Page 188 - The Resilient Organization

Postcard No. 2 from Hanover, New Hampshire 175

volunteers who had traveled to Iowa to help the campaign in the final
week before the voting. His impassioned speech to these supporters was
widely broadcast, replayed, and lampooned. It was singled out
overnight as the moment that he lost all credible chance of winning his
party’s nomination.
One of Dean’s supporters in the audience, however, was a documen-
tary film maker, and he recognized problems with the speech that was
broadcast. The camera angle on Dean did not show the large, excited
crowd surrounding the stage, missing the context of Dean’s remarks
(which is why the film maker chose to shoot his own footage during the
speech from within the crowd). The broadcast of Dean’s speech also
muted the stomping and cheering of the crowd. As it was discovered
later, it was due to a directional microphone that captured Dean raised
voice to be heard above the crowd but without the crowd’s loud back-
ground noise (and their visible excitement) to show why he was so loud
and animated. The film maker quickly attempted to get his video public
because it showed the Dean’s speech from the audience’s perspective:
excited crowds that were cheering so loudly that the infamous broadcasted
“scream” that Dean made was barely audible. The film maker says that
many Dean supporters tried to help him get the video to the DFA cam-
paign organization. Despite their efforts, there was no response.
So the film maker put the video on his Web site for viewing. A link
to the site was shared repeatedly by Dean supporters in the Blog for
America comments space, and news spread of it. The grassroots-run
Dean Rapid Response Network (another informal organization) put a
link to the video on its Web site home page. Much traffic flooded the
documentary film maker’s Web site. He began to get calls of complaint
from his Internet service provider, and he concluded that he would have
to remove the video from his site. His service charges were determined
by the bandwidth that his Web site used, and the traffic to view the
video was so high that he expected to owe $20,000 in several days, by
the end of the week.
Someone suggested that he set up a PayPal account, a service that
facilitates the electronic transfer of funds using an existing credit card
or checking account. He set up the account, receiving sufficient money

(continued)