In 2003, John Kerry announced that he would run for president of the United States and entered the democratic primaries, beating out contenders such as North Carolina Senator John Edwards, and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean.
The campaign internet reach, asides from establishing a campaign website, was pretty limited. On the other hand, the internet created Dean, and is thanked for most of his success during the primaries.
In a 2004 interview with Gary Wolf of Wired, Dean shared his excitement with what he called the internet “community.”
“The Internet community is wondering what its place in the world of politics is,” said Dean. “Along comes this campaign to take back the country for ordinary human beings, and the best way you can do that is through the Net. We listen. We pay attention. If I give a speech and the blog people don’t like it, next time I change the speech.”
The article goes on to explain a toll called Meet Up, which Dean used to further connect with voters.
Meetup is a Web tool for forming social groups. In early 2003, Dean himself was lured to an early New York City meetup where he found more than 300 enthusiastic supporters waiting to greet him. Meetup quickly became the engine of Dean’s Internet campaign. Back then, the leading group on the site was a club for witches. Zephyr Teachout, Dean’s director of Internet outreach, describes sitting across from campaign manager Joe Trippi in the early weeks and hitting Refresh again and again on her Web browser. “I was obsessed with beating Witches,” she says. “Witches had 15,000 members, and we had 3,000. I wanted first place.”
While Kerry was able to snag the democratic nomination from Dean, what he wasn’t able to capture was his web-debonair.
The use of Kerry’s blog – which was at times dry, voiceless and boring, was teared to pieces by Maureen Dowd, in a her New York Times OP-Ed titled, “Blah Blah Blog.”
“It could be amusing if the pols posted unblushing, unedited diaries of what they were really thinking, as real bloggers do. John Kerry would mutter about that hot-dog Dean stealing his New England base, and Dr. Dean would growl about that wimp Kerry aping all his Internet gimmicks.” said Dowd. “But no such luck.”
Dowd went on to criticize Kerry’s blog calling it “cheesy,” and bashing the presidential hopeful for assigning staff members to write posts for him, instead of having him do it himself.
Dr. Dean doesn’t deign to write his blog, either, but at least it’s fun. Matthew Gross, the Dean campaign’s ”head blogger” or ”blogmaster” — who got his job by blogging and who now writes most of the Dean virtual entries — calls blogs the new town hall meetings. ”They’ve revolutionized the way campaigns are run,” he says. ”It creates an equality among everybody. People are hungry for the old-fashioned discussion and debate.”
Long and text heavy, the campaign blog looks more like an itinerary than a dialogue
History, like bad decisions, are easy to judge in hindsight. While currently, going back and seeing so much words (and no animated GIFs!) and not even a comment system in place shows the limitations the Kerry campaign bestowed upon itself. Unlike Dean’s team, who used their blog as a means to provide feedback from voters, Kerry used it as another means to shove his talking points down voters throats.
