Dean-ial

Dean reminds me of Eugene McCarthy 1968, or John Anderson in 1980...........and there have been dozens of similar "savior" figures since the flood. I heard all the blather about Dean, the first time I saw him on TV I laughed. "Bush will carry 49 states........."

You imply that Dean was never really popular with the public at large, only with a bunch of self-referential netheads. But at one time Dean was ahead in the national polls, which means that a plurality of voters intended (at that time) to vote for him.

What needs to be explained is not why people thought Dean was popular (answer: because the polls said so) but why his popularity with average voters evaporated so quickly.

In a case like this, the first theory to consider is that when voters found out more about the candidates, they decided they liked the other guys better.

Maybe my memory is bad, this reminds me of McGovern winning primaries because the Flower Children turned out for him. Come the general election, he lost big because the FCs were too few, they were all that he had.

Dean's primary problem may have been the result of Net Weenies being too few in number to carry any primary or caucus. This was a weak and fragile base for a presidential drive. The net will be considered important in the future, perhaps as a way of kindling a candidacy.

I don't mean to imply that *only* self-referential netheads made him popular - but rather, that he was popular for a time with a portion of the (Democrat) public for very weak and conventional reasons, which had next to zero to do with netheaderdom.

He was The Anti-War Candidate, that was his key issue, and as that receded from the public mind, his public (not nethead) support-base dropped - a very common outcome. If there had been a big disaster in Iraq, a "Tet Offensive" event, he might very well have been winning now. But events went the other way (e.g. Saddam Hussein captured), and so he went with them.

For a while, he also looked better than he was, since he had some good luck when Kerry's campaign was disorganized, so Dean looked better than he "deserved" and Kerry looked worse than he "deserved". When Kerry got his act together, and Dean's rivals pounded him in the run-up to the primaries, he also went down, for again completely conventional reasons.

Just forget about The Internet-as-God (social networking), or later Internet-as-Devil (isolation), is what I'm saying - yes, Dean raised lots of money, but everything else is a standard political script.

>>...at one time Dean was ahead in the national polls, which means that a plurality of voters intended (at that time) to vote for him.

At one time, Leiberman was at the top of the national polls. When no one esle is runnning, or when you are a single-issue candidate before other candidates have co-opted that issue, you're likely to show good poll numbers. (In any case, a national poll isn't much use in a series of state elections.)

As soon as other candidates announced, Joe L.'s numbers started to drop. Dean stopped getting a boost from his anti-war stance as soon as other candidates started speaking against the war.

Dean, it appears, spent a good chunk of all that money in states that don't hold primaries until late in the season. That'll be too late to do him any good, He should have spent what it took to when Iowa and New Hampshire. If he'd won those two states, he'd have benefactors lining up to fill his campaign's coffers.

Hi Seth. You say "there's too often a conflation of writing an online diary for oneself and a few friends, with having an effect on the political process." Where does one find this? Do you have any links? I would like to examine this cracked "reasoning" myself to see who indulges in it, and in what forums. I understand that I won't find people literally saying "online diaries change politics" but rather something that amounts to that-- more or less. But where? Can you assist?

Then you also write: "It's all part of a fantasy that, Come The (Net) Revolution, we're all supposed to be happy little blogging bears, 'citizen-journalists' reading and writing to one another, merrily pouring in hours and hours of time each week, for free, in order to take back Democracy from Big Media via People Power, I mean The Blogosphere."

Likewise, where do you find this? I'm not trying to nitpick you with evidentiary demands, I am genuinely curious about how this impression of yours got formed. You're good at showing your contempt for it--the Dean-ial, the fantasies, the hapless delusions of Net-heads--but it must be based on something you have seen people doing, saying, arguing, attempting to show. Got any links we can examine? (I have asked others this question, too.)

I would like to offer one thought for your contemplation. I understand that one of your major themes is countering the hype by which people hope for too much from the Internet, or from politics, or from Dean, or from their own experience.

But you seem to think hype is confined to the hopeful, the wishful, the dreamers of a better day who can't look up from their screens long enough to notice that all the world is not like them. But there is negative hype too. There is the hype of the illusion-buster, the doubter, the avenging skeptic. Hype inflates to excess. Negative hype deflates with a vengeance that can also go to excess.

This sentence: ""IF many teenage girls e-write about their crushes, and their parents use eBay as a garage sale, THEN Howard Dean is President" is, in my opinion, hype. It's balloon popping that distorts and exaggerates belief in order to make the "pop" that much louder.

Jay, just look for any argument of the form "There are X million bloggers!". There sure are. But these are 99.9% diary-blogs, which don't reach beyond the immediate friends-and-family of the writer (which again is fine, but that's what it is). I assume you've followed the "most bloggers are teenage girls" argument, and the recent "one blogger is worth ten votes" skepticism (which was a gloss of the actual quote of "A voter with a weblog is ten times more powerful than a voter without a weblog, because there's more voting than just going in and flipping a lever.")

The problem with these sorts of statements is that it's hard to pin people down about them. What exactly did "ten times more powerful" mean? The gloss of"ten votes" was precise, but it could always be argued that "powerful" was in fact sound and fury signifying nothing. So pre-emptively, let me defend against a reply that it's not wrong, it's just meaningless (this is one of my most frustrating parts of these general exchanges).

Look at the whole "Emergent Democracy", hype-mongering, which I deride as "Regurgitant Pundocracy". Perhaps the canonical example is James Moore's "Second Superpower" (no personal offense meant):

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/jmoore/secondsuperpower.html

"The collective power of texting, blogging, instant messaging, and
email across millions of actors cannot be overestimated. Like a mind
constituted of millions of inter-networked neurons, the social
movement is capable of astonishingly rapid and sometimes subtle
community consciousness and action."

Now, granted that's a rhetorical flourish, but I'd say the Dean-dissolution is exactly a case of it being *very* possible to overestimate the collective power of texting, blogging, etc.

These hopes, goals, dreams - they are not wrong - and I feel them as strongly as the utopian writers (perhaps even more so, for what I've done myself). But it's too easy to repeat it all to ourselves uncritically.

I was just looking at your own notable posts in this area,

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2003/12/17/nine_lines.html

One commentator had this prescient gem:

"All this talk of the Dean campaign's "revolutionary" aspects is going
to look pretty silly when his campaign self-destructs due to amateurs
being on a too-long leash. Pros with control is still how successful
campaigns are run."

And something similar was debated at:

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2003/12/18/theory_blues.html

Ah, here's a classic:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-12-30-blogging-usat_x.htm

"There's no question in my mind that political bloggers are a major new
development," says Ellen Miller, a longtime political activist and
Washington lobbyist who reads blogs. "It takes the media out of the hands
of the corporate world and puts it into the hands of guys with computers."
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

As Jay Rosen, a blogger and the chairman of New York University's
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
journalism department, puts it, "Readers are becoming writers."

And ending:

"That's one of the fantastic things about the blogosphere and the
Internet," Bevan says. "If you have something to say that's
interesting, you will eventually be heard."

Not be too harsh, but articles such as this (which overall did have some balance) are *one* source of the ideas I cite. I'm not exaggerating their existence.

"Takes the media out of hands of the corporate world and puts it into the hands of guys with computers" ... "Readers are becoming writers." ... "... you will eventually be heard."

If you want a 100% nailed quote, look at my dissection of numbers in:

http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/000485.html

Note the sentence "IF many teenage girls e-write about their crushes, and their parents use eBay as a garage sale, THEN Howard Dean is President" was, I thought, one of my most well-grounded points. that is, it was meant as a humorous if biting way of pointing out that "use the internet" covers a wide range of applications, so having many people "use the internet" hardly translates into any sort of new politics much less favor of Dean. This seems, at heart, a fairly mundane observation.

And finally, the next person who tells me personally, that I can in any way counter a 10,000 or 100,000 (or more) audience smear of me, because I have a *blog* - can I send them to you?

Seth: Now I really don't get it.

I thought the departure point of your post was the deluded thinking that caused Dean supporters or other observers to believe that his Net presence--blogs, meet-ups, online organizing--would translate into political victories. Or that having a weblog meant having an effect on the political process. Or that the Net triumphant would mean Dean triumphant. So I asked you where this attitude is found.

How does a remark like "readers are becoming writers" (something I have said and still say) become or suggest or connect at all to "... therefore Dean is going to triumph"? Don't get that.

How is Moore's second superpower thesis--surely a utopian document--evidence for the complacent thesis: Net triumphant equals Dean triumphant? That document is mostly about world governance and the global public sphere. (Maybe what you really mean that the kind of people who swallowed Moore's thesis are the same kind of people who expected certain victory for Dean.)

And how do various iterations of "now everyone can be heard" show anything at all about the Dean collapse? I can't see the connection you are drawing. Are you suggesting that Dave Winer, whom you quote saying something like that, bought the Dean hype too?

You cite as prescient--predictive--this comment from my weblog: ""All this talk of the Dean campaign's 'revolutionary' aspects is going to look pretty silly when his campaign self-destructs due to amateurs being on a too-long leash. Pros with control is still how successful campaigns are run."

If this is prescient then it must mean that Dean's campaign did, as predicted, self destruct because amateurs were given too long a leash. Is that what you believe? The cause of the Dean implosion in Iowa and New Hampshire is that amateurs in the movement were given too much freedom? If so, it's an original analysis that I haven't seen before, and you should develop it. Or was the prescient part just the words "self-destruct"?

I still want to know: who conflates doing a weblog with having an effect on the political process, such that Dean's victories seemed to that person assured? I understand you want to ridicule the pathetic wishfulness of that belief, but is it really a belief so much in evidence that it amounts to dangerously popular "groupthink?"

The one quote that actually bears on that proposition, "A voter with a weblog is ten times more powerful than a voter without a weblog" comes from who? (That's the one without a link.)

You write: "These hopes, goals, dreams--they are not wrong--and I feel them as strongly as the utopian writers (perhaps even more so...)" Well, this is just one reader's reaction, but I must say: you coulda fooled me, Seth.

For the very clear impression I get from your writing is a deep-seated contempt you have for these "dreams," for the "appealing fantasies" of revolution you find so many dupes falling for, and for the clueless, foolish people who spout the "utter nonsense" it is your task to refute-- even though, as I learn from reading Infothought, there is no chance you will be heard. I say this is the impression one gets from the words you write. What you actually feel may be quite different.

Link for quote: "A voter with a weblog is ten times more powerful than a voter without a weblog, because there's more to voting than just going in and flipping a lever"

http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,61142,00.html

Skeptical gloss: "One blogger is worth ten votes"

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/33995.html

I checked that's it's not a misquote. Further elaboration, with some rumination:

http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/000510.html

More later, perhaps I need to do a big-picture post to explain my reasoning.

[Update: I took the rest to e-mail instead of making it a long post]