The father of all Web campaigns

Almost every innovation now commonplace in politics — search ads, social networking, online video hubs, do-it-yourself grass-roots tools — has traceable roots to a ragtag bunch of techies whose dream candidate was a loser.

Remember Howard Dean?


Today, the whiz kids who used the Web in 2003 to transform the former Vermont governor into — at least for a short while — a viable presidential contender are now in the upper reaches of President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, in academia, or have made big business out of politics and technological activism.

“If you look at where Dean people are compared to the people who worked for other losing candidates, Howard Dean was the best losing candidate to work for in the history of politics,” said Clay Johnson, 35, who bounced from a $28,000 programming job for the Dean campaign to co-founding Blue State Digital, the multimillion-dollar Democratic online campaign consultancy.

Once regarded as a misguided gang of upstarts threatening the tried-and-true campaign process, the Dean team’s digital spawn have helped rewrite the political playbook from front to back.

The most visible alum is the Obama 2012 campaign’s chief digital strategist, Joe Rospars, 31, whose key innovation for Dean for America, by some accounts, was his craftsmanship in writing email fundraising solicitations, a skill clearly evidenced in the Obama team’s prolific and intensely successful email program.

The Obama campaign declined to let Rospars be interviewed for this report.

Others aren’t shy about the effect Dean’s digital brains had on politics.

“We were the Wright brothers,” Dean’s campaign manager Joe Trippi told POLITICO. “We had great ideas, and we were doing it in a very primitive way with what was possible. From the Wright brothers, we landed a guy in the White House. The pioneering spirit didn’t die with the campaign.”

The Dean effort, while a triumph for digital campaigning, lived fast and died young. Remember the infamous Dean scream, that earliest viral political moment and the pinprick that instantly deflated the Dean bubble? Turns out, it was merely the bang that scattered a team of dreamers across the body politic, liberating them to start companies, write books, teach and talk.

“There is the Dean campaign before and after,” said Jascha Franklin-Hodge, 33, a Blue State Digital co-founder who quit a lucrative job in Boston for AOL to become Dean’s national systems administrator, responsible for preventing the online operation from crashing. “We’ve been seeing what the ‘after’ looks like in the last eight years. That was the moment that laid down the marker for all that came afterwards.”

Typical of the group’s innovation was the experience of Nicco Mele, who, at 35, is now an adjunct professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. In early 2003, he was bored in a job managing a site for an AIDS advocacy group in New York when he heard about a nearby Dean appearance. Mele couldn’t get in — the bar was at capacity — and he had trouble finding the campaign website when he later searched on Google. As a silent donation, he bought a few Google ads so that when people searched for “Howard Dean” or other similar terms, they’d at least see a link to the site.

A month later, Mele received a huge bill from Google because thousands had clicked on the ad. He called the campaign and reached a harried director of online organizing, Zephyr Teachout.

“She said, ‘Oh, I wondered who was doing that’ and I said, ‘Well, I can’t afford it anymore, but you could probably raise a lot of money this way,’” Mele recalled. “She said, ‘Nobody here knows how to do that. Come do it.’ And she hung up.”

He became the Dean campaign’s webmaster and among the first practitioners in politics of the dark art of SEO — search engine optimization. After the campaign cratered, he co-founded the digital firm EchoDitto, a multimillion-dollar business that now advises the likes of the Clinton Global Initiative and AARP, and ran the online operation for Obama’s 2004 Illinois Senate bid.

Mele’s forthcoming book, “The End of Big: The Consequences of Radical Interconnectivity,” argues that the major political parties will soon be crushed by the weight of bottom-up Web activism. “I owe my career absolutely to the Dean campaign,” Mele said. “I was the right person, in the right place, at the right time, with the right skills, and I was very lucky.”

Similar stories abound. Johnson had never voted but became interested in politics when his mother’s bout with breast cancer sent her health insurance premiums soaring. That and anger over the Iraq War propelled him to a Dean meet-up in Atlanta in 2003; he found supporters inspired but badly organized so he wrote some software to keep track of volunteers. He’d go on, as the campaign’s first programmer, to write similar software as well as help create Deanlink, a social network site for supporters and volunteers.

Afterward, he, Franklin-Hodge, Rospars and Ben Self made a deal for the rights to the software they helped write and founded Blue State. Those ideas and possibly even some of that computer code live on today in Dashboard, the much-vaunted digital nerve center for the president’s state-of-the-art reelection operation.

“We didn’t know what we were doing, we didn’t know we were going to create a software platform, a content management system, a way to make blog posts, a contributions system to raise money and accept credit cards online,” said Johnson, who recalled taking his own Dell desktop to Vermont and having to buy a card table to set up as his desk.

Most of the Dean innovations took hold and instantly proved their value, but not all. Karl Frisch, 34, took on the task of filming dozens of Dean campaign events and posting them on the campaign’s site well before the advent of YouTube. The effort involved scrounging around hotel lobbies for Wi-Fi to upload, from a 25-pound laptop, videos in three formats — RealPlayer, QuickTime and Windows Media Player — for a public just beginning to adopt high-speed Internet. He’d even burn episodes of what they dubbed DeanTV to DVDs to mail to Dean groups around the nation.

In those quaint pre-counter days, nobody knew how many people watched the videos or whether it made any impact; Trippi and others cite it as an example of ahead-of-its-time thinking that had questionable results at the time.

Nonetheless, it was that spirit of experimentation that captivated and gratified the Dean kids, and such videos are now de rigueur. Likewise, the idea of Web-organized meet-ups first surfaced spontaneously on meetup.org, but then Michael Silberman, 32, began providing campaign support and organized for Dean to attend some of them as they proliferated across the country.

Other campaigns would have feared ad hoc organizing of that sort, said Silberman, an EchoDitto co-founder now heading Greenpeace’s international online efforts. Those arranging local meet-ups were awestruck to receive kudos and help from a campaign official and then amused to discover when they met that Silberman was just 24.

“They weren’t waiting for the campaign, we were playing catch-up to them,” he said. “We were trying to figure out who was organizing for the campaign, not the other way around.”

Not everything worked. Franklin-Hodge set up an online program that provided names and addresses of undecided Iowa voters and encouraged volunteers across the country to write personal, handwritten snail-mail letters to them, asking them to caucus for Dean.

“That may have hurt us more than it helped us,” he said. “What does it mean to someone in Iowa getting a letter from out of state telling them who to vote for? It was supposed to be authentic, enthusiastic engagement.”

The question of authenticity is one that many Dean alums mull. Dean for America was a genuine, organic grass-roots movement that used Internet tools to empower volunteers and supporters to take ownership of the effort, but today’s campaigns use the Web to collect data and control the message.

“That’s centralized power, not decentralized power,” said Teachout, 40, who went on to help found the Sunlight Foundation and CurrentTV and now teaches election law at Fordham University. “That’s not what we meant to do. I was a true believer that we could change the way political campaigns operated.”

Still, what floors everyone is how far they’ve all come and how much a part of the basic wiring of campaigns their experiments are.

“Nobody went to work for Howard Dean saying this is my ticket for financial freedom, or notoriety, or success,” Johnson said. “I look at the success and see that as vindication of those core ideas and proof that what we were doing was the right thing.”