Berman’s voluminous reporting, based on interviews with campaign insiders, tracks how Dean first embraced this “netroots’’ strategy as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Dean was an outsider who had become disillusioned with both the regionalization of the party (strong in the Northeast and Midwest, but conceding much of the South and West to Republicans) and its tendency to seek the safe middle ground by accommodating Republican ideas such as welfare reform, deregulation, and the war in Iraq. As chairman of the DNC, Dean encountered a party controlled by Washington insiders and veteran political consultants, none of whom he much liked. And they loathed him.
Dean decided to make huge changes in the party’s ossified structure. “Dean had a simple message,’’ Berman writes, that “there were Democrats everywhere . . . and under his leadership the party would travel to all fifty states to find them. No longer would Democrats be a party of eighteen states dominated by a small circle of well-endowed political consultants.’’ Moreover, Dean helped pioneer a “small donor revolution’’ that would use the grass roots to match the traditional “big donor’’ power of Republicans. And it worked. Berman’s detailed reporting shows how Dean’s “fifty-state strategy’’ energized long-forgotten Democratic activists in supposed “red states’’ like South Carolina, Colorado, and Indiana.
Dean revamped the DNC’s fossilized information systems. He “began overhauling the DNC’s relationship with its online constituents, redesigning the website, conversing over blogs and e-mail, making sure grass-roots activists knew their state party officials and vice versa.’’ Dean also used social networking tools to build a powerful political network for Democrats. Additionally, he provided DNC money to cash-strapped local Democratic organizations. These actions broadened the Democratic base and brought many supposed red states into play for Obama.
