If you’re happy about President Obama, thank Howard Dean.
He was the pioneer of the fundraising strategy Obama perfected, and of the 50 state strategy Obama used. Give the man his due.
But Dean was resolute in forcing Democrats to compete in states they’d written off before, sending money and organizers around the country to help build up state and local parties. That helped Democrats win special elections in places like Louisiana and Mississippi this year, and helped pave the way for Obama’s far more aggressive (and better-funded) grass-roots organization in nontraditional battleground states this fall. The DNC began sharing data on voters and demographics with state and local branches, as well; though it was never as granular as what Obama’s campaign put together, it made a difference. “Having a resource within the party to do that was certainly a step in the right direction,” said Don Bivens, the chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party. “Although the Obama campaign has also advanced that to a new art form, they weren’t first. Dean was there before them.”
Even some of Dean’s critics are, if somewhat begrudgingly, giving him some credit for this year’s results. “I think it’s partial vindication,” Democratic insider Harold Ickes told the Hill last week. Dean’s Netroots supporters, meanwhile, are launching a campaign to make sure everyone knows whose idea that 50-state strategy was. “One of my goals the next few weeks is to make sure that Howard Dean gets his due props and, by extension, all of us who fought to make Dean’s vision a reality,” blogger Markos Moulitsas wrote Tuesday.
Markos gets, of course, the credit as the grand master of the netroots, turning online visions into reality. He’s the one paying attention to races in every district in the country, delivering funding surgically. Maybe you give five bucks to a race in Alabama and another district turns blue. Or maybe you’ve got a news scoop that turns into a recommended diary that gets read by millions. Anybody with an internet connection can make a difference, and Obama’s victory owes everything to that fact.
-jb
November 18th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
[...] elected as Dean did, putting his position as chairman of the DeaNC, his Democracy for America, and his 50 state strategy at Camp O’s complete disposal. DFA lobbied hard against FISA, at one point even asking [...]