc.—all taking orders from above. Nothing happens until someone above them says to jump. Okaaay?” After a typically uncomfortable pause, he pointed to the bulls-eye pattern that he had drawn earlier on the board, while staring at us.

Or this from Email Manager Kelly Nuxoll:

Every day for the final ten days of the quarter the campaign was sending an e-mail to all its supporters, asking them to contribute. In the late afternoon, Trippi would roar out of his office like a bear in springtime, red-eyed and blinking, and dictate a message that was part messianic vision, part exhortation to send money. In Trippi’s vision, the campaign didn’t distinguish between big donors and small. We were all in this campaign together, and the antiwar activists who gave ten bucks would receive the same message as the LGBT-er who had maxed out at $2,000. (Not that Trippi didn’t care about money: I had the impression that if he could have reached through the computer screen, grabbed supporters by their ankles, and shaken them until $2,000 fell out of their pockets, he would have.)

In different ways, all of these writers have a poetic sensibility and attention to language—here narrative, but during the campaign an epic language that permeated the technological efforts. The campaign spoke not with the catch-phrases of movement, but the spirit of it, treating emails more like speeches than like advertisements.

These writers—along with others like Mark Sundeen, Jerome Armstrong, Larry Biddle, Bobby Clark, Joe Rospars, Amanda Michel, frequently inspired by Nicco Mele's in-office poetry recitals—communicated their own sensibilities in thousands of emails and blog posts that millions of people read. Many people read far more of these online communications than they did Dean's speeches.

A public, moral, and somewhat poetic political rhetoric—as much as any technology—was at the heart of the internet campaign. Why do we care? Because as the greeks knew, political rhetoric has a deep impact on the polis, us, the community of people who have come together to make collective decisions.