Why, you ask?

He forget that a bunch of people who do matter, don’t have computers.

In The Marketing of A President, Edward Cone raved about how amazing the Dean campaign was at getting people together through MeetUp.com. Cone also raved about the grassroots network of support they created all across the country. He also raved about the millions of small dollar donations they received that equalled and surpassed what the other candidates were getting through their high dollar chicken dinners.

If you read Joe Trippi’s book “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (which is actually quite good) it is almost identical in its raves.

And yet, Dean lost Iowa…and Dean wasn’t nominated by the Democrats for President.

One of the best (liberal) takes on Dean’s falling star in 2004 comes from a blog posting by Jerry Bowles entitled “The Internet Does Not Scale / The Internet Is Not Random.” In it he wrote:

Pew has repeatedly found in its research that those with higher income and education levels are much more likely to be Internet users. On the opposite pole, African-Americans and seniors—two of the most solid cornerstones of Democratic support–are among the least likely to go online.

These are people who don’t know or care that Joe Trippi is an open-source kind of guy or which candidate raised the most money online. They don’t even know who Joe Trippi is.

But, It turns out they’re just as fed up with Bush as those of us who do; they just didn’t share our enthusiasm for Dean simply because he got to the right positions first.

Those farmers in Iowa and New Hampshire who climbed into their long-underwear and four-buckle arctic boots with cow dung on the heels and went out and heard the candidates live took a long look at our boy, Dean, and decided he was not the strongest choice to rid the nation of the plague of the House of Bush.

When it came down to it, in 2004, the internet was a good way to raise money and generate ideas (i.e. compain about things), but it was only accessible to a certain group of people.

When those people who had never received an email from Dean, or seen Dean’s blog, finally did come face to face with Dean and the campaigns of 2004, it wasn’t Dean that connected with them.

And though technology is rapidly changing in America, even in 2012 there will still be people a campaign will need to reach that can’t be reached through a cable.