One of the most important online vehicles for the Dean campaign is blogs. Just as President Bush has wooed conservative talk-show hosts, holding a special day for them at the White House, Dean is the first candidate to treat relatively unknown bloggers as a critical opinion-making constituency.

Anyone who writes critically about Dean can expect his copy to be chewed up by this army of zealous Dean Internet scribes. When I wrote a piece recently that contained a few paragraphs about Dean, a member of the Dean2004 blog team filed an almost 2,000-word entry slicing my article up into sections with labels such as "true," "false," "inadvertently true," and "foolish." Not content with this, the Dean blogosphere recently established a rapid-reaction team called the Dean Defense Forces (DDF)—an e-mail list of hard-core Dean supporters who swiftly push back with e-mails, letters to the editor, blog entries, and phone calls against anyone spreading anti-Dean sentiments. "When he gets attacked, we'll respond," pledges the DDF's organizer, Matthew Singer, a 20-year-old college student in Montana who once blogged about Dean on his own site, Left in the West.