Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Deval's Blog Blitz Part II

Deval Patrick again shows that he's willing to engage the blogosphere, this time in an Interview with David Eisenthal. Check it out -- David gets the candidate to talk some specifics about his ideas for Springfield.

I think Patrick's reaching out to us here on the Internet is a reflection of his campaign's focus on youth outreach -- after all, Internet users taken as a whole tend to be younger than the general population. Wayne Woodlief wrote about it in the Herald last week (mirrored at devalpatrick.com) and the Patrick campaign sent out an announcement touting the fact that their college outreach program is "reaching out to almost 200,000 students". The impression is that young people are the engine that makes his candidacy possible. I wonder, though, if he has learned the lessons of Howard Dean's campaign in Iowa. Dean imported hordes of college kids to knock on the doors of unsuspecting Iowans who were naturally skeptical of the outsiders. John Kerry suffered a similar fate in Ohio during the general election. While he had to import canvassers from the Northeast, the Republicans generally had neighbors talking to neighbors.