The Howard Dean Rejuvenation Project

But just a few weeks ago the Democrats again had great success in red states, winning the presidency for the first time since 1996 and expanding their majorities in Congress considerably; Dean’s strategy is lauded once again, and if James Carville is calling out Dean for ineptitude, he is doing it out of the public eye.

Of course, not all of the credit should go to the 50-state strategy. The Democrats ran on an anti-war platform in 2006 (though, it is worth noting, they did not follow through on it) and took advantage of Bush’s dismal approval rankings and the unpopularity of the war. In 2008, they were helped dramatically by an economic crisis that most blame on Republican policies (though both parties have largely supported deregulation in recent decades). More importantly, the Democrats have also worked with massive fundraising advantages in the last two elections. President-elect Barack Obama, for example, benefited mightily from online donations from grassroots supporters.

And this – the rise of the Internet fundraising apparatus that has helped sweep the Democrats into power – can also be attributed, in no small way, to Dean’s previous efforts.

Dean and the Netroots

Flash back to 2003, in the early stages of the 2003 presidential primary. Howard Dean’s long-shot campaign, while shunned by many in the party, was finding favor with a relatively young group of liberals, who spent a good deal of their time posting their musings on the web. One such person was Markos Moulitsas, founder of the one of the most popular political blogs in America, Dailykos.com.

Moulitsas, known on his blog as “kos,” was described at the time as “an obscure blogger” by rival campaigns. But, while he was obscure to some, his blog was one of many that were growing rapidly as they made an effort to use the Internet to push the Democratic Party to the left. These blogs, which also included sites like mydd.com and atrios.com, would later come to be known as The Netroots. In time The New Republic, a magazine that has not traditionally been an ally of the liberal blogs, would call this phenomenon “the most important mass movement in U.S. politics.”

When Kos was asked to assist the Dean campaign, he wrote: “The Dean campaign wants to prove that the Internet can and will change the way campaigns are organized and run.” Four and half years later, it is hard to argue that Dean was not right. The Netroots has become a major source of fundraising for the party, not to mention a popular place for liberals to pontificate online.

And Barack Obama, a shrewd politician no doubt, jumped at the opportunity to use this to his advantage (so too, did John Edwards, who hired Joe Trippi, Dean’s campaign manager in 2004, to run his failed 2008 presidential run).

Obama has 2.4 million friends of Facebook, has been watched on YouTube four times as much as John McCain, and ended up raising hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of the Internet, much of it coming from small donors. These circumstances led some to call Obama, “The First Internet President.”

As one writer for The Root observed: “On my.barackobama, nearly 30,000 user-created electronic mailing lists, such as Harlem for Obama or Filmmakers for Obama, coordinated largely spontaneous activities of local, national- and issue-based groups. Group members could talk directly to each other and coordinate independent campaign efforts that ranged from sharing informal personal stories to planning big-ticket fundraisers, getting together for modest debate watching parties and organizing mammoth weekend get-out-the-vote efforts.”

This is exactly the kind of service the “liberal blogosphere” had been doing (and still are) for years. Raising money online and allowing the development of a community of supporters to organize online. And this is a method that was first popularized by one Howard Dean. This is not lost on those who forged this path. Following the election, Moulitsas wrote: “One of my goals the next few weeks is to make sure that Howard Dean gets his due props and, by extension, all of us who fought to make Dean’s vision a reality,”

The future for Dean and the Democrats

While Obama clearly benefited from Dean’s work, there is still a question as to how Obama govern, and who he will listen to as President. While some speculate that Dean may be up for a Cabinet position, it was Rahm Emmanuel, an adversary of Dean, who was appointed chief of staff. And while it was Dean’s opposition to the War in Iraq that made him a relevant figure, Obama’s aides told the Wall Street Journal that he plans on leaving some troops in Iraq indefinitely. In 2006, Obama also supported pro-war Democrat Joe Lieberman over Ned Lamont, who at the time was the biggest Netroots sensation since Dean. This, again, showed that Obama is by means toeing the line that many prominent progressive bloggers would prefer.

So even with Dean’s great success, it is not clear what direction the party will take. But, even though we may not know what the next era of Democratic Party politics will look like, we do know that it is an era that may have never seen the light of day, if it weren’t for the groundwork laid by Howard Dean and his earliest supporters.