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Per Richard Bennett (via Jeff Jarvis):
So what is happening? Briefly put, Dean’s problem is the Deaniacs. The Internet-driven campaign has enabled him to amass a large following, but they’re primarily unbalanced people, fanatical followers, extremists, and wackos. In my experience with Internet-enabled activism, these are the kind of people most attracted to online chat and email wars, so an organization that’s going to use these tools to recruit has to prune the weirdos before they run off the mainstream people you need to reach out to the undecided mainstream people whose support you really need in the voting booth. Others have written that the orange-hatted, tattooed, and body-pierced volunteers who flew into Iowa alienated the actual voters, and that’s real.
If many of those surrounding Dean were batty—is it possible that Dean believed they were everyday Americans? Could that help explain why he thought his angry, extremist rhetoric would play to the American people?
