McFreedom

One random thought about this most recent election. While everyone likes to talk about the way the Internet has influenced this election, it seems to me that a lot of this influence has been...well, illusiory. Remember this time last year when Howard Dean was an unstoppable juggernaught because he had the Internet that was firing up his base? And then none of them made it out to vote and he died?

Before he died, though, he made Kerry tack left - voting against funding the Iraq occupation, for example - which left Kerry very vulnerable in the broader electorate. Amazingly, Kerry went on to make the exact same mistake thinking that millions of new voters would be fired up by the Internet and swing the election. If the Democrats had simply ignored the Internet, they probably would've been better off. Instead, they kept getting the wrong directions from it, and drove off a cliff.