ABSTRACT
Jerome Armstrong founded the political blog MyDD and is a key figure in the creation of what some call “the liberal blogosphere” or “netroots” as a political force. He started blogging in support of Howard Dean’s candidacy in April 2002, and in the fall of 2002 he joined the volunteer-run Dean Nation blog. In the months that followed the campaign kickoff in January 2003, he worked with the campaign directors to integrate the decentralized online movement with the campaign, and he persuaded Joe Trippi to use Meetup. com for organizing. Within the campaign, from May 2003 to February 2004 at the Burlington, Vermont, headquarters, he directed Internet advertising, helped coordinate blogger outreach, and built and administered Dean’s https://ForumForAmerica.com community website (built with Markos Moulitsas; Murshed Zaheed ran the community), among other campaign tasks, but in this chapter he focuses on the early months, providing details of how the nascent netroots and the Dean campaign discovered each other. This was an essential and unique event—essential, because this serendipitous alliance transformed the campaign and charted new political waters, and unique, because having a campaign so open to outside influence was unprecedented. It is important to remember that at the time (and in many cases still to this day) the events Armstrong describes here—the spontaneous creation of pro-Dean blogs and websites, for example, or the free offering of strategic advice—would have been considered irrelevant or even annoying to the vast majority of professional political campaigners. Armstrong and his online compatriots managed to bring a mixture of political urgency, an improvisatory spirit imported from the Internet, and thoughtful optimism to the effort.
