{"id":91,"date":"2003-09-12T21:08:48","date_gmt":"2003-09-13T01:08:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/2003\/09\/12\/the-transformative-campaign-blogger-"},"modified":"2012-05-04T00:06:23","modified_gmt":"2012-05-04T04:06:23","slug":"the-transformative-campaign-blogger-matt-gross","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/2003\/09\/12\/the-transformative-campaign-blogger-matt-gross\/","title":{"rendered":"The Transformative Campaign Blogger: Matt Gross"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a314'><\/a><\/p>\n<p><P><FONT face=\"Times New Roman,Times,Serif\"><FONT size=\"4\">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <A href=\"http:\/\/cyber.law.harvard.edu\/ml\/output.pl\/35502\/download\/matt.gross.mp3\">Listen here<\/A>.&nbsp; There&#8217;s a nice chicken-and-egg argument to be had&nbsp;whether Howard Dean harnessed the bloggers or, contrarily, the blog zeitgeist found and inflated the Dean candidacy.&nbsp; <IMG hspace=\"5\" src=\"http:\/\/media.skybuilders.com\/lydon\/images\/mattGross.jpg\" align=\"left\" vspace=\"5\">Either way, I think the late Theodore (<EM><STRONG>Making of the President<\/STRONG><\/EM>) White would begin his narrative of the 2004 cycle with the <A href=\"http:\/\/blog.deanforamerica.com\/archives\/cat_open_threads.html\">&#8220;open thread&#8221;<\/A> of the Dean blog,&nbsp;from the moment last Spring when the Dean people relaunched their main&nbsp;page on&nbsp;comment-friendly&nbsp;Movable Type software, called it &#8220;Blog for America&#8221; and turned a campaign into a public conversation.&nbsp; Mathew Gross, 31,&nbsp;was the stray volunteer from Utah, a writer-blogger who&#8217;d also been a rock drummer and a Colorado River guide, who put blogging at the center of the Democrats&#8217; nominating campaign.&nbsp; Since 1960, he remarked in our <A href=\"http:\/\/cyber.law.harvard.edu\/ml\/output.pl\/35502\/download\/matt.gross.mp3\">conversation<\/A> this afternoon, &#8220;presidential politics has been a broadcast medium and a spectator sport.&#8221;&nbsp; Blog for America may have&nbsp;changed that forever.&nbsp;&nbsp;The Internet money machine&nbsp;for&nbsp;Dean is important, of course, but so is the blog&nbsp;discourse&#8211;hip, disciplined,&nbsp;hopeful.&nbsp; Matt Gross sets the tone: &#8220;Widen the circle,&#8221; he&nbsp;writes.&nbsp; &#8220;We must build the community now.&nbsp; We have to stay focused.&#8221;&nbsp; Anticipating Dave Winer&#8217;s <A href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/bloggerCon\/\">BloggerCon<\/A> at Harvard in October, Matt Gross had his own <A href=\"http:\/\/blog.deanforamerica.com\/archives\/001397.html\">interesting forum<\/A> the other day on &#8220;how blogs can create\/are creating a better election.&#8221;&nbsp; His is a blog getting hundreds of posts and now&nbsp;30,000 visits&nbsp;a day.&nbsp; The <A href=\"http:\/\/blog.deanforamerica.com\/archives\/cat_open_threads.html\">open thread<\/A>&nbsp;reads to me not like&nbsp;agit-prop.&nbsp; It&#8217;s&nbsp;more nearly a&nbsp;sort of soundtrack, with abundant links, of center-left Democrats trying to make up their mind&nbsp;that the ex-governor of Vermont is tough enough, and good enough, to take the country back.&nbsp;&nbsp;It&#8217;s the lefties that are holding out.&nbsp; I was struck by the&nbsp;response from <STRONG><A href=\"http:\/\/blog.deanforamerica.com\/archives\/001302.html#64658\">Mike in CT<\/A><\/STRONG> two weeks ago:<\/FONT><\/FONT><\/P><br \/>\n<BLOCKQUOTE><br \/>\n<P><FONT face=\"Times New Roman,Times,Serif\" size=\"4\"><EM>A Case Against the Case Against the Case For Howard Dean: Can We All Stop This Madness? &#8230;Truth be told, I&#8217;m still waiting for a minority radical feminist who puts renewable energy above everything else and guts the military budget to invest in renewable state-of-the-art public schools (including free college education). But you know what? I&#8217;ll be waiting a little while longer. While I could write articles saying Dennis Kucinich isn&#8217;t my dream candidate &#8211; &#8220;After all, one need not point out that our candidate of hope is not EVEN a minority radical feminist.&#8221; &#8211; while I could do this, I don&#8217;t. And why? Because today there is a bigger fight to be fought.<\/EM><\/FONT><\/P><\/BLOCKQUOTE><br \/>\n<P><FONT face=\"Times New Roman,Times,Serif\" size=\"4\">Clever writing.&nbsp; Serious politics.&nbsp; <A href=\"http:\/\/cyber.law.harvard.edu\/ml\/output.pl\/35502\/download\/matt.gross.mp3\">Here&#8217;s Matt Gross<\/A>.&nbsp; As the old pols say, get to know him before you need him.<\/FONT><\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Listen here.&nbsp; There&#8217;s a nice chicken-and-egg argument to be had&nbsp;whether Howard Dean harnessed the bloggers or, contrarily, the blog zeitgeist found and inflated the Dean candidacy.&nbsp; Either way, I think the late Theodore (Making of the President) White would begin his narrative of the 2004 cycle with the &#8220;open thread&#8221; of the Dean blog,&nbsp;from [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1340,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1340"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":229,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions\/229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}