PVII. Dean as Figure

Joe Trippi, the author of the book The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, was also for a time the campaign manager for Vermont Governor Howard Dean’s Presidential bid in 2004. Trippi was largely credited for the Dean Campaign’s innovative use of social software tools to raise campaign funds, mobilize popular participation in the campaign, and distribute information about his candidacy.

Dean is a figure in whom both the reckless enthusiasms as well as the dashed hopes that presumably inevitably freight utopian technophilia condense with an especially illuminating ferocity. The enthusiasm generated for a time by what was widely described (perhaps without perfect justice for such a conventionally moderate American politician) as an “insurgent candidacy” arising out of the American Left was largely assimilated to befuddled rather nervous contemplations by mainstream media pundits of the role of digital networked media in particular in Dean’s campaign (and, from their perspective, the probably threateningly expanding role of digital networks in politics to come). And it is no surprise that when Dean’s campaign went on to evaporate in an embarrassing defeat in the 2004 Iowa caucuses the end of its narrative was likewise regularly assimilated through the figure of a “bursting bubble” to the kinds of irrationally exuberant hyperbole of the “dot.com” internet enthusiasms that preceded their own rather stunning failures at the turn of the millennium.

In his Iowa concession speech, Dean shouted to be heard over the enthusiastic voices of his supporters in a crowded room, not realizing that this crowd noise was filtered out for vast broadcast television and radio audiences, creating an impression for them of near hysteria as he cheered his supporters on above the din. What has been variously dubbed (now quite literally, as it happens, into any number of dance mixes, among other things) “the Dean Scream” or the “I Have a Scream Speech,” was then looped interminably over the twenty-four hour broadcast news cycle, kneaded into what had already been widely criticized as an unfair but by then effortlessly and so apparently irresistibly available mainstream narrative of Dean’s “immoderateness” and consequent “unelectability.”

And so, through the figure of Howard Dean, a narrative and argumentative frame arraying the distortive and dystopian machineries of elite broadcast media against the utopian “Netroots” democratization of social software becomes well nigh irresistible for technoprogressive media critics and enthusiasts.

That this frame arose specifically in the aftermath of Dean’s rather spectacular defeat (although Dean’s subsequent bid to be elected Chair of the Democratic National Committee, in February, 2005, which was likewise figured as an anti-establishment “insurgency” supported primarily by “Netroots” mobilization, was successful), should surely recommend some qualification at least to the optimism of its most eager advocates. Consider the extent to which corporate press releases from Diebold Election Systems -- now weighted down with suspicions in connection with the statistically curious results of the November 2004 American Presidential Election itself, in which they played, together with Dean, a significant role in the larger drama -- deployed comparably sunny technophilic stylings, dilating endlessly and cheerfully about the security, ease, and techno-enfranchisement facilitated by digitality, even as machines they developed eschewed open source, lacked reliable authentication mechanisms, and refused to provide tangible records or “paper trails” by means of which their tabulations could be compared against voting practices affirmed by citizens themselves.

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