I love reading history books about past elections. It's been about all I've read for the past 2-3 years. Books with titles such as "Dark Horse" on Garfield's 1880 election, "Prejudice and the Old Politics" on the 1928 election, and "Grass Roots" on the NH 1988 primary, and dozens more of obscure books on past elections. So when Zephyr asked me about contributing to one on the Dean campaign, "Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope", I thought it an important collection to gather, and glad to be a part of the effort.

The chapter I wrote, "How a blogger and the Dean campaign discovered each other," details the 2002 to early 2003 moments. In order to write the chapter over last winter, I found myself digging through alot of archived webpages. Some of the stuff I wrote about happening in 2002, like setting up a Dean supporter webpage and showing online polls that favored Dean, seem sort of trivial compared with what is happening now. But I also found myself re-living part of that excitement from that time, when ideas of using the web for politics in a decentralized manner were just breaking out-- the birth of the netroots.

In an early theoretical chapter, there's a section titled "Who and what is the grassroots?" that has this little historical nugget:

The word also signaled that this was not just a campaign of people at their keyboards, but was focused on the very old-fashioned idea of grassroots and face-to-face organizign. The companion tern netroots actually had a relatively short life, used only early in the campaign, and was generally replaced by the term grassroots for the duration of the Dean campaign.

That's true and it strikes me as an important realization of where the Dean campaign was historically, in terms of the internet being a force for electoral action. I'm not trying to differentiate a policy standpoint between the two terms. Action done through the netroots just are an effective use of technology to persue popular grassroots objectives. But I am suggesting that what's used in describing the 'netroots' is something that is much more decentralized than what could structurally work inside a traditional campaign operation, at least for now.

The chapter I wrote, as I commented on above, dealt almost exclusively with the 'netroots' part of the campaign. The experience thereafter, working inside the campaign operation, formed a lot of the opinions that I carried into co-writing "Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics." If you've read the chapter in that book on media consultants, you'll know what I mean. I loved the cool things we did on the internet, but was really frustrated by how traditional the campaign operation was for the most part in dealing with how to spend the massive amount of money we raised in the campaign.

I look at the presidential campaigns of 2008 among the Democrats, and don't see alot of difference in that regard. They all have terrific websites, but the campaigns struggle with how to interact with the netroots excitement for their candidate. It's telling that the real online decentralized action this year hasn't really been with any of the top-tier candidates, but with a maverick, Ron Paul, and a darkhorse, Mike Huckabee. I've always remarked that there's nothing partisan about netroots action, and they've certainly proved it.

Zephyr and I were remarking, via email earlier this month, how striking it was to watch the online operation of Huckabee & Paul, in their similarities with Dean's 2003 operation. Homemade websites on the blogroll and a chaotic blog were a hallmark of the Dean campaign that Huckabee effectively uses to create a community. Fundraising through decentralized support for Ron Paul has broken records. Dean's online operation is the predecessor for these campaigns. It remains to be seen if Paul turns his online money into offline votes, or if Huckabee is able to defeat Romney's skilled offline organization.

There seems to be a sort of correlation between the candidates being outsiders and their having hyper-effective internet operations. I also see a sort of push and pull that is happening during presidential campaigns, and during the primaries and the general elections. After the outsiders either become traditional campaigns or get blown away by the establishment, everyone rallies to their traditional sides, and the general election begins. Everything is subsumed to that battle.

It was only after the general election of 2004, that the use of the term 'netroots' re-emerged. First to describe much of the online push for DNC as chair, then with the online backing of the candidacy of Hackett in the OH-02 race. But the real breakthrough happened with Lamont defeating Lieberman in the Democratic Senate primary. That signaled the arrival of the netroots. But now, as Democrats go through the process of choosing a nominee, it largely seems as if the netroots is on the sidelines, passively engaged for the most part, waiting for a nominee.

There is a real tangible infrastructure being built through netroots support. ActBlue for fundraising, the 50 State blog network, and a progressive blogosphere that now numbers about 120 million page views monthly (guesstimating a correlation of about 10 million individuals). It's immense, and still growing. 80 percent of the population uses the internet, and if you take into account mobile devices, it's even higher. But these population centers are still largely on the outside of the campaign operational reach. How does it get inside?

That's the real lesson I drew from the Dean campaign-- it's going to take a long time. There were campaigns that used television very effectively in the late forties and early fifties, but it wasn't until the sixties that it became firmly established, and the seventies until the last strongholds of the ward operations gave way to mass media campaigns. It's definitely going to be a quicker adoption of using the internet effectively, but it's still going to take a while.

Part of that takes technological adaption. Every campaign has it's operational silos, and that's traditionally carried over into database silos. Getting to the point of sharing info across the whole campaign is a big accomplishment that's still being worked out. Once it does though, we'll see campaigns that are much more decentralized information-gatherers, and as a result, more rich with meaningful data. That will also open up the realization that more data can quickly be gained over the internet than is currently being done through telephone polls and focus groups.

For example, I've went through a process with campaigns (shaking my head) as the campaign gets a baseline poll, crafts messages, focus-group test them, and then cut an ad that's also focus-group tested. It usually takes weeks. That could all be done over the internet in a couple of days, at a savings of tens of thousands of dollars. Sure, it's tactical, but doing things like this opens up a whole different way of thinking-- one that's more open to realizations and opportunities coming out of the blue.

Right now, we seem to be going in reverse in some ways, with the Democratic Presidential campaigns mistakenly viewing the netroots and the online world of Democrats as some sort of interest group, instead of the majority of voters. It's going to ebb and flow like this for a while, as a generational change happens-- as politicans move from reading a print copy of USA Today to reading online. Traditional campaign infrastructures still dominate. In the long run though, the netroots, representing a more open and decentralized interaction with the population, is going to become the central nerve of the successful campaigns. How those campaigns operate is still to be created. Dean's campaign showed the way to start moving in that direction.