Howard Dean, who wasn’t even on the ballot of Louisiana’s presidential primary, is now the DNC chair and this makes me very happy. Hope remains when an ex-candidate doesn’t throw in his towel, but continues to fight for his country in another incarnation. Zephyr Teachout has some good advice for Dean with respect to internet campaigning:
” … while the ‘net is disrupting some old channels for political power and offering new kinds of connections as well … without an aggressive effort, I worry that most of this energy will go into fundraising, list-building and maybe some online community building.”
Sure, these aren’t bad things, Teachout says, “but in the face of the Great American Loneliness and the Great American Powerlessness, I hope that the disruptive power of the internet might serve to create a new form of voluntary association: offline communities based on online connections but rooted in public places.”
