We called it lovingly the "U-Blog" or the "DeanBlog". It's the forgotten chapter in the history of the liberal blogosphere -- the blog that made Joe Trippi a cult hero and launched many of the leading lights in blogotopia today (Marisacat, A Gilas Girl, Colleen, Folkbum, Jonathan4Dean, Jumbo) as well as many passionate voices now silent (Chase, Hamletta, Scott Gamel). Among its early posters (aside from founder Aziz Poonawalla, who still blogs at City of Brass) were blog titan Annatopia and current DNC Internet Director Joe Rospars. At the time -- this was before the now-defunct Not Geniuses -- Joe's home base was That Other Blog, where he often posted drunken rants that were enjoyed by me and others. Those were the days...
It all started like this:
Ok, here we go!
I'm devoting this blog to a collection of links I find about Howard Dean, Democratic governor of Vermont, and candidate for teh Democratoc nomination in the 2004 Presidential Election.
I voted for Gore here in Texas (actually, I vote-swapped with a Nader supporter in Oregon) in 2000. That was mainly a lesser-of-three-evils kind of choice. But with Howard Dean, I feel that there finally is a candidate who really meets my political, social, and economic criteria.
Libertarian civil policy, neo-Wilsonian foreign policy, conservative fiscal policy, liberal social policy. This is where I have evolved to in my own views, esppecially after September 11th. And that's what I see so far with Howard Dean. So, this blog will track him through the press online and I will see if he lives up to his potential.
Let's see where it leads us!
And oh, did it ever lead us...
I was one of those who got my start at Dean Nation -- in December of 2002, a full three months before I started blogging at Kos. Aziz was supporting Dean because he was a centrist who talked tough to the hacks in Washington, and I got on the bandwagon. I convinced my friend Lavoisier1794, who at the time was supporting some guy named Kerry, that Dean was the real deal.
Together we watched as first Dean himself and then Joe Trippi discovered the blogosphere through Dean Nation. I doubt anyone in the blogosphere has ever been so loved and worshipped as was Joe Trippi during those heady days. (I personally wrote poems to the guy, so...We shared meetup stories with each other (I was one of the founders of my Meetup group here in Flagstaff). We pledged money. We joined up with the Dean Defense Forces of another Not Genius, the great Matt Singer (now of Left in the West). Ezra Klein, originally a Hart blogger, came over and had a few memorable dustups with some of us Deaniacs (and came off extremely well, if I recall correctly). We were an ever-expanding community, and one that was very necessary for me at a particularly lonely time in my life.
And then, just as suddenly as the Dean Nation had boomed, it busted. Traffic was drawn off first to the "O-Blog," Blog for America, then to Kos after he became a Deaniac. After Dean exited the race, Aziz tried to keep the site running, but without the magnetic candidate to support it Dean Nation became a ghost town. By the end, it seemed as if Aziz was trying to recreate the Dean magic out of a merger between Hillary's centrism and Obama's magnetism -- but it just didn't fly for many of us. The movement was not dead, but it had moved on from its original stomping grounds.
But there are still some of us who remember those heady days when online politics was new and untested and a few visionaries believed it could change the world. What we have here today at Kos and throughout the liberal blogosphere, where politicians regularly stop on by and pay homage to the netroots, is primarily the spawn of the great experiment that was Dean Nation.
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