In his post from the Personal Democracy Forum, David Weinberger writes of panelist Ron Wyden:
Wyden was running for Congress for the first time. My wife called his office with a question about one of his stands, and dang if Wyden himself didn’t call back and talk with my wife for 20 minutes. So, she and I went door to door for him, and have been Wyden fans ever since.
David mentions that Jerry Michalski is moderating; I guarantee you that David’s connection to Ron Wyden is already now in Jerry’s Brain.
This would be an interesting conference to be at — Mathew Gross is there, as are a number of other bigwigs from the Internet/political realm. Realtime blogging and comments are available here.
Interestingly, I just read this post from the conference blog, and can’t help but scratch my head at this meme:
The Dean campaign has actually been heavily critiqued today, not just for losing, but also for mistaking their movement as technology based when it was in fact youth based, and also for overestimating how far the issue of the War in Iraq would take them.
Where is this coming from? Youth based? Sure there were young people involved. But a look at my MeetUps out here in the burbs (at our peak we were 600+ strong), or at any of the other MeetUps for that matter, throws cold water on the conclusion that it was dominated by youth. And “overestimating how far the issue of the War in Iraq would take them”?
My own thoughts on what went wrong. YMMV.
I'm curious as to who is saying the campaign was "youth based". There were a lot of young people that became politically active because of Dean, but it's not fair to the rest of the Dean supporters to say this was the majority.
ReplyDeleteBentley Study Analyzes e-Campaign for 2004 Presidential Elections (Meetup Supporters)
http://www.bentley.edu/news-events/pr_view.cfm?id=1430
# Demographically, they are mostly Caucasian, middle aged, middle income professionals who are about 60% female and 40% male.
# Almost all report that they use the Internet several times a day, and more than half have visited several candidates' web sites as well as multiple political activism sites