Political Hopefuls Turn to Web Networking

Fox News has some coverage out on the success of meetup for Howard Dean:

Interest has been so overwhelming that even presidential hopeful Howard Dean attended a meeting of his backers last week in New York City. The former Vermont governor, one of nine Democratic contenders seeking their party's nod to run against President Bush in November 2004, made an appearance Wednesday night before a crowd of 550 at the Essex Club in Manhattan's Lower East Side.

"We need your help on the Internet and off the Internet - this is an extremely powerful tool," Dean told cheering fans who made it into
the club. Many more couldn't get inside and were wrapped around the block hoping to get a glimpse of their candidate. There's an enormous number of people all over the country who are putting out our message on the Internet," Dean said. "What you all can do is so incredibly powerful - you can change this country, just like my generation did [in Vietnam], with better tools at your
disposal."

Through the Internet, over 2,500 people in 79 cities total were able to participate in the meeting. Nationwide, over 4,200 people signed on to "meet up" with Dean and his supporters. Among them was Columbia University junior Brian Schaitkin, who heard about Meetup.com around campus, then went online and signed up for Wednesday's Dean rally. "I think it's the perfect way for candidates to build support, build a real organization and try to establish himself if he doesn't necessarily have a lot of name recognition and a lot of capital to work with," Schaitkin said.

David Nir went to his first "meetup" in February. At the time, 15 others showed up, but after checking out hordes of Dean Web logs and realizing there was enough support out there to form a group, he and other participants decided to make fliers, start an e-mail listserv and talk about what fundraising they could do to support their man. From that, the "New York for Dean" campaign was formed, and since then, Dean's campaign has asked them to organize a formal campaign in the city. "This whole enterprise could not have happened without the Internet," Nir said.

Of course, since it's Faux News, you get the spin too. Calling it a fringe phenomenon and unprofessional ("Meetup.com is at the edge of what's acceptable, at best," Cornfield said. That may be true. The day after Dean's rally, another event was held at a coffee shop in the Upper West Side for Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry and no one showed up).

Faux's rationale for Dean's Meetup success? Merely a bunch of anti-war protesters: Their commentator suspects when the anti-war movement loses its reason for being, both Meetup.com and the Dean campaign will see a slip in interest. "It's not the Internet that's powering it, it's the channel where people are not satisfied with the war are finding their way to these meetings," Cornfield said. "It's like a spider's web into campaigns."

Well, I can't speak for the other meetups, but in Portland, this invasion into Iraq was only one of a host of issue for why people were there, and the war certainly did not dominate the discussion-- this invasion into Iraq is merely another symptom, Bush is the disease that we are hooked on rooting out, and Dean is the one who understands this, Faux doesn't.

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