Dangerous Analogies

(This is a cross-post from DeanDefense.org)

Chris Suellentrop has a piece about Dean and the net over at Slate. We applaud his recognition of our fine organization, but we take issue with his opening analogy:
It's too early to say for certain, but Howard Dean may turn out to be the Napster of presidential politics: the force that enables the Internet to upend an entire industry, threatens to transform the way it collects money, and opens the eyes of the average person to yet another way to use the Net. But if Dean is a political Napster, it will probably mean more for politics in general than it means for Howard Dean. After all, two years after Napster went dark, people are still logging on to the Internet to swap music files. Ultimately, Napster empowered music users more than it empowered itself. Something analogous will probably be true with Internet politics. That's good news for political junkies, but it could be bad news for Howard Dean.
The great power of Napster existed not just for Napster but for the spread of music. Likewise, the power of any internet campaign is to promote the spread of the candidate. Even if Dean's own internet campaign loses its pull on the 'net (unlikely, given the popularity of its blog among supporters), it will likely be because the supporters found better methods.

Music fans switched from Napster to Gnutella because Gnutella was more resilient. Today, they are using Kazaa or heaven knows what because it is still workable.

Someone commented that the internet often goes through four or five news cycles while the rest of the world goes through one. Well, campaigns have to be four or five times more dynamic on the 'net.

In the end, though, Dean's supporters aren't together by his campaign's use of the 'net (which, while impressive, is only a small portion of the Dean Matrix that comprises all of the online Dean-world), but by their desire to build the candidate known as Howard Dean.

And, just as music continued to succeed, even as Napster had problems, even if Dean's own 'net campaign crashes, he'll still be the strongest candidate on the internet, cause Gnutella is here.

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