Monday, 12 January 2004

"70% of success in life is showing up." Believe it or not, the Howard Dean campaign is mobilizing here in Sydney, Australia. Regardless of your political views, you have to admit that Dean and his team have reinvented the modern election campaign (and, possibly, the modern Democratic Party): No one will run for office in the future without studying Dean's techniques.

I think it was back in October when I first read that the Dean campaign was using meetup.com to organize its supporters. Out of curiosity I visited the site, and discovered there were about a dozen Dean supporters in the Sydney area; they were trying to organize their first meeting, and didn't quite have the numbers to pull it off (a meetup requires at least five RSVPs).

So I signed myself up. I hadn't made up my mind yet on a candidate, but I wanted to see first-hand the results of Dean's little experiment in applied democracy: How would it work? What could American expats in Australia possibly do that would make a difference to the Dean campaign, aside from sitting way over here on the sidelines?

The November meetup came and went, without enough people in Sydney to have one. But in December there were exactly enough RSVPs: We had the minimum of five, and no more. I had signed up for something called "meetup plus" when I registered (it was an extra $20—I chalked it up to research), so I was nominally the host of the meetup, and dutifully printed out the materials the Dean campaign sent me. I also brought along all the information I could find about requesting an absentee ballot from overseas, since I figured anyone living abroad would need to know that.

Five people attended December's Dean meetup in Sydney: Myself, three people from the Australian media (!), and the head of the Democratic Party's expat chapter in Australia. We had a lively off-the-record discussion of Dean's campaign and American politics in general, which didn't do very much to boost Dean's chances in Iowa or in November—but you know the old saying about how avalanches start: One pebble at a time.

Last week we had the January Dean meetup, with nine people in attendance. Most had never been to a political meeting before, and their enthusiasm ranged from fence-sitters to passionate Dean supporters. We're sending hand-written letters to undecided Iowa voters (won't they be surprised by the airmail stamps) and talking about how we can reach out to other expats.

Somewhere along the way (in life as well as this narrative) I started referring to "Dean supporters" with words like we and us. It's surprising how that can happen; heck, it's downright amazing that it can happen, considering that I'm over 10,000 miles from Vermont and (until now) my political activism had been limited to voting. (Admittedly I've been writing about politics quite a bit lately, but this is also a recent development: When I lived in the States I mustered up just enough energy to vote every couple of years, but otherwise I was a bystander at the coliseum.)

Every human being has the desire—the need—to be a part of something that is greater than themselves. It's a permanent condition of the human spirit, and it motivates people to move mountains. When Howard Dean gets up in front of an audience and says his signature phrase, "you have the power," he is speaking directly to that want. And I respect and admire him for that, even as I may disagree with some of Dean's positions (which, I'm sure, I'll be writing about in the future). In no small part, though, I've gotten involved in the Dean campaign because I could—and because the Dean campaign made it easy. You just have to show up.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 10:38 am. comments.