Prometheus 6

Clay Shirky muses on what it was about what the Dean campaign did right and why it made everyone he had unshakeable support. It's a good read.

I wanted to wait ‘til today’s polls opened to post this, because I wanted it to be a post-mortem and not a vivisection. What follows is a long musing on the Dean campaign’s use of internet tools, but it has a short thesis: the hard thing to explain is not how the Dean campaign blew such a huge lead, but rather why we ever thought that lead actually existed. Dean’s campaign didn’t just fail, it dissolved on contact with reality.

The answer, I think, is that we talked ourselves, but not the voters, into believing. And I think the way the campaign was organized helped inflate and sustain that bubble of belief, right up to the moment that the voters arrived.

Take this as an early entry in a conversation everyone who was watching Dean’s use of the internet should contribute to: what went right? what went wrong? and what to do differently next time? We should do this now because ‘next time’ still includes a passel of primaries and then, most importantly, the general election. If we have the conversation now, we won’t have to wait til the few uncontested House races of 2006 to see if we learned anything.