ABSTRACT
Bobby Clark, the first web strategist for the Dean campaign, describes the chaotic, almost absurd early days of Dean’s Internet campaign, including stories of borrowing icons from The West Wing to create a hasty mockup of a website. He explores in detail a few critical technological choices around contact management tools, and the development of online tools that enabled people to become their own fund-raisers in presidential campaigns. He describes how his background in technology start-ups influenced his approach to the nascent web campaign, and argues that the open-source ideology played an important role in the campaign’s early commitment to using the Internet to connect people, instead of to broadcast. An Internet campaign, he argues, is ultimately, a reflection of the group of people who make it up.
