In Political Parties Shift Emphasis to Core Voters, the NY Times’ Adam Nagourney describes how both Democrat and Republican operatives are planning massive get-out-the-vote efforts for 2004.

Voter turnout campaigns are typically more influential in primaries, because fewer people vote, making the outcome easier to affect. At the very least, several Democrats said, Dr. Dean’s ability to use new techniques to identify and turn out a base of supporters makes him a formidable figure in early primary states.

But Dr. Dean, in remarks at a pig roast here in central New Hampshire this afternoon, noted that a shift of just a few percentage points in states like New Hampshire would have delivered the White House to Al Gore in 2000. And he urged supporters who showed up at his events to register their e-mail addresses with his campaign, so they can be contacted as Election Day approaches. Dr. Dean’s aides are creating a database that merges e-mail addresses with voter registration rolls and the history of voting behavior.

The enviros have understood this since the mid-90s — when WEAVE pioneered the idea of matching enviro group member lists against state voter files in order to target GOTV work.

Environmental groups have GOT, GOT GOT, to focus on getting email addresses so they can use email to do c3 and c4 GOTV work in the 2004 cycle.

I’m not kidding. So many memes are colliding here that I think my head is about to explode.

The Clark Sphere says it well:

The internet then is the “grange” of Lincoln’s day, it is the place where The Influentials congregate, get their information, and develop their understanding. By the time the campaign comes to an end, the media people will have made up their minds about what the story is, and right now, they are reading what is going on on the internet. The Blogsphere’s roll as “factoid filter and meme tester” is crucial, because it tells the reporter and pundit what plays, and does a great deal of the leg work for him or her.

Enter the internet. The internet is not a new mass medium in the sense of television. It is not, in otherwords, the next in a long line of innovations that put more power in the hands of a smaller number of people who had control over the presses. The sequence: the modern newspaper, the national magazine, the syndicate, the movie studio, the radio network, the family of magazines, the television network, the monopolization of radio and television – has reached its pinnacle. The internet, like cable television, is the beginning of creating a new localism, to replace mere geographic localism. This isn’t a new observation, it is something that one internet business analyst was pushing some time ago: he said that EBay was about the only sure bet in the “dot com” space, because EBay was applying economies of scale to a business that was already incredibly profitable: the classified ad. Basically, Ebay allows you to place a national classified, it allows you to do the flea market circuit, without the gasoline.

This process also works with dating: regular people are now meeting other regular people through internet dating services. Regular people are now meeting regular people for political campaigns, hobbies, fan clubs and the rest. This revival of a “cyber localism” is something that has a power that is not well understood, simply because localism of this kind is not part of the bicoastal media universe.

Pacific Views just published this great coverage of Rep. Jay Inslee’s recent public panel about the handling of the intelligence information that was used to justify the march to war in Iraq.

Not only does the article provide an outstanding in-depth account of an important story, I think it also is a great example of the potential of “amateur” journalism.

AlterNet: The Progressive Case for Howard Dean is a long but extremely well-written essay in which author Nico Pitney (a student activist, hooray!) lays out all the reasons why smart Progressives should throw their support behind Howard Dean, despite the fact that we don’t agree with him 100% on every issue.

Pitney displays insight and wisdom beyond his years (god, what I am I saying — I’m only 30!), and gives eloquent voice to many of the thoughts I’ve not been able to get down in writing.