With respect to the use of technology by the Dean campaign, Tom Mangan writes:

I just finished Ed Cone's piece, which seems to be missing one critical point: anything perceived good guy Howard Dean can do with technology can be replicated by his enemies (it's possible I glazed over this part, it's long article). Team Bush has $200 million and six months to play catch-up. It also has talk radio, the Fox Network and all the warbloggers on its side, plus the population's inherent tendency to side with the current prez during wartime. The Web knows no politics, it just offers politicians another way to get people to the polls. All Dean's "he gets it!" cheerleaders are gonna have some crow to digest if somebody really repellant uses all these tools to get elected in the future

From Prints the chaff
Referenced Fri Nov 21 2003 14:07:01 GMT-0700

Tom's right. There's no trade secret in what Dean's doing and indeed, to be effective, it would be hard to keep it a secret. Campaigns don't really work so much on secret information as much as they do on effective operations. I think this is how we want it. We want the playing field to be as even as possible so that the message and the ability to execute are what takes center stage. This hasn't always been the case with broadcast style democracy, maybe with connected democracy we will move more in this direction.

I disagree with Tom on his last point. I don't think someone odious will get elected because of some technology spin. They'll get elected because their message resonates with people and people vote for them. Happens all the time. Course my definition of "odious" may differ considerably from yours. :-)