(Host) Howard Dean took his presidential campaign to New Mexico on Wednesday and asked his followers to redouble their efforts to sign up new volunteers.
The former Vermont governor has emerged as this year’s high tech political strategist. He’s stunned his Democratic opponents with his ability to raise millions of dollars over the Internet. The Dean campaign also uses a Web site called Meetup.com to coordinate monthly grassroots strategy sessions.
In Santa Fe, Dean announced that 100,000 people have now connected to his campaign through the Meetup service. He told the monthly Meetup gathering that the campaign’s goal is to reach out to one million supporters using the Internet. And he gave the crowd of about 400 a homework assignment to accomplish that task.
(Dean) “Your assignment is in the next 30 days is to bring in at least five people, each one of you, bring in five people for our e-mail list. We want to get to 450,000 e-mails by the end of this month. We want to get to a million by the end of the year. Because the way we’re going to beat George Bush is to get a couple million people to the polls that haven’t voted before, or voted for third party people. Because this time the person with the most votes is going to win.”
(Host) Dean joins the eight other Democratic candidates for a debate Thursday night at the University of New Mexico. The debate will be aired by many public television stations.