Raising a Red Flag
Dean’s rebel yell doesn’t slow his mo. Or so the Net says
By Howard Fineman
NEWSWEEK
Nov. 17 issue — Kym Spell, Wes Clark’s energetic spin doctor, was on the line, crowing. The big news: her candidate’s Web site for the first time had beaten Howard Dean’s on Alexa.

It was a Sunday, true, and Dean’s site the next day had retaken the lead, but “this shows we’ve got momentum,” she said. That brought a dismissive laugh from Joe Trippi, Dean’s campaign manager.

“We crush them on Alexa,” he said.
ON WHAT? Aficionados know the earliest battlefields in the race for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination: Iowa (where Dick Gephardt leads) and New Hampshire (Dean is way in front) and South Carolina (where John Edwards leads in most polls). But the newest, and one of the most important, fields of combat exists in cyberspace, on a traffic-monitoring site

called Alexa.

Owned and operated by Amazon.com, the site ranks thousands of Web sites on all subjects by hits and page views, and produces a constantly updated digital EKG of each campaign. Though it has conceptual flaws (it’s Microsoft-based only and depends on free downloads of a monitoring software),

Alexa has become an arbiter of who’s hot—or not—on the Net.

Dean still is, with consequences that are rippling through the race. In a three-day online plebiscite among his e-mail list of 500,000 supporters (most harvested initially on the Internet), he won overwhelming approval for rejecting the federal-financing system. That, in turn, will allow him to raise as much as he can, and to spend as much as he wants trying to snuff out his Democratic rivals early next year.
The possibility that Dean could do so is leading some nondigital powers that be—labor-union chieftains—to overlook the doctor’s penchant for aiming shots at his own foot, the most recent being his condescending description of Southern, working-class white men as “guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.” The resulting controversy didn’t stop two powerful unions—Service Employees and State, County and Municipal Employees—from putting aside their own rivalry and preparing a joint endorsement of Dean. “They see all that money coming in,” a Gephardt aide glumly concluded.
Indeed, within Dean World, attacks on the candidate tend to be seen as proof of his manifest destiny. When Tim Russert roasted Dean on “Meet the Press,” Web traffic and donations skyrocketed. Last week’s scorching on the flag issue produced a similar result, Trippi claimed. “We had our best two days so far this quarter,” he said. Now the campaign is using its Web roster to select and deploy thousands of volunteers who will flood into Iowa, New Hampshire and other states. Recruiting questionnaires ask about subjects ranging from issue preferences to whether a nonsmoking volunteer would live in the home of a smoker