David Locke said on September 26, 2003 at 04:46 PM

I was looking at the Dean blog a while back. It’s acutally not Dean, but Dean supporters who are blogging and a few people on the Dean staff.

The entries were not really done with any conscious acknowledgement that the goal was to get Dean elected. Some of the Schwartzenger as a Fascist posts were over the top. Being a German-American, I wrote the campaign via email. And, to this day have not heard back. That was well over six weeks now, plenty of time to reply if they were going to.

Blogs are fine for candidates, but they are not enough. And, while Blogs aren’t supposed to be edited, I see where political blogs might need it.

In addition, communities are not substitutes for person-to-organization or person-to-person communications.

Meetups are not meeting the candidates. And, they took on cult-like overtones, so I was hesitant to throw in with them. The email response would have been the last gate. That gate is closed.

Not answering the email is simply unacceptable. I wasn’t asking for the moon. There are technologies that do triage on email and attempt to direct some attention on emails with emotional content. That might be it. I didn’t respond emotionally, ever objective, ever useless.

I don’t pay any attention to the Dean campaign now as a result of the blog and email failures. I’m certainly not going to get sucked up into the exuberance of the campaign. I was hoping for a “vote for” year this year. Too many elections have been “vote against” votes. We tend to ignore that not having someone to vote for is an absense of democracy. We’ll see.

Caglayan Emily Rekow said on May 3, 2004 at 10:31 AM

Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.

Manion Kim said on June 30, 2004 at 12:16 PM

Just because there’s a pattern doesn’t mean there’s a purpose.

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