The Greensboro News-Record profiles the guy who revolutionized online campaigning while working for Democrat Howard Dean's presidential campaign four years ago. No, it's not Joe Trippi.
About four years ago, before Mathew Gross made his way from Utah to Vermont on the off chance Howard Dean's campaign might put him to work, presidential contenders didn't worry much about hiring a head blogger or Internet strategist.
In one campaign cycle, the position that Gross helped create and define while working for the former Vermont governor is now considered critical, one of the first big hires a candidate makes after a campaign chief, fundraiser, pollster and media consultant.
Gross, 35, and now a Greensboro resident, signed on with the precursor to former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards' 2008 presidential campaign last year. His job has as much to do with helping supporters get themselves organized and find one another as it is does with technology.
"I think what the Internet really does, what it's provided, is a tool for ordinary Americans to get involved," Gross said during lunchtime conversation last week. "... Prior to the Internet, if you didn't live in Iowa or New Hampshire at the beginning, there wasn't much you could do other than read the paper and send a check."
Edwards is using the Internet to do everything from letting supporters know about rallies to networking volunteers for civic projects. In an e-mail sent last week, Gross encouraged supporters to upload messages to YouTube, an Internet service for sharing home-brewed videos.
"The key thing to recognize is the technology is going to change, it's still changing. It hasn't stopped," Gross said. "If YouTube didn't exist a year and a half ago, what completely unforeseen community or technology is going to exist by the general election of 2008?"
While the story focuses on a leading Internet strategist on the Democratic side, it quotes a Republican campaign strategist too:
Carter Wrenn, a Republican strategist who once worked for U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, says it was Gross who first illustrated to him the utility of the Internet in a campaign. ... Campaigns are either going to have to find a guy like this or put together a team of people to do the same things," he said.
I call it the cyber-primary, the race to win the early online media game. On the Republican side of the -08 campaign, it looks to me as if the Mitt Romney camp is ahead in the cyber-primary, as it has hired good online-strategic talent and begun to reach out to the blogosphere. It's pretty clear that Team Romney "gets" the Internet.
Sen. John McCain's campaign also seems to "get" the power of the net, but McCain the policymaker has made a number of moves that have alienated online-active conservatives - most especially the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law that has turned out to be an assualt on free speech and a threat to political bloggers.
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