MyDD :: Netroots for Howard Dean @ MyDD

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Netroots for Howard Dean @ MyDD

By the Summer of 2002, the MyDD blog served as the nexus for the early supporters of Howard Dean's Presidential campaign. In the Fall of 2002, MyDD relaunched with the Movable Type blog becoming a central spot in the blogosphere for chatter on the 2002 mid-term elections, and one of the highest traffic blogs.

Following the mid-term elections of 2002, the focus turned to the Democratic Primaries, in late 2002, Joe Trippi began his involvement with MyDD and the blogosphere, engaging Armstrong Zuniga ( Jerome & Markos from Daily Kos) for strategic talks on implementing a netroots strategy for Dean's Presidential campaign. Then 2003 began, Mathew Gross, who had earlier been guest blogging for MyDD, jumped aboard the campaign as chief blogger. Meetup was begun on Dean Nation and MyDD. Armstrong moved to Dean's Burlington VT HQ's to direct online advertising & blogger outreach, and MyDD went on haitus for a year.

Dean's bloggers and webteam, under Joe Trippi's wide-open guidance, flourished. But, Howard Dean, through happen-stance with the media's attack, didn't have the right stuff to close the deal in 2004. The era's breakthrough & revolutionary campaign ended, Trippi's webteam disbanded, forming different internet consulting groups, but the netroots has kept growing. MyDD was relaunched in Scoop format in March of 2004.

From Campaigns & Elections:

The Rise of the Netroots

Political blogs have existed for a little more than four years. Message boards and "me-zines" -- journals by professional writers -- had begun appearing in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but the first major liberal blog was MyDD, launched in June 2001 by Jerome Armstrong, a graduate student at Portland State University in Oregon.

"At the time, there was no such thing as a political blog, really," he said. "The personal blog became a way to take what I was posting on other forums and put it together on my own."

He updated and maintained MyDD alone until the following April, when he upgraded the site to let readers to sign in and post comments. One reader, Berkeley, Calif., lawyer and techie Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, launched his own blog, "Daily Kos," in late May. A growing liberal blogosphere devoted itself to discussions and predictions of the 2002 midterm elections and their aftermath. At the end of the year, a little fewer than 1,000 MyDD regulars participated in a poll to name their favorite presidential candidate for 2004. Out of seven possibilities, including John Kerry and John Edwards, 43 percent chose Howard Dean. "So how does Dean translate this nascent support into cold, hard campaign cash?" asked Moulitsas on his blog. "Beats me. If I knew, I would be a highly paid political consultant."

Moulitsas was onto something. Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi, a MyDD reader, met with Armstrong and Moulitsas in January 2003 to discuss how the candidate could build his own community online. In March, another MyDD poster named Mathew Gross showed up at Dean's office in Burlington, Vt., to become the campaign's Internet communications manager. Trippi and his Internet advisors did not want to create a site simply advertising Howard Dean, so they launched the ambitious Blog for America.

"The vision was, let's tell the story of why Howard Dean should be the nominee, then the story of why he should be president," Gross said.

The Dean campaign's use of the Internet -- the blog, the use of the event-planning site Meetup.com to stage Dean get-togethers -- was heavily reported in 2003. But the campaign's massive fund-raising and organizing successes were a combination of the Internet community-building and old-fashioned campaigning tactics re-appropriated for the Web.