About five years ago, I made my first ever donation to a political campaign. This was at least partially an effect of having my first ever bank account, and was at least as useful an expenditure as those lots of 1” Joy Division buttons to adorn my messenger bag. The buttons now rest at the bottom of my dish of laundry quarters, but the donation went to fund the most spectacularly imploded frontrunning Democratic campaign of the past 20 years. It’s possible that my youthful dalliance has finally paid dividends, however, in the form of a little idea that has, only this much later, spread its tentacles throughout the party and the country. I’m speaking, of course, about Howard Dean and his50 State Strategy. (If I could fling a curtain aside, I would, but excessive capitalization is the curtain flinging of literature. An impressive Introductory Paragraph, indeed.)
Allow me to make an observation: Barack Obama’s campaign is one of the most fully integrated web-to-street ventures that we’ve seen. Another, equally banal, observation: its foundation was Howard Dean’s 2004 fundraising operation, which brought together small donors via the internet andluncheon meat. Of course, the value of the first part is somewhat debatable. It’s hard to say how many people have used the my.barackobama.com portal to network within the site, or how many have attended events advertised through it. (Although we can at least point to this guy, who has joined what appears to be every possible Obama group, from “Zimbabwean-American Families for Obama” to “Lumberjacks for Obama”. Admittedly, these are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and if there is a Zimbabwean-American Lumberjack Families for Obama group, I would like to speak to you no matter where you are. So call me.)
The second part, however, has an easily quantifiable value, as we have all been told over and over again. In January of this year,$28 million.$45 millionin February. Small-dollar donations, spread out over the larger pool of donors are, to add another voice to the refrain, they key. And that part of it is no different than Dean’s 2004 operation, except that the overall level of online spending has increased consistently since then (to aprojected$232 billion from $142 billion in 2004). Furthermore, if Dean was, as we heard again and again, unable to actually drive youth turnout to vote for him, then Obama has had a much greater ability to do so, especially in the crucial early contest of Iowa.
But Dean’s position as head of the Democratic National Committee has been about much more than youth voter turnout and online fundraising. As I’ve been harping on in this space and as we’ve seen in the past several weeks, Dean’s strategy of contesting every single open seat in the country – as opposed to focusing on the typical “swing” districts – is paying huge dividends with Democratic pickups in Republican seats like IL-14, LA-06, and, most recently, MS-01, which is for Republicans the rough demographic equivalent of the Democratic party losingLos Angeles County. The fact is, without Dean’softenmalignedstrategy, none of these candidates would have received any money nor possessed any infrastructure with which to run in very conservative districts. Furthermore, Dean’s recognition that the party needed younger, more energized, staffers in all parts of the country has bled over into Barack Obama’s campaign, where, as a recentPostarticlementioned
…On the ground, the Obama campaign is being driven by youngsters…Field offices are staffed by 20-somethings who hold positions -- state director, regional field director, field organizer -- that are typically off imits to newcomers to presidential politics.
And indeed with Obama’s campaign readying what is billed as amassive turnout schemefocusing on those same young, newly-minted activists, there may yet be more reason to look at Dean’s sometimes-controversial time at the DNC with something approaching admiration. The Joy Divison buttons, on the other hand, are useless, and I have made peace with that.