I'll admit it: I'm a Dean supporter. Not for having embraced the Internet and bloggers, but actually because of his policies.
(geez, sounds like "I read Playboy for the articles... really.")
I read the Dean for America blog, which seems a little over the top, but if you dig deep enough beneath all of the hype and promotion has some useful information.
All of the discussion and speculation about traditional political pundits not grokking the Dean campaign has me wondering, though, whether Dean can really beat Bush on the path that he's on. Bush owns television media, and as long as the television pundits don't get Dean's campaign, or more likely recognize that Dean's success in using the Internet to reach voters decreases their power base, then the television coverage is going to skew heavily in favor of traditional candidates like Bush.
So here's a random idea: perhaps the Dean campagin should be putting free Internet kiosks in public locations like malls, bus stations, airports, convention centers, etc. Lots of studies have shown that as people's Internet usage goes up, their television viewing goes down. Let's get more people off television and onto the Internet.
I can imagine kiosks that are clearly labeled "Free Internet access, sponsored by Dean for America". With a paragraph saying clearly that this is unfiltered Internet access with which people can go find out information about any candidate, any political issue, or anything else they want to learn about -- that's a key tenet of a free society and one that the Dean campaign openly embraces.
Yes, there are people who will use the kiosks to surf for porn (though having them in very public places will hopefully dissuade that), and there are Republican campaign staff that will try to hack them to either break them or bias towards Bush propaganda, but the ad above the kiosk will still be there.
At some point when the Dean campaign has reached all of the potential Dean supproters on the Internet, they will need to find a way to reach out to everyone else to keep the growth and the momentum. Assume that Bush and FoxNews will continue to own the media. We'll need to find another way.
11:06:29 PM  ; ;
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