From this week’s LA Weekly: Out of Left Field:
That is to say, given an incumbent president with unlimited campaign dollars, and competing Democratic candidates with more resources and greater name recognition than yours, you need to alter the conventional formulas for money and organization and troops on the ground, and to do it without spending too much cash up front. The major change Dean hopes to make in the political environment is to enlarge the electorate, and to do so by drawing from the vast, untapped reservoir of eligible voters (50 percent by some estimates) who either have never participated in politics or who are discouraged dropouts from the system.
This in itself is a fairly profound connection to have perceived. no other Democratic candidate has advanced any ideas at all, really, on ways to counter the enormous imbalance of resources that otherwise threatens to dominate the general election . and the interesting thing, even so far in advance of the election, is the possibility that this approach might actually succeed. In late June, at a rally for him at UCLA following his appearance at an environmental forum there . a rally that has been put together in two days by Bruins for Dean and, even with a last-minute time change, has managed to produce a gathering of 600 . Dean asks how many people in the crowd are newcomers to political participation, and about half the group, by no means all of them students, raise their hands.