“. . .
I forget
sometimes that we did, but we really believed. . . .
there was a core passion that we all shared about
actually changing the shape of political society.
“There’s no clear answer to me about why that happened .
. . It’s not so simple as the DNC speech or the NYC
Meetup flipping a switch. I don’t remember when I first
started believing that it was possible—this restructuring
of society . . . I like to think some of the tools I had
a hand in were instrumental—Get Local and so on—but I can
really imagine the Dean campaign without all of these
things, except perhaps Meetup. What I can’t imagine is
the Dean campaign without that conviction and belief, the
culture of passionate, pragmatic work toward something
much different and bigger than a candidate—the tool that
made up the molecular structure of everything we did—in a
deeply contentious, anxious environment, the one tool
that held us all together, if barely.”
--Zephyr Teachout, in
Chapter Five of Mousepads, Shoe
Leather, and Hope: Lessons from the Dean Campaign for the
Future of Internet Politics (2007)
