Musings on Dean II
Some reasons I STILL want Dean to win, despite the tumult of the past week and the increasingly impressive performances of his rivals:
1. Dean is an open book. What you see is what you get, which is why he is so hard to catagorize--he is a complex person and it is all there to see. It is a breath of fresh air after the (very different) dishonesties of our past two presidents.
2. He was the one of the 9 to first say that our beloved emperor W was wearing no clothes. He gets big loyalty points for being brave enough to speak first.
3. This is the most powerful reason why I still support Dean, and I don't think it has been articulated clearly anywhere: Dean is not beholden to "special interests" he is beholden to the thousands of private individuals who have given him tiny amounts of money. I believe that should we ever get lucky enough to have a Dean White House that it will change completely the dynamics of politics in Washington. I may be wrong, but it is this dream that keeps me involved.
Musings on Dean I
So I have broken my New Year's resolution to write regularly, but I'll try to get better. I just got an interesting piece on why Dean may have faltered so badly in Iowa. I don't know if it is right, but it is certainly an intriguing theory:
Is Social Software Bad for the Dean Camapign?
I'm getting the same cognitive dissonance listening to political
handicappers explain Dean's dismal showing in Iowa that I used to get
listening to financial analysts try to explain dot com mania with
things like P/E ratios and EBITDA. A stock's value is not set by those
things; it is set by buyer and seller agreeing on price. In ordinary
markets, buyers and sellers use financial details to get to that
price, but sometimes, as with dot com stocks, the way prices get
agreed on has nothing to do with finance.
In the same way, talking about Dean's third-place showing in terms of
'momentum' and 'character', the P/E and EBITDA of campaigns, may miss
the point. Dean did poorly because not enough people voted for him,
and the usual explanations -- potential voters changed their minds
because of his character or whatever -- seem inadequate to explain the
Iowa results. What I wonder is whether Dean has accidentally created a
movement (where what counts is believing) instead of a campaign (where
what counts is voting.)
And (if that's true) I wonder if his use of social software helped
create that problem.
We know well from past attempts to use social software to organize
groups for political change that it is hard, very hard, because
participation in online communities often provides a sense of
satisfaction that actually dampens a willingness to interact with the
real world. When you're communing with like-minded souls, you _feel_
like you're accomplishing something by arguing out the smallest
details of your perfect future world, while the imperfect and actual
world takes no notice, as is its custom.
There are many reasons for this, but the main one seems to be that the
pleasures of life online are precisely the way they provide a respite
from the vagaries of the real world. Both the way the online
environment flattens interaction and the way everything gets arranged
for the convenience of the user makes the threshold between talking
about changing the world and changing the world even steeper than
usual.
The rest of the article . . .
