Abstract

The Deaning of America

Does "Dean for America" have a second act? That's the question a lot of people have been asking after the collapse of Howard Dean's presidential campaign. "We all felt the muscle flex of this new progressive movement and were stunned by it," Nicco Mele, Dean's webmaster, told me recently at the Politics Online conference at George Washington University. "Everybody wants to carry that forward." But no one knows exactly how. Maverick populist candidacies always generate important ripple effects--like the many black mayors elected in the wake of Jesse Jackson's 1988 run. But it's awfully hard to bottle political lightning. But this time, there's a new ingredient: the Internet and all the capacities for bottom-up and lateral networking it offers. "The people have it in their brains that they can organize themselves." Not only that; both by design and by accident, Dean's core staff really did share a lot of power with their base. Thus, to glimpse where all this goes next, you have to look beyond the efforts of a few leaders and wade through a sea of Dean-inspired activist networks that are basically hubs of independent Democratic activism. If anything, the biggest problem for these post-Dean ripples is coordinating their efforts without a strong center guiding them. There's evidence that Dean has inspired a wave of new aspirants to public office. This suggests that worrying about the lack of a strong center may not matter, as emergent self-activating and self-organizing people may find equally valid ways to knit themselves together.