BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.

HOWARD DEAN: I am no longer actively pursuing the presidency.

BOB GARFIELD: And with that, the doctor was out. Howard Dean's announcement after his dismal third place showing in the Wisconsin primary surprised few, but since then we've seen campaign obituary after campaign obituary, each doing its best to explain what on earth happened to the candidate who a little over a month ago was the undisputed favorite for the Democratic nomination. Some blame Dean for not keeping his cool, and some blame his staffers for squandering the campaign's nest egg. Many blame the media. But one of the most compelling explanations we've found suggests that Dean's lead never actually existed to begin with. Clay Shirky, an expert on the sociology of the Internet, wrote in his web log “Many to Many” that, quote, "Dean's campaign didn't just fail; it dissolved on contact with reality." And he offered a useful metaphor for understanding the collective delusion -- the corporate letterhead.

CLAY SHIRKY: In the old days, if you got something on corporate letterhead, it meant there was a solvent company behind it, because they had the money to get someone to design the letterhead, they had the money to have it printed and stored somewhere and so forth and so on. And along comes the desktop publishing revolution, and so suddenly, you know, as a, an individual with no incorporation, no lawyer, no clients, I can create corporate letterhead and send it off, and anybody who looks at that letterhead, at least in the early days of the desktop publishing revolution, said oh, my goodness, you know, this person must represent a really big company. And over time we've come to realize that sophisticated graphic presentation is no longer emblematic of large resources behind it. I think that a lot of what happened is that the Dean campaign created the political equivalent of desktop publishing letterhead; that it made so many previously hard things easy that we all came to believe that he had made getting votes easy as well.

BOB GARFIELD:Let's talk about the thing that first caught the attention of some campaign reporters --the seemingly spontaneous turnout of 300 people at a Howard Dean Meetup in New York City--

CLAY SHIRKY: Right.

BOB GARFIELD: -- in early 2003. This sort of thing was unprecedented.

CLAY SHIRKY: We assumed that that was a sign of enormous latent strength, and I feel, you know, especially dumb for having missed this, because of course what Meetup was actually founded to do, actually -- full disclosure -I'm an advisor to the company - was to lower the hassle of getting people together in the real world. So it wasn't so much that those 300 people signified that there was this huge upwelling of support for Howard Dean but rather that if you supported Howard Dean it was now much, much easier to gather with like-minded individuals. But what it means is that you can no longer look at the number of people who turn out for a particular cause or candidate as evidence of a much larger pool of support.

BOB GARFIELD: So it is in effect the desktop publishing-produced letterhead.

CLAY SHIRKY: Right.

BOB GARFIELD: You've just found a new tool.

CLAY SHIRKY:And in this case, they found several tools in successive order - it wasn't just a kind of one-off novelty. There was Meetup, but there was also the involvement of Moveon. There were web logs, there were mailing lists, there were wickies which are these collaborative workspaces where people were working at policy, there was the incredible fundraising story. And all of that stuff together produced a set of numbers that in past elections and for other candidates have been incredible predictors of electoral success as well. It looks in retrospect like what Dean had done is lower the difficulty of doing those kinds of things -- raising money and turning out supporters -- without lowering the difficulty of getting people to actually go for the polls and push the button for Dean.

BOB GARFIELD:Okay, Clay, I hear what you're saying. However, apart from the media coverage and the, the cover stories in Newsweek, the poll numbers were very good. He had a gigantic lead in New Hampshire and in Iowa--

CLAY SHIRKY: Right.

BOB GARFIELD: -- that did in fact evaporate. What do you make of that?

CLAY SHIRKY: Well, they only evaporated if they were there, and they were only there if polls are the same as votes. And we've gotten so used to polls predicting votes that we've treated them as the same, but they're actually two different kinds of things. A vote is a one-off in non-binding choice. A poll is essentially a, an opinion offered for public consumption. Dean offered a really direct and muscular challenge to a president who is hugely polarizing and therefore hugely energizing, and he did it on a number of issues that Democrats are usually afraid of, especially the war. And so, up until people had to actually decide who to vote for, Howard Dean was pronounced anybody but Bush, all right? And once people came around to having to decide not about general issues but who they were specifically going to vote for in their state, I don't think Dean's support evaporated. I think the poll questions essentially became different. Instead of who's saying the kind of things you like right now -- which are the poll questions last fall -- it became very specifically who are you going to cast your vote for -- and those are two different questions, and we got two different answers.

BOB GARFIELD:All right, well then fine. We have seen how the internet can create the spiffy letterhead. Tell me how you suppose, looking forward, a small group of people using the internet can really change the minds of the largest part of the body politic.

CLAY SHIRKY: You know, a lot of the initial effect around the Dean campaign was simply the novelty of the thing. The bloom is off that rose. So in the future, people will be able to pick up these tools without the kind of complicated effects of the press coverage about the tools which seems to be about the candidate. That having been said, I think any campaign that picks up these tools faces a risk that the potential successes of using the internet to organize people or to raise money undermines their sense of how hard it is to get votes. The Dean base was famously energized. You know, they took on the name for themselves "Deaniacs." Margaret Mead once said, you know, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful and committed people can change the world. Indeed it's the only thing that ever had." And of course that's vacuously true, but the systems that run the modern world, democracies and markets, are actually designed to defeat exactly those attempted hijackings by small groups. You can't out-believe the opposition. You have to convince other people to vote your guy in.

BOB GARFIELD: Clay, thank you.

CLAY SHIRKY: Not at all. Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD:Clay Shirky is a consultant and writer on the social aspects of internet technologies. He teaches in the interactive telecommunications program at New York University. [MUSIC]

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