HOWARD Dean's second straight loss in last night's New Hampshire Democratic primary should have reporters eating crow for having fed the frontrunner frenzy leading into the election year. Caught up in the seduction of Dean's Internet campaign, starry-eyed journalists cranked out one "sexed-up" story after another. Amid all this heavy breathing, they blissfully ignored what should have been clear all along: Just as the dot-com bubble collapsed under the weight of its own frenzy a few years ago, the soaring success of Dean-dot-com was unsustainable.
In economics, a "bubble" exists when stock and real estate prices are unjustified by their underlying valuations. Bubbles are often driven by hype, or "irrational exuberance" -- as Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan famously called it. And, of course, bubbles inevitably burst.
The rise of the Dean campaign had all the trappings of a bubble. First, there was the hype. Martin Walker in United Press International gushed about "Dean's internet revolution." ("Howard Dean's revolution," Nov. 12, 2003.) A column by Noam Scheiber in The New Republic declared that his online organization "reinvents campaigning." ("The Organization Man," Nov. 17, 2003.) Economist Everett Ehrlich even attributed Dean's success to the principles of Nobel laureate Ronald Coase -- that by lowering the cost of organizing supporters, his Internet campaign was the death knell for the two-party system ("What will happen when a national political machine can fit on a laptop?" The Washington Post, Dec. 14, 2003).
Webster's defines "hype" as "deception," and the purported innovation of Dean's Internet campaign was exactly that. Campaign Web sites are nothing new; Bob Dole often promoted his cyberspace address in speeches in 1996, and the 2000 campaigns were even more Internet intensive. Hundreds of politicians before Dean have used their Web sites to collect donations, gather supporters' names and addresses, promote their platforms and policies and post dispatches from the campaign trail (what the Dean camp calls its "official blog" ). The only real variation Dean introduced was to allow supporters to post their own "blogs" in response to the "official blog." Again, this was nothing new -- news and magazine Web sites routinely have such features allowing readers to post responses to articles. In addition, the Dean Web site encouraged supporters to visit Meetup.com, where they could organize independent local meetings.
While Dean's use of the Internet was not particularly imaginative or original, his campaign hyped it up nonetheless, and reporters, some of whom had no experience with what they were talking about, were all too happy to play along with overstating its significance. Veteran Washington Post reporter David Broder called Dean's blog "a tremendous tool," but admitted, "I am not [sic] and I never have blogged, and I'm going to get to the end of my career without blogging" (Meet the Press, Jan. 11).
The Internet does not, as many have suggested, herald a new era in campaigning distinct from what we've seen since television revolutionized the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon race; the old rules of delivering a centralized, cohesive message still apply. This is even more true with a cable-driven 24-hour news cycle; politicians cannot deliver one campaign theme in the morning and one in the afternoon without confusing voters and diluting both themes. Thus, the problem with the overemphasis on blogging is that, while its interactivity excites hardcore Deaniacs, what ends up happening is the candidate becomes all things to all people without a core set of positions. Faced with this hodge-podge of what his supporters idealized him to be, Dean could only ride on what united them: anger.
Underneath the hype, Dean also shared the dot-coms' lack of underlying assets. The former governor of a state of 600,000 with no foreign policy or national experience, Dean lacked the gravitas of the blue-chip John Kerry and the charisma of John Edwards. He was also prone to hissy fits; he became a Congregationalist for no other reason than because his erstwhile Episcopalian church refused to surrender its property for a bike path he wanted built.
While Dean did have appeal as a Washington outsider and a maverick, that asset alone could not wipe away his liabilities, nor could it justify the bucket loads of cash that were flowing in. Just as investors foolishly emptied their wallets on IPOs during the dot-com bubble, the millions Dean's supporters have sent him will fizzle along with the novelty of Dean-dot-com.
Like the dot-com bust, Howard Dean's Iowa-New Hampshire shellacking proved that the best laid dreams of mouse clicks and men can often go astray. His infamous outburst last week must have been the wrath of sour grapes.
(Eric Wang's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at ewang@cavalierdaily.com.)
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