From The Nation:

If the race narrows to a long race between two people, then you think the person that’s not Clinton with web organizing is more likely to win.

Yes, because they can put up organizing kits. How else are you going to do this? When you look at Iowa, Iowa is easy. Its six Congressional districts, you know, you spend two years there, then all of a sudden you’ve got one month and twenty states and no resources. There’s only one way: decentralized people taking responsibility, the campaign giving up power, using the tools.

One of the most effective things from Dean’s Internet team–and the people writ large–were able to do was build very resilient counter-narratives that eventually competed with or overtook the MSM narrative. So the idea that what 300 people in Washington define as a bad appearance on Meet the Press didn’t have to be a bad appearance.

Can you identify anything [like that] for Edwards this cycle?

No. First of all I don’t think a lot of that is ever going to happen that way again…. I think a lot of the things that you saw worked for Dean are not likely to have that kind of critical mass until there’s a nominee this time. Because essentially we were the nominee of that– whatever that is–last time. There was a reason you could have that narrative happen because the whole thing worked almost like a monolithic thing. MyDD, DailyKos, all of them were in support of the one campaign that understood that they existed and pretty much couldn’t stand the way all the other campaigns. It was a creation. I don’t think in this campaign–a lot of people really like Edwards, a lot of people really like Obama, you just don’t have that same critical mass concentrated in any one place to drive a counter-narrative yet. That doesn’t mean that two days after Iowa it won’t coalesce around somebody and that could start to happen.

The other thing that’s different about this time is it’s harder to coalesce something without anybody spotting it. Half the freaking reporters are–well, not half, 100 percent of the reporters are reading the blogs and trying to spot and jump in front of the story, the narrative, before it ever gets going because they’re freaked out about being caught off guard by some narrative they didn’t see. So it becomes part of the mainstream message before it even became a–uh…

It’s a hyper co-optation.

Yes, They’re always on it. Whereas before we could be saying that’s right about Howard Dean, and [it] would spin up. And then all of a sudden one day they woke up and were like “what the [hell] is this?!” So there was a counter-narrative to the mainstream media. Now, you can wake up tomorrow and Katie Couric is giving voice to something that you and I spotted on the blogs this morning. Why? Because some freaking producer was on MyDD, spotted something and did the story. Now all of a sudden the blogs are mimicking that.