MEETUP Mojo

I know we've been talking non-stop about how cool MEETUP's are in the Dean Campaign, but don't miss Bill McKibben's description of the PLAIN OLD FUN of the MeetUp's he's been to -- from his letter posted on the Dean blog today.

But what’s really impressive is how he has turned politics back into a participant sport. For as long as I’ve been conscious, presidential politics has been about raising money from rich people and then buying television ads designed to confuse everyone else. The Dean campaign is utterly different: people gather every month in Meetups at church basements and high school cafeterias (all sociologically-minded friends should definitely visit one of these) and there they write letters to voters, plan small events. Pundits have made a lot of the Internet, and indeed Dean’s people have used it well—but the way they’ve used it best is to allow real people who never before felt like they had any stake in the process to become deeply involved. This is radical democracy, far more radical and more important than the particular positions he’s staking out. The fact that it comes from a radical center, not the left or the right, makes it all the more important—makes it completely possible that Dean can win in November. And then when he wins he’ll actually be able to tackle the big problems—global warming, Social Security, etc—that just overwhelm even well-intentioned politics as usual.