I just listened to the first two parts of a three-part FiveThirtyEight podcast that was great and stirring.

I would certainly recommend the Obama/Wright podcast for a reminder of how hard it was for this country to elect a black president, and what an extraordinary person he is. It documents the speech then-Senator Obama gave after recordings of Rev Wright had become a public controversy. What a speech, and it was so true, and it's still true today. Very personal. And on-topic now because we have a chance as a country to re-affirm that choice we made in 2008, or revert to our racist past. We're as enmeshed in race today as much as we were then. 

Then I listened to the podcast about the Dean Scream. They observed that it likely would have happened differently if we had social media then that we have now. It's funny because there's an untold part of that story, that social media was ready to step in, but the top people on the Dean Campaign didn't know that. I was there that night, and we had the means to go around the TV networks even in 2004, before Twitter and before Facebook. Here's the story, briefly.

I was at Dean Headquarters in Burlington as an observer. I was a Berkman fellow at the time, in nearby Boston, and we were following the New Hampshire primary closely as part of the development work we were doing. 

I didn't have a candidate at that time, but I was of course interested in the Dean campaign because they were using blogs so effectively. I also knew a couple of people there, and made new friends that day, and they trusted me enough to give me the password to their blog, and I was posting during the returns from the Iowa caucus that night. It was a thrill and an honor. 

I was there when the scream was broadcast, and replayed, and here's the thing, there was audio available for publishing, on the web, and they had the distribution ability through their much-watched blog. It would have shown what they explained in the 2016 podcast. The story could have been killed. I have no doubts of that. But it didn't happen. 

I had a chance to ask Howard Dean himself about this, at the DNC later that year, at the blogger's breakfast. A lot of my blogging friends were there. Dean said it didn't matter because they had already lost the nomination at that point, but with all due respect I don't remember it that way. We got Kerry as the nominee. I don't think Dean would have done any better against the Repubs. They could probably have found something to stick on him that would scare people. At that time the Dems were doing a pretty good job of that without any help.