The post-mortems of the Internet Candidate are coming in. Was Dean's surge a mirage, as suggested by Clay Shirky? Does this suggest that many of the new tools such as social networking are equally as vacuous? Most surreally, has the self-referential, self-congratulatory post-modern world of the net found its comeuppance when colliding with the real world of voters?
Given the money he raised, the attention he garnered, and the impact he had on defining the terms of debate, it is difficult to conclude that the Dean phenom was all buzz and no substance. Indeed, Dean has redefined the primary process in a way not seen since Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere. His methods will be studied and copied in campaigns to come. He could even be said to be a third-party candidate who cleverly co-opted the brand of the Democratic Party to gain legitimacy.
A simpler explanation is that what the Net giveth, TV can taketh away. Dean's persona was created online (and in Doonesbury), but he neglected to bring it to the living room through television. Hence when faced with their first real look at Dean during the "I Got a Scream" speech, the voters in New Hampshire figured there was something screwy about the candidate. Perhaps if they had had longer television exposure to Dean, he could have survived this. But other candidates have had their efforts crater overnight due to events on TV which jarred the voters: Muskie's crying, Romney's brainwashing, Dukakis's tank.
This is a lesson we first learned at the dawn of the TV Age: the Nixon-Kennedy debates. Nixon won the debate on radio, but lost it on TV, not because of what he said, but because of how he looked. To many pundits, this was a tragedy, as it changed the character of the political process from substance to image. Given how deliciously the Scream speech was played over and over on morning radio programs, history has once again repeated itself, as a farce.
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