Well, it looks as if Michael Wolff was right all along, the Dean campaign did carry the seeds of its own destruction. A short entry on John Naughton’s blog, led me to a long thoughtful piece by Clay Shirky analysing the failure of the campaign and why so many people got it wrong. It’s a good read, but I’m not sure that it adds that much to what Michael Wolff said some months ago.
The danger in all this is that just as the significance of Dean’s campaign became over inflated, it may now be too easily dismissed. My sense is that its real significance was its role in changing the agenda, rather than its role in garnering support for one candidate. I suspect that as time goes on we will see an increasingly sophisticated adoption of the methods Dean’s people used not only to change agendas but to create and define them.