This time, it wasn't about the candidate at all. It was about the people. This was never about him. It was about them. An amazing thing happened in the presidential contest of 2004: For the first time in my life, maybe the first time in history, a candidate lost but his campaign won. ... This was nothing less than the first shot in America's second revolution, nothing less than the people taking the first step to reclaiming a system that had long ago forgotten they existed. This was democracy bubbling to the surface, flooding the landscape, and raising all of us -- an obscure Northeastern governor, his inexperienced supporters, and a handful of old political warhorses -- along with it.
(Joe Trippi, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything)
It was something more than just finding ideological soul mates. It was learning how to act: how letters got written, how doors got knocked on, how co-workers could be won over on the coffee break, how to print a bumper sticker and how to pry one off with a razor blade; how to put together a network whose force exceeded the sum of its parts by orders of magnitude; how to talk to a reporter, how to picket, and how, if need be, to infiltrate - how to make the anger boiling inside you ennobling, productive, powerful, instead of embittering. How to feel bigger than yourself. It was something beyond the week, the year, the campaign, even the decade; it was a cause. You lost in 1964. But something remained after 1964: a movement. An army. An army that could lose a battle suck it up, regroup, then live to fight a thousand battles more.
(Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus)
Posted by Michael at February 3, 2005 05:43 AM | TrackBack