By Neil the Ethical Werewolf When I first read Ezra's Gore piece, my thoughts were something like, "When Gore finally succeeds with this disintermediation stuff, I'll probably have enough money to buy a holographic projector so I can receive 3D pods in my space station!" But now that I've seen his latest post, disintermediation looks a lot more run-of-the-mill than it did before. Cutting out the middleman between candidates and swing voters is a herculean task. Cutting out the middleman between candidates and activists is a relatively easy one that everybody is doing. The following things strike me as obvious: The internet makes it possible for people to be heard by millions of others who are interested in hearing them, at a very low cost. Putting your candidate's most exciting speeches up on the internet so activists can see them is a great idea. When you take a popular position on an issue and expend some effort to push it, email your supporters telling them what you're up to. And campaigns generally are doing these things. Ezra talks about Howard Dean in the post below, and doesn't mention the central factor in the Dean story: Iraq. If you have a candidate who passionately argues for an unpopular position early in the primaries while others oppose it, and that position becomes a strongly held majority view among the party base, the candidate becomes a frontrunner. I don't know how much explanatory work the internet stuff does here. The old media was perfectly happy to play up the fight between the anti-war outsider and the pro-war establishment. And while the new media portrayed Dean's views much more accurately than the old (most people are still astonished when you mention that he's a big budget-balancing guy) I'd be pretty surprised to see anyone argue that the use of blogs to recruit fiscal conservatives played a big role in his rise.
