The Internet has been revolutionizing business and culture for years - and that was just a side effect. What's really going on is a political phenomenon, a democratic movement that flows naturally from our civic lives and spills over into the music we hear, the clothes we buy, the causes we support. Today, the Amazons and Friendsters seem like the peak of Internet development. But that's changing. The 2008 election will be the first national contest waged and won primarily online. The Web puts us over the tipping point; it's democracy's killer app.
For the best evidence, follow the money. In the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush raised $193 million; Al Gore, $133 million. As I'm writing, President Bush already has $229 million and Senator John Kerry has $185 million, 37 percent of it raised through his Web site. I don't want to be partisan about this, but these are the kind of numbers that make Karl Rove swear like Dick Cheney. Kerry can counterpunch Bush in every battleground state.
For the Dean campaign, the average donation was $77; for Kerry, it's $106. These donations aren't coming from the Global PAC of Balding White Men Who Rule the Earth. They're coming from people like you and me.
More important, though, the Internet is quickly becoming the world's primary source of information. Reporters begin every day by reading blogs. They're looking for the pulse of the people, for stories they might have missed. The blogosphere has become fundamental - the plankton of the information ecology.
But it's not just the media elite who are affected. Television took 13 years to get into 50 million homes. The Web reached that number in only five years. September 11, 2001, was the key moment. The Pew Internet & American Life Project found that in the days immediately after 9/11, just 3 percent of Americans who were on the Internet used it as their primary source of information. Less than two years later, as the US was preparing for war with Iraq, that number had risen to 26 percent. Now, 77 percent say they have used the Internet to interact with news about the war. They're not just reading the Web; they're emailing one another, posting messages, writing blogs.
Television had the Kennedy-Nixon debates; the Net has begun to have watershed moments of its own. In Iraq, the US media is facing the same military censorship as they did during World War II. But skeptical Americans, hungry for real debate, can now go online and read foreign newspapers, listen to the BBC, and read blogs from people in other countries. The more homogenous journalism becomes, the more it drives people to the Web. No newsroom, not at The New York Times or ABC or Wired, can scoop 100 million reporters.
To toot my own horn (and those of more than half a million Dean supporters), our campaign was another push toward the tipping point. We proved that tens of thousands of people communicating outside the official campaign structure could be as powerful - even more powerful - than whoever was allegedly "in charge." I said it from the beginning: I didn't manage the Dean campaign. They did.
In 2008, a candidate will announce that he or she will not take any donations over $100 (just as Jerry Brown did in his quixotic but prescient 1992 presidential bid; as usual, he was ahead of his time). Some innovative, Internet-spun software will accelerate, enable, or alter every element of that campaign - advance, fieldwork, communications, rapid response. And 2 million people will each send $100. The campaign will have a war chest of $200 million and will be able to do whatever it wants.
Listen, most Americans are unhappy with both political parties; they assume that every candidate is lying to them. Young people say they're powerless to change anything except the channel. Our founders feared this would happen, so they placed the power to elect a new government - the power of revolution - in the hands of the people. We've had the right to fix the system since 1789. Now we have the tools, and the will to use them.
Joe Trippi (joe@joetrippi.com) managed Howard Dean's campaign for president and is the author of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.VIEW
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Power to the People
