The rest is history
Roger Hickey, Mar 18 2004, on Tompaine.com
“[E]ven if Dean were to retire to the life of a Vermont doctor tomorrow and former campaign manager Joe Trippi decided to cash out as a corporate marketing consultant, we can be sure that the insurgent "people-power" force that fueled the Dean campaign will live on and grow. How do we know this? Because the Dean campaign didn't create this new citizen insurgency. Dean was as much a creation of it as he was its organizer. Trippi was smart enough to notice and to convince Dean to offer himself to that movement as their candidate, transforming the fortunes of what started as the quixotic, long-shot quest by a small state governor for the Democratic nomination into a 600,000-strong grassroots political crusade and fundraising dynamo that for a while seemed unstoppable.
On the day before Dean pulled the plug on his candidacy for president, MoveOn.org sent out an e-mail announcing that membership in that vibrant nation-wide activist organization is now over two million people strong in the United States"larger than the Christian Coalition at its peak. "To put it another way," they said, "one in every 146 Americans is now a MoveOn member. And we're still growing fast." Even if the remnants of the Dean campaign never come back together, MoveOn will continue to grow as a political force, with a significant overlap of both issues and supporters.
And it was MoveOn, along with other progressive groups like the Campaign for America's Future and Win Without War, that helped to pull together and give voice to the millions of grassroots progressives who, in 2002 and early 2003, were looking for an outspoken political leader unafraid to stand up to George W. Bush"on the war in Iraq and on domestic economic issues"even though the official Democratic Party didn't seem to want that kind of candidate. Howard Dean responded, and the rest is history.”
“[E]ven if Dean were to retire to the life of a Vermont doctor tomorrow and former campaign manager Joe Trippi decided to cash out as a corporate marketing consultant, we can be sure that the insurgent "people-power" force that fueled the Dean campaign will live on and grow. How do we know this? Because the Dean campaign didn't create this new citizen insurgency. Dean was as much a creation of it as he was its organizer. Trippi was smart enough to notice and to convince Dean to offer himself to that movement as their candidate, transforming the fortunes of what started as the quixotic, long-shot quest by a small state governor for the Democratic nomination into a 600,000-strong grassroots political crusade and fundraising dynamo that for a while seemed unstoppable.
On the day before Dean pulled the plug on his candidacy for president, MoveOn.org sent out an e-mail announcing that membership in that vibrant nation-wide activist organization is now over two million people strong in the United States"larger than the Christian Coalition at its peak. "To put it another way," they said, "one in every 146 Americans is now a MoveOn member. And we're still growing fast." Even if the remnants of the Dean campaign never come back together, MoveOn will continue to grow as a political force, with a significant overlap of both issues and supporters.
And it was MoveOn, along with other progressive groups like the Campaign for America's Future and Win Without War, that helped to pull together and give voice to the millions of grassroots progressives who, in 2002 and early 2003, were looking for an outspoken political leader unafraid to stand up to George W. Bush"on the war in Iraq and on domestic economic issues"even though the official Democratic Party didn't seem to want that kind of candidate. Howard Dean responded, and the rest is history.”
posted by Greg Bloom at 4/11/2005 12:23:00 AM
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