I meant to post this when I finished it two weeks ago. It's a paper I wrote for a class, "Civil Society and the State: Rethinking Theory," about the Dean campaign as a case study in social capital formation. Nothing totally brilliant or original (and it could've used some more revisions), but I vainly thought others might find it interesting. Feedback is more than welcome.
When Howard Dean, then Governor of Vermont, first filed the paperwork for a presidential run in May 2002, the Boston Globe did not find the 500-word story worthy of its front page (Milligan). All available evidence indicates that the candidate himself had no expectation of ever occupying the Oval Office. And yet by the time his campaign began to collapse this January, it had become a media sensation that left pundits and political operatives alike playing catch-up as they sought to understand how a virtually-unknown governor from a small New England state had become the front-runner for his party's nomination despite beginning with virtually no support among its establishment.
On a personal level, I can distinctly recall laughing when first being told of Dean's impending candidacy by a friend from Vermont. I had just completed a course on American elections, during which it was made very clear that the increasingly front-loaded nature of the primary calendar meant that presidential nominees are chosen by insiders capable of raising large sums of money and securing key endorsements. Dean definitely did not fit that bill, and yet a year later I found myself interning for a campaign which had shattered virtually every Democratic Party fund-raising record and won the support of many of its key players, including the last nominee and the country's two most politically powerful labor unions.
Some of the explanation for the shift lies in the "right place, right time" character of Dean's strident anti-Bush rhetoric, but there was another, more paradigmatic innovation which is missed by analyzing the words and actions of the candidate. Dean became a phenomenon not just by connecting with grassroots supporters -- which every smart campaign seeks to do -- but by connecting them with one another. In so doing, they may not only have revolutionized the practice of political campaigning, but provided a fascinating case study for recent academic fascination with civic engagement.
The political press paid a great deal of attention to Dean's consistently harsh attacks on the Bush administration, and sometimes even on the Democratic Party, but relatively little discussion was given to what became a sort of credo for the campaign, with which he closed every speech:
The great lie spoken by politicians on platforms like this is the cry of "elect me and I will solve all your problems." The truth is the future of our nation rests in your hands, and not in mine. Abraham Lincoln said that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from this earth. But this President has forgotten ordinary people. ... You have the power to give Americans a reason to vote again. ... You have the power to take back the Democratic Party. You have the power to take our country back. And we have the power to take the White House back in 2004. (Dean, "Great American Restoration")
Cynics might dismiss such language as rhetorical flourish, but it was taken seriously and literally by supporters. By the time I saw Dean deliver those lines on election night in New Hampshire, much of the audience was reciting it along with him. And I doubt I was the only supporter moved to tears when I saw him deliver them on television for the last time as he exited the race. Such language set the tone and tenor of the campaign, by sending a strong message that it was not the property of staffers in Vermont, but of every supporter in every community around the nation.
But Dean's stump speeches, at their best, went beyond firing up his supporters, to communicating a certain vision of American society. While it is typical for political candidates -- particularly at the presidential level -- to use patriotic or downright nationalist imagery, Dean's language was qualitatively different. Quoting again from his announcement speech, appropriately titled "The Great American Restoration":
This campaign is about more than issue differences ... It is about something as important as our children. It's about who we are as Americans. Here are the words of John Winthrop: "We shall be as one. We must delight in each other, make other's conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always living before our eyes our Commission and Community in our work." It is that ideal, the ideal of the American community, that we seek to restore.... An America where it is not enough for me to want good public schools and a better life for my children - but an obligation, and a responsibility as citizens to insure that every child in America may go to a good public school and have the opportunity of a better life. An America where it is not enough to protect my rights under the law but where it is a duty and an obligation for each of us as Americans to make sure every American is equal under the law. An America where it is not enough to proclaim the words freedom, self-government, and democracy, but where it is a duty and a responsibility to participate together in common purpose with the sacrifice required of each of us to give those words meaning.
Dean probably did not realize -- although his speechwriter might have -- that he was echoing the writing of political scientist Robert Putnam in Making Democracy Work, where he uses Winthrop's quotation to almost precisely the same effect in articulating a vision of "civic community" which sounds surprisingly similar to Dean's. According to Putnam, a civic community is distinguished by three elements: civic engagement ("participate together in common purpose"); political equality ("make sure every American is equal under the law") ; and solidarity, trust, and tolerance ("the ideal of American community"). Importantly, writes Putnam, "The norms and values of the civic community are embodied in, and reinforced by, distinctive social structures and practices" (325). Specifically, "civil associations contribute to the effectiveness and stability of democratic government ... a dense network of secondary associations both embodies and contributes to effective social collaboration" (326). This is what Putnam and other social scientists call "social capital," formally defined as "social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them" (Bowling Alone), and it is what the Dean campaign sought to build.
Putnam is best known, at least popularly, not for his theoretical work in the Italian context, but his applied study of social capital in the United States. First in a journal article, and then in a full-length book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, he makes the jarring but well-researched argument that America's stock of social capital has undergone rapid and serious decline since the 1960s.
Putnam spends a chapter of that work specifically analyzing the decline in political participation, and his conclusions are worth exploring. First, he points to the oft-cited statistic that voter turnout has declined seriously in the past few decades, from a peak of 62.8% in 1960 to a low of 48.9% in 1996 (31-32). Unlike many popular commentators, however, he points out that "this widely reported fact understates the real decline in Americans' commitment to electoral participation" (32), because it occurred during a period when hurdles to voter registration were falling, and African-Americans in the south were being realistically enfranchised for the first time (32-33). In other words, the decline in electoral participation is even worse than popularly thought.
Internet entrepreneur Scott Heiferman was living in New York on September 11, 2001, when, struck by the outpouring of togetherness in the aftermath of the attacks, he read Bowling Alone and was inspired to found Meetup.com. Meetup.com is an online service which organizes monthly local gatherings for users with common interests. Signing up is as simple as entering a zip code and voting for a preferred local venue. However, the site struggled to attract interest -- the most popular Meetup was for those interested in practicing witchcraft -- until late 2002, when, according to Heiferman, one of his employees noticed that their nascent politics category was attracting participation from a growing number of Dean supporters. (Castrone)
By his account, Heiferman got in touch with Joe Trippi, Dean's newly-hired campaign manager. Trippi was an old hand who had burned out on politics and turned to profitable high-tech consulting in the 90s. By Trippi's account, he found about Meetup.com on one of his favorite blogs, and was amazed by what he saw; the campaign inked a deal to integrate Meetup functionality into their own campaign website (Interview). The decision proved a fortuitous one -- to everyone's amazement, participation boomed, reaching 100,000 people in less than six months (Teachout, "Incredible Moment").
Much has been made of the importance of the Meetups in the Dean phenomenon, and very little of it is exaggeration. I wasn't sure what to expect when I went to my first Meetup in August, having heard about them for a few months prior. For starters, I was stunned to discover that the affluent and Republican-leaning suburban area in which I grew up had already outgrown a single Meetup venue and split into two. Nevertheless, the library meeting room was packed, and the designated Meetup host (who clearly had no experience facilitating meetings) seemed overwhelmed. He had an agenda sent by the "official" campaign, but had a very difficult getting past the testimonials item. In what I imagine must have resembled an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, person after person raised their hand to speak about why they had come to support Dean. The stories differed, from the man who had run a losing campaign for state representative, to the woman who'd given up on politics after volunteering for -- and then feeling betrayed by -- Bill Clinton in 1992, to others who hadn't been politically active since the 1960s, or never at all.
The pervasive and infectious spirit at every Meetup I attended was one of amazement and exhilaration. Undoubtedly, some of this was due to the amazing rise of our preferred candidate. But it seemed to me that the joy was equally associated with the discovery that there were other people -- lots of them -- who shared our concerns about the future of our country. The aftermath of September 11, the dismal performance by the Democrats in the 2002 elections, and the failure of the anti-war movement had contributed to a sense of powerlessness and isolation on the part of American progressives. Campaigning for Dean was not merely about electing a candidate, but about coming together to re-discover our sense of political efficacy and fight for a space in the political culture. As Zephyr Teachout, the campaign's director of Internet organizing, told the New York Times Magazine: "Meetup.com is emerging as the 'ritual' element of the new Dean community. 'It's like church, the central place where people go to get inspired'" (Shapiro).
That article by Samantha Shapiro, "The Dean Connection," was one of the first published attempts to understand what was driving the legions of Deaniacs -- as we came to be known, to my chagrin -- in relation to Putnam's theory:
The campaign sees political involvement in the way "Bowling Alone" does, as related to participation in civic organizations -- to people getting together socially. People at all levels of the Dean campaign will tell you that its purpose is not just to elect Howard Dean president. Just as significant, they say, the point is to give people something to believe in, and to connect those people to one another. The point is to get them out of their houses and bring them together at barbecues, rallies and voting booths.
Her article was not universally well-received by campaign supporters, however, in part because of her focus on two young campaign staffers who had joined the campaign after breaking up with their respective girlfriends. One Dean campaigner wrote:
I am a 44-year-old married man. I'm not looking for new friends. I support Dean because he's not afraid to take on this administration. He says the right things (most of the time). And I believe he has a real chance to win. It has nothing to do with making friends and telling my story. It's all about taking back control of this country from the right-wing extremists. Why can't you write about that? (Hormel)
Clearly, the campaign was experiencing a lot of both. But whatever the reason, people of all ages were flocking to participate in the campaign. And while there may have been a great deal of personal catharsis going on, there was also a lot of serious political momentum being built. At the Meetup I attended in August, volunteers had already begun organizing door-to-door canvassing efforts -- despite having no staffed campaign organization and being in a state with caucuses still more than six months away. The month before, the campaign had added a new twist to the Meetups by providing each Meetup host with the names and addresses of undecided Iowans and the stationery to write them hand-written letters. Many Meetups reported running out of letters, and polling showed a corresponding bump in support for Dean.
Such methods flew in the face of the contemporary style of political campaigning. Here, we can return to Putnam, who presents a paradox -- how is it that party organizations are growing in strength (as measured by size, fundraising, and organizational skill), even as fewer Americans are participating in partisan political activities (37-39)? The answer, he says, lies in the "professionalization and commercialization of politics in America. The 'contacts' that voters report are, in fact, less and less likely to be a visit from a neighborhood party worker and more and more likely to be an anonymous call from a paid phone bank" (39). "The bottom line in the political industry," he writes, "is this: Financial capital - the wherewithal for mass marketing - has replaced social capital - that is, grassroots citizen networks - as the coin of the realm" (39-40).
Putnam is exactly right. Though a variety of factors had begun to weaken the traditional party machines, the 1960s saw the emergence of a new style of consultant-centered campaigning, which shifted emphasis to the candidate and relied increasingly on mass media, both paid (campaign ads) and "earned" (news coverage). This professionalization of politics has brought with it professional training and professional literature, a field known as political management. One textbook on that subject has this to say about media strategy:
Coordination is crucial. The overall image of the candidate is created largely by the general strategy of campaign media. ... To build a coherent image, a campaign must commit itself to consistency, efficiency, proper timing, effective packaging, and a well-played expectations game. ... Consistency is demanding. A campaign's theme must be communicated up and down the chain of command. Typically, only designated staffers speak for the campaign - the candidate, the campaign manager, and the press secretary or communications director. (Shea 153-154)
In other words, a modern political campaign must run a very tight ship, with an effective top-down command strucuture. That does not begin to resemble what Dean and Trippi were doing. The campaign wasn't even obeying the basic structure for grassroots voter contact -- the "hub-and-spoke" model that was beaten into my head in an introductory campaign management course. Shapiro reports:
Joe Trippi ... says the campaign's structure is modeled on the Internet, which is organized as a grid, rather than as spokes surrounding a hub. ... Trippi likes to say that in the Internet model he has adopted for the campaign, the power lies with the people at "the edges of the network," rather than the center. When people from the unofficial campaign call and ask permission to undertake an activity on behalf of Dean, they are told they don't need permission.
Trippi, who began regularly telling journalists and Deaniacs alike that “the biggest myth in American politics is that Joe Trippi is running the Howard Dean campaign," loved nothing better than to talk about the revolutionary political potential of the Internet. Another one of his favorite metaphor-models came up in an interview:
T: ... I used to work for a little while for Progeny Linux Systems. I always wondered how could you take that same collaboration that occurs in Linux and open source and apply it here. What would happen if there were a way to do that and engage everybody in a in a presidential campaign? L: So is this an open-source presidential campaign? T: Yes. That moment when that was all going on made me think, "That's sort of what we're building here." I guess it's about as open as you can do it in modern-day politics.
"Open source" refers to a model for software development which has become increasingly popular in recent years. Instead of computer programmers within a single firm writing proprietary software and keeping the source code a secret (e.g., Microsoft), open-source software projects are developed openly and collaboratively by programmers from all over the world, and licensed under terms which allow anyone to examine and even modify the source code. By involving so many people in the development process, advocates argue, software becomes more stable, secure, and functional. And, according to some of its more radical and anarchist-inspired advocates -- who prefer the term free ("as in freedom") software -- such technology is fundamentally more democratic, egalitarian, and liberating, for both users and developers, than non-free (i.e., proprietary and closed-source) alternatives.
It is appropriate then, that the Dean campaign actually released software under an open source license. DeanSpace, a software package which enabled grassroots supporters to easily set up their own community websites, was just one of several online tools, eventually grouped together as the Dean Commons, which enabled supporters to contact and collaborate with one another, and reach out to undecided voters, all without the involvement of a single paid campaign staffer.
By far the most notable of these was the "Get Local" tool, which allowed literally anyone to organize and announce a campaign event on the website, ranging from fundraising houseparties to community service outings to flyering at farmers' markets. I remember searching Get Local for events in D.C. (where the campaign had no office and was organized entirely by volunteers) last Fall, and finding literally dozens of events for a single week. The night of a television debate, I had my choice of watching at a bar in Georgetown, a student lounge at George Washington University, or a houseparty in Arlington. Another popular feature was DeanLink, through which supporters could create profiles for themselves, with their interests and volunteer skills listed, and link their profile to others. Thus, finding someone to give a campaign presentation or translate a flyer into Spanish was as simple as searching your personal network -- or your zipcode -- for a volunteer who fit the bill.
By far the most noteworthy feature of the campaign's online presence, however, was its weblog, dubbed Blog for America. A weblog, typically shortened to blog, is a sort of sophisticated online journal, with entries shown in reverse chronological order. The content and quality of blogs varies widely, from whiny teenagers detailing the trials and tribulations of adolescent life to well-regarded political journalists offering continuous commentary and minor scoops.
The world of blogs, commonly known as the blogosphere, has several distinguishing features which separate them markedly from traditional journalism, even on the web. First, most have a commenting option, whereby any visitor can publicly respond to any posting. Second, most bloggers link to each other incestuously, promoting the latest interesting tidbit of news or analysis. Thus, blogs may be the first journalistic medium fundamentally built on horizontal networking. And while the there are a few immensely popular conservative blogs, the progressive blogosphere has positively exploded, causing many to remark that the left has finally found its own "echo chamber," an answer to the confluence of right-wing think-tanks, talk radio, and Fox News which relentlessly hammer at conservative messages until they eventually find their way into the mainstream press.
Joe Trippi was an avid blog-reader and intended for the campaign to have one, but they didn't get around to it until Matthew Gross, who had blogged for myDD.com (a favorite of Trippi's), showed up unannounced at campaign headquarters (Interview). The results may well go down in the history of campaign communications.
The most obvious benefit for the campaign was to plug into the potential of the blogosphere for recruiting supporters and raising money. Many established bloggers, frustrated with the mealy-mouthed rhetoric of most Democratic politicians, warmed up to Dean, and some began actively promoting him. Supporters started unofficial Dean blogs, some of which became quite popular in their own right.
Yet ultimately the most serious success of the blog was in developing a vertical relationship between supporters and the "official" campaign. The blog was not merely a sidelight project, another avenue for posting the latest press release or fundraising appeal. Rather, it was a full-time job for Gross and a major focus of several senior staffers, who not only constantly posted updates about the latest goings-on, but read and sometimes responded to the hundreds of comments each entry attracted. As a result, supporters felt empowered to offer all sorts of campaign advice on matters which any other campaign would've kept restricted to its senior strategists. For example, one supporter posted the following on the blog entry for the "Great American Restoration" speech:
A powerful message. Dr. Dean and his staff now must build on this energy by refining and polishing his personal demeanor and appearance. An ironed shirt, crisp tie, no stray facial expressions or gestures - simple things that are expected of a president. This is the true challenge - the unspoken and subtle qualities that can make or break a candidate.
While undoubtedly everyone at the campaign knew that Dean needed to wear an ironed shirt, the campaign did take such comments seriously. And when Dean and his advisers wanted to give up federal matching funds -- and the spending limits that go with them -- it first put the matter to an online vote of the supporters.
The end result was that the blog became the primary venue for supporters' increasingly strong self-identification with the campaign and with each other. Some of us merely checked it on a daily basis. A hard core posted comments constantly, developing a literal cast of characters for the comments sections. An unofficial "Meet the Blog Family" site was formed for regulars to post descriptions of themselves. The results did not fit Shapiro's twenty-something lonely hearts stereotype. Descriptions ran the gamut, but reasonably typical was "Bubie in Chicago":
I'm Bubie in Chicago - a 64 year old grandmother. I have not been politically active except to consistently vote (and vote Democratic, oh yes, and one year worked to get some local school board members elected) since I worked with my mother on Adlai Stevenson's campaign as a kid. I certainly have never contributed to a campaign before, and never even passed out leaflets, much less had a House Party for Dean, as I did in October.
Nothing was more emblematic of this sort of commitment than the bat, an online graphic periodically posted on the blog used for campaign staff to challenge supporters to meet a fundraising goal. Like a thermometer, the bat would fill up with red as the money came in. One of the first and most creative uses of the bat came in July 2003: in response to a planned $2,000-per-plate fundraising luncheon by Dick Cheney, campaign staff challenged supporters to match Cheney's $250,000. At the suggestion of a blog commenter, they posted a picture of Dean eating a $3 turkey sandwich; the grassroots responded, raising just over $500,000 in three days (Trippi, "You Did It").
But the truly amazing fundraising successes came at the end of each quarterly reporting period. Typically, presidential campaigns approach these by publicly trying to downplay expectations while privately scrambling for cash in the hopes of earning good coverage. As the end of each quarter approached, however, the Dean campaign put up a bat on the blog with an overly ambitious fundraising goal, knowing full well that a failure to meet it could be seen by journalists as a loss in momentum. That never happened, and the campaign shattered the Democratic record by raising nearly $15 million dollars in the third-quarter of 2003 ($5 million during the last five days), and then going on to exceed that figure in the fourth (Trippi, "What It's About"). Such contributions came overwhelmingly in small donations -- the average hovered around $75. Trippi coined the phrase the "$100 revolution," noting that if one million Americans donated were willing to donate $100 to the campaign, it would be on the same financial footing as Bush, who has collected tens of thousands of $2,000 contributions.
By the time the campaign came to a close in February 2004, the overall figures, some of which were proudly displayed in various hokey graphics on the sides of the blog, stood at:
Surprisingly, Robert Putnam has had little to say about the Dean campaign and the Meetup phenomenon he so directly inspired. He did sound encouraging when quoted in the Philadelphia Inquirer in December: "When you bring people face-to-face and have real people talking to other real people about issues, it does change the character of the politics. It makes people actors again instead of just spectators" (Fifield). But the next month, his comments to the New York Times struck a different tone:
"If people are getting together to talk about politics, that's better than people sitting watching a 30-second sound bite," said Robert Putnam ... But Professor Putnam ... said more interaction among people with diverse views would be preferable. "The terribly polarized politics that we have now is the culmination of a trend that's been going on for 25 years," he said. "Whether the Internet is going to make the problem better or make it worse is a big, important question." (Harmon)
While the slant of the Times article was definitely to portray Internet politics as a preaching-to-the-choir phenomenon, Putnam is on the record as being extremely skeptical of online communication as a replacement for traditional forms of social capital, for several legitimate reasons -- the ongoing "digital divide," the difficulty of communicating nonverbal cues over computer networks, and the possibility of the Internet degrading passive and privatized forms of entertainment (Bowling Alone 174-180).
But I find much less to agree with in the criticism he makes in the Times article, echoing what he calls "cyberbalkanization" in Bowling Alone: "The Internet enables us to confine our communication to people who share precisely our interests... That powerful specialization is one of the medium's great attractions, but also one its subtler threats to bridging social capital" (177). To Putnam, this is devastating, because he places such value on "meaningfully engag[ing] with opposing views and hence learn[ing] from that engagement" (341). The major threat declining social capital poses to democracy is that "our politics will become more shrill and less balanced," because "When most people skip the meeting, those who are left tend to more extreme" (342).
This is an overly simplistic understanding of the relationships between civic participation, political culture, and public policymaking for which Putnam and his sympathizers have been criticized. Sheri Berman writes that "we need to marry an analysis of societal and cultural factors to the study of political institutions - something that recent neo-Tocquevillieans ... have ignored" (32). While Berman was concerned with situations in which civil society may produce deeply uncivil politics, I think the same can be said of the reverse. In other words, we cannot understand the Dean phenomenon -- and the supposedly polarizing character of its organizing structures -- without understanding the political institutions to which it was responding: namely, an executive and legislative branch dominated by an extreme right-wing increasingly interested in stifling unwelcome dissent.
At the outset, I quoted from Dean's announcement speech, noting that it drew from themes of declining civic community. What I did not include was the repeated references to the ways in which the Bush administration was causing or contributing to that very decline:
Today, our nation is in crisis. At home, this crisis manifests itself in this President's destruction of the idea of community. This President pushes forward an agenda and policies which divide us. He advocates economic polices which beggar the middle class and raise property taxes so that income taxes may be cut for those who ran Enron. He divides us by race by using the word quota, which appeals to the worst in us by instilling fear that people of color might take our jobs or our places in the nation's best universities. ... He divides us by gender by attacking a woman's right to make her own health care decisions. ... He divides us by sexual orientation by supporting senators who have slandered gay Americans...
Whatever his flaws (and believe me, there were many), this is what Dean, at his best, got right: connecting the immediate political issues of the day with a broader sense of the condition of the American body politic. In seeking to re-connect with one another, Deaniacs were, and perhaps are, not merely embracing some fuzzy notion of personal togetherness, but building the bonds of solidarity they know will be necessary for the long struggle ahead to build a powerful progressive political movement. It is too soon to tell they will persist beyond the collapse of their candidate, but political campaigning in America has already been transformed.
Berman, Sheri. "Civil Society and Political Institutionalization." Beyond Tocqueville: Civil Society and the Social Capital Debate in Comparative Perspective. Hanover: Tufts / UP of New England, 2001. 32-42.
Castrone, Linda. "Conversation Starter Meetup.com Is Not Just a Political Tool." The Denver Post. 11 Apr. 2004, final ed.: L05.
Dean, Howard. "The Great American Restoration." Blog for America. 23 Jun. 2003.
Fifield, Adam. "Dean Campaign Readies New Round of 'House Parties.'" Philadelphia Inquirer. 30 Dec. 2003.
Harmon, Amy. "Politics of the Web: Meet, Greet, Segregate, Meet Again." New York Times. 25 Jan. 2004, late ed.: 16.
Hormel, Smokey. Letter. New York Times Magazine 21 Dec. 2003: 10.
Maslin, Paul. "The Front Runner's Fall." The Atlantic Monthly May 2004.
"Meet the Blog Family!: Howard Powered People." Accessed 6 May 2004.
Milligan, Susan. "Dean to Form Committee for 2004 Run: Vermont Governor First to Take Step." Boston Globe. 30 May 2002, third ed.: A3.
Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
---, with Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Y. Nanetti. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993, 86-91. Rpt. in Hodgkinson, Virginia A. and Michael W. Foley, eds. The Civil Society Reader. Hanover: Tufts University, UP of New England, 2003, 322-327.
Shapiro, Samantha M. "The Dean Connection." New York Times Magazine 7 Dec. 2003: 56+.
Shea, Daniel M. and Michael John Burton. Campaign Craft: The Strategies, Tactics, and Art of Political Campaign Management. Rev. and expanded ed. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001.
Teachout, Zephyr. "Incredible Moment -- 100,000 on Meetup." Blog for America. 2 Sep. 2003.
Trippi, Joe. Interview with Lawrence Lessig. Lessig Blog. 19 Aug. 2003.
---. "What It's About." Blog for America. 1 Oct. 2003.
---. "You Did It!" Blog for America 29 Jul. 2003.