Soon after coming to Burlington, Vt., from Moab, Utah, and depositing himself at former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean's headquarters, Mathew Gross was commissioned by Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi to set up a blog for the campaign. The rest is history.
Today, every campaign for the presidency has a blog. There's an O-Blog (official) and several U-Blogs (unoffical) for President Bush. And the blogosphere routinely keeps stories alive until mainstream dailies choose to report on them.
Gross has now left the Dean campaign. As befits the first blogger-in-chief in presidential campaign history, he agreed to answer some questions online before hopping in his car and heading to North Carolina. In the future, Gross will stay in touch with his former Dean campaign readers via his own blog, Deride and Conquer.
Why are you going to North Carolina?
To be with my wife, who has been down there since early January.
Where will you live?
Probably the Boston area.
Are you considering or would you consider working for another campaign (presidential or other)?
I'll consider anything. The first order of business is to send George Bush to a crushing defeat in November. I'll put my shoulder to the wheel, in some capacity at least.
Why did you leave the Dean campaign?
For family medical reasons, primarily. Nothing extraordinary or dramatic. It was time.
What do you think Dean's chances are of winning the Democratic nomination?
Far better than Carol Moseley Braun's, Dick Gephardt's, Joe Lieberman's, or Wesley Clark's.
Besides Gov. Dean, which candidate could/would you support?
I'll support whoever the nominee is. But I still believe that the person in the field who would make the best president is Howard Dean. That was the assessment I made a year ago in Utah, and nothing's changed it.
You were brought onto the Dean campaign by Joe Trippi. What was it like to work there after he left?
I didn't work in the office much after Trippi left -- I had to attend to some personal matters. I was in and out. Obviously many people were sad to see Joe go, but Roy Neel was welcomed with open arms and is doing a fine job.
Do you have any plans to work with Trippi in the future?
We've only just begun to talk about it. I'll probably visit him on his farm sometime in the next week or two. I'm sure we'll be up all night drinking Diet Pepsis and talking about what might be next.
How is he doing? What is his new blog about?
It's about continuing the fight. It's about giving the American people a platform to reclaim their republic. There are some things that people just have to do themselves, and restoring the democratic process is one of them.
What do you think the lessons of the Dean campaign are for future political campaigns?
The lesson is that technology, coupled with true grassroots support, can level the playing field. Actually, it can flip the playing field on its head, as it did in 2003. It's clear that any candidate who ignores the Internet in the future -- as most of the Democratic candidates did in the first half of 2003 -- is going to be at a severe disadvantage.
What do you think the legacy of the Dean campaign will be?
I do believe that the Dean campaign will be looked on as a seminal moment in American politics. We really signaled the beginning of the end of the broadcast age in politics, and the change is going to be even more rapid from here.
Now I know that the retort of the day is that in the end television mattered more in 2004, but that retort, smug as it is, is extremely short-sighted. A little historical perspective is in order. The apogee of network television lasted barely more than a generation, and in ten years the distinction between television and the Internet is likely to be an academic one. The level of interactivity will increase, and people's options will increase. I don't say this as a tech geek or as some wild-eyed futurist, neither of which I am. It's simply the direction that technology is heading. What this means is that people are going to have more options to get involved in national politics. It also means that campaigns are going to have to become their own media channels, and find ways to reach out to an increasingly segmented American audience. Campaigns will have to decentralize as the electorate becomes more decentralized. And I think the Dean campaign has shown the way for other campaigns to do that.
How has the Dean campaign's use of the Internet changed politics and campaigning? How has it not changed politics and campaigning?
The Internet has the ability to nationalize any race -- look at the Chandler race in Kentucky right now. But the Internet's not a trick. You still need a good candidate with a good message. And the media still exerts an enormous influence. That influence can be countered by the Internet, but the Net doesn't eliminate it.
How has it changed you? Are you more cynical or disillusioned than you were going into the campaign?
Obviously it changed my life in ways that I could not have forseen a year ago. But cynical? Not at all. Disillusionment was pulling the lever for the Democratic Party in November of 2002. Cynicism was the leaders of my party voting for George Bush's war in hopes that it would improve their electoral prospects. But look at what people have accomplished. They've transformed the Democratic race. They've put Bush on the ropes. They've given the Democratic Party a spine. And the amazing thing -- the thing I still have yet to see a single pundit get -- was that only 600,000 people in a nation of 300 million did that. 600,000 people shook the very foundation of political power in this country. It was an earthquake felt by both parties, the media, and the special interests. That feeling scared the hell out of a lot of people in Washington D.C. But you know what it felt like to the rest of us? It felt like hope.
When did you first recognize that the bottom was starting to fall out of the campaign?
I'll tell you in Boston in July.
Garance Franke-Ruta is a senior editor at the Prospect. Read more from the campaign trail with her new blog, Campaign Dispatches
