Will the Internet candidate please stand?

The recent announce­ments of changes in the cam­paign man­age­ment of the Dean pres­i­den­tial cam­paign raise some inter­est­ing questions.

As polit­i­cal observers know by now, Joe Trippi, the man cred­ited with cre­at­ing a new polit­i­cal approach by using the Inter­net, has been replaced at the head of the Dean cam­paign by Roy Neel.

In: Tele­com Insider

The impact of this change goes much beyond a sim­ple change of man­age­ment. Neel was pres­i­dent and CEO of the USTA, which bills itself as “the voice of the con­verged tele­com industry”.

The USTA and the Inter­net crowds have often been on opposed end of the polit­i­cal spec­trum. His­tor­i­cally, the USTA has been the orga­ni­za­tion that pro­tects the Baby Bells. For exam­ple, the USTA believes that IP tele­phony should be sub­jected to the same charges as reg­u­lar tele­phone car­ri­ers and does not sup­port Wire­less Num­ber Portability.

Granted, it is unfair to look at the cur­rent record of an orga­ni­za­tion and use it to paint a neg­a­tive image of a for­mer pres­i­dent. Maybe the orga­ni­za­tion changed rad­i­cally from when he was their pres­i­dent. So let’s look at his record: Neel is against reg­u­la­tions of tele­phone com­pa­nies but against shar­ing lines, which he sees as anti-competitive. Here’s what he had to say:

line shar­ing cre­ate a tremen­dous dis­in­cen­tive for invest­ment by the local exchange car­ri­ers in the deploy­ment of dig­i­tal sub­scriber lines and other advanced services

Well, OK… so many he’s pro-consumer and wants to do what’s best to ensure more com­pe­ti­tion, except…
In March 1997, the FCC was con­sid­er­ing a deci­sion on reduc­ing local tele­phone access charges. Where did the USTA and its pres­i­dent stand? Opposed to it.

Out: Decen­tral­ized Internet-based campaigning

Buried in a New York Times story comes the announce­ment that “Mr. Neel would cen­tral­ize decision-making in Burling­ton but would not be dic­tat­ing to the field offices.” This strikes me as a depar­ture from the pre­vi­ous strat­egy of push­ing power to the edge and cre­at­ing an open-source pres­i­den­tial campaign.

Does that mean that the dis­trib­uted nature of the Dean cam­paign is now breath­ing its last breath and that the Dean cam­paign is aban­don­ing the Inter­net prin­ci­ples that got it so far?

A void in Inter­net candidacy

With these changes, the Dean cam­paign seems to sig­nal a shift away from the Inter­net and towards a more tra­di­tional approach. This seems to cre­ate a void that could be filled by other can­di­dates but who will step up to the plate? There is an obvi­ous oppor­tu­nity here for any­one who wants to get an ener­gized base to join them.

At the end of the day, the media went after Dean because he rep­re­sented some­thing vastly dif­fer­ent. His use of the Inter­net was scary to them because it sub­verted all the estab­lished chan­nels, get­ting around the tra­di­tional media, around the estab­lished power-that-be in pol­i­tics and giv­ing a truly pop­ulist cam­paign back to the peo­ple, empow­er­ing them through the Inter­net. Any can­di­date that steps up to the plate and wants to become the Inter­net can­di­date will have to real­ize that he/she will be attacked for it because it is truly a revolution.

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