Wall Street Journal Online

JOHN FUND ON THE TRAIL

Caught in the Web
How Democrats mobilized online and other campaign tales

[Excerpted]

. . . Despite the bursting of the Dean bubble, Mr. Trippi's team did change campaign politics in fundamental ways. "If John Kerry ends up in the White House," he writes--referring to the anti-Bush firestorm that the Dean campaign helped ignite and to the fund-raising techniques it pioneered--"it will be in large part because of Howard Dean." Still, he worries that Mr. Kerry is too hesitant to engage people in the kind of free-wheeling style that was so much a part of Dr. Dean's big moment. He notes that two months after Mr. Kerry wrapped up the Democratic nomination, he had only 80,000 people signed up on his Meetup.com lists for neighborhood gatherings. Dr. Dean had 165,000 names, "and he wasn't even running anymore" . . .

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