ABSTRACT
Kelly Nuxoll, a freelance writer and the e-mail manager for the Dean campaign, nicely describes the feelings of helplessness and outrage in the face of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq that motivated so many to join the campaign. Most of her chapter, however, is devoted to the structural dilemmas that the campaign faced around e-mail. E-mail remains the most basic and common form of Internet communication, and it constituted much of the fabric of the campaign. Nuxoll shows how the campaign struggled to maintain a personal, grassroots feel with the then-unusual principle of signing one’s own name to e-mails. But how is this feel maintained in the context of an energetic, burgeoning national political effort involving hundreds of thousands of activists and several times that many e-mails? Was e-mail in this context simply a form of marketing, like bulk mail? Or could it be more interactive? To the extent that it is interactive, who decides how and when those interactions should take place? The Dean campaign maintained a remarkably creative tension between these competing ideas; as Nuxoll illustrates, maintaining a balance was not always effortless or clear-cut.
