Before they chartered planes and opened teeming offices in Des Moines or Manchester, even before they announced their lofty ambitions to the world, the current field of presidential candidates set about absorbing the lessons of Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign. Dean lost, of course, and in a fairly ignominious way, but his campaign was the first to harness the fund-raising and organizing power of the Internet, and both parties’ 2008 hopefuls had visions of replicating his model  minus the meltdown. One of the first things they did was to sign on a new class of online organizers and fund-raisers. The Web was the new frontier of American politics, and the candidates intended to exploit it.

Now, as we come to the end of a tumultuous political year, it seems clear that the candidates and their advisers absorbed the wrong lessons from Dean’s moment, or at least they failed to grasp an essential truth of it, which is that these things can’t really be orchestrated. Dean’s campaign didn’t explode online because he somehow figured out a way to channel online politics; he managed this feat because his campaign, almost by accident, became channeled by people he had never met. Dean for America was branded from its core antiwar message down to the design of some of its bumper stickers and buttons by laptop-laden volunteers, and these strangers, it could be argued, both made and unmade the candidate. In the new and evolving online world, the greatest momentum goes not to the candidate with the most detailed plan for conquering the Web but to the candidate who surrenders his own image to the clicking masses, the same way a rock guitarist might fall backward off the stage into the hands of an adoring crowd.

How else to explain the notable online surge of support for Ron Paul, the onetime standard-bearer of the Libertarian Party? Unlike his main opponents, Paul himself didn’t have the resources to build a sophisticated Web campaign, but antiwar and antispending Republicans were happy to do it for him. Last month, Paul supporters who had nothing to do with the campaign organized an online fund-raiser on Guy Fawkes Day, a British holiday named for the rebel who tried to assassinate King James I. Paul’s stunned campaign brought in more than $4 million and 21,000 new contributors in a single day  the largest 24-hour haul of any Republican candidate to date.

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Meanwhile, those candidates who have amassed roomfuls of well-paid online experts have frequently found themselves buffeted or embarrassed (or sometimes both at once) by mysterious forces outside their grasp. Take, for instance, the much-forwarded “Obama Girl” music video, written by a 21-year-old undergraduate at Temple University. (“Universal healthcare reform/It makes me warm,” mouths the model in the video.) Fairly or not, that video probably had more to do with shaping Obama’s complicated public image  young and exciting but maybe a bit shallow  than any Internet appeal devised by the candidate’s own aides.