From Barry's boys to the Deaniacs: how alternative media have transformed politics on the left and the right.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: America's Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media to Take Power - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything - Book Review

America's Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media to Take Power, by Richard Viguerie and David Franke, Chicago: Bonus Books, 375 pages, $26.95

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything, by Joe Trippi, New York: Regan Books, 252 pages, $26.95

Like most populist presidential candidates, Howard Dean wasn't nearly as interesting as the movement that assembled itself behind him. The Vermont doctor was capable of staking out independent positions: He attacked the Iraq war when his party's leaders were either endorsing it outright or timidly keeping their doubts under wraps, and he was one of the few Democratic governors who managed to show an interest in both gay rights and gun rights. But what at first might look like a quirky combination of Eugene McCarthy and William S. Burroughs turned out to be a conventional center-left politician, a Democrat committed to higher taxes, an active foreign policy, and the "re-regulation" of energy, airlines, and other industries. If he managed to grab the Zeitgeist for a few months of 2003 and 2004, he did it without stepping very far outside the boundaries of ordinary behavior.

The Dean movement was another beast entirely. According to the conventional wisdom, it managed to raise both far more money and far more enthusiasm than its rivals because it used the Internet. In The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, his bombastic but instructive memoir, Dean's campaign manager, Joe Trippi, stands that formula on its head. "We were not using the Internet," he writes. "It was using us."

He has a point. An election professional who entered presidential politics working for Ted Kennedy in 1980, Trippi had also toiled for several tech companies during the Clinton years. With one foot in the political world and the other in cyberspace, he didn't invent his candidate's Internet offensive so much as he discovered and magnified it. Every political junkie knows that Trippi and Dean built their movement by embracing Meetup.com, a company that arranges get-togethers for people who share a common interest--anyone from disgruntled Scientologists to fans of Angelina Jolie. What isn't as widely appreciated is that Dean's supporters were already using Meetup.com to find each other before the campaign even knew the service existed.

Indeed, when Trippi first saw the site, "the first thing I noticed was that Howard Dean--dead last among the Democratic candidates in almost every other meaningful measurement--was actually leading in this one category, the number of his supporters who wanted to meet up." He added a link to Meetup.com from the campaign Web site, and with that small piece of HTML code the number of Dean backers in the system suddenly leaped from 432 to 2,700. "For months," Trippi recalls, "Meetup.com would run its own parallel campaign, the number of people meeting up growing from that initial 432 to more than 190,000. Eventually, we'd even have to create our own, specialized version of Meetup--the GetLocal tools, which would grow to 170,000 people on its own." When Trippi persuaded Dean to attend a meetup himself during a stop in Manhattan, the number of fans planning to attend started to multiply; he ended up speaking to 500...