Dave Winer doesn’t get the Dean campaign

This isn’t terribly surprising, given his comments on the campaign to date. But still, it’s surprising that the opinion would be expressed so definitively, especially when the facts are so at odds with the opinion. Britt, who’s at BloggerCon, just reported on a comment made by Dave Winer:

Dave Winer just said that the Dean campaign is only a start, dismissing it as no more than a start, that eventually the voters should write the campaign blogs, not the campaign itself. That seems to me to be true already with the Dean campaign. Matt Gross, the campaign’s chief blogger, is a blogger who just showed up one day at the campaign because he felt it ought to have a blog. So, whether or not Matt is a voter or a campaign worker is questionable. When I spent a week at the campaign as a volunteer worker, I discovered that even the paid staffers (by far the minority) functioned as volunteers–they’re voters who feel so strongly that they somehow find a way to work on the campaign full time for slave wages or less. And the campaign blog is written by several of the staffers who have become celebrities themselves. NYC Deaniacs enthused about getting their autographs at the Bryant Park Rally!

I’d like to clarify a huge misunderstanding about the Dean campaign, arising from not digging deep enough to get it how the campaign blog works: The real story of the Dean campaign is not the official blog, but the comments to the blog. The abundant, passionate and uncannilycomments are the fuel for this campaign. The threads they build there are the way this community maintains its community. And, importantly, they are half a million people who have explicitly declared themselves to be a community, which explicitly proves that this is precisely what Dave says it is not.

It’ll be interesting to see how the panel discussion goes this afternoon, when Mathew Gross will join other campaign bloggers in a discussion controlled moderated by Dave.

One response to “Dave Winer doesn’t get the Dean campaign”

  1. No one understands the Dean phenomena….because this is the first time it's happened in American history.When have people flocked to a small state governor in a time when the media says defense and foreign policy are at a premium?When have people contributed to and communicated about a political candidate with such ease before?When has democracy really been about the little guy?When has the frontrunner also been the insurgent candidate 6 months before ballots are counted?

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