I'm quite happy with tonight's Dean Meetup at Gua-Rapo in Arlington. Jill and I showed up a little after 7pm and signed in then waited in line for the slow barmaid to get a couple of beers. We retreated to a corner to drink and wait for the meeting to start. Compared to my experience with meetings in the District, this was was more staid and leisurely--and not so chaotic. It's not that the District meetings are bad; it's just a stylistic thing, where I like the ability to actually hear what's being said rather than being in a group for a group's sake.

A couple of older women joined us in the corner and we struck up a conversation with them. Most of the meetups I've been to have been populated by the young professional crowd, so I was intrigued to find out more about these ladies. Although I never caught a name, in response to my question about how politically active they were, one regaled me with her history of working for Senator Kennedy's campaign (and she meant J.F.K., not Bobby or Teddy), then working in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, as well as at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Then the meeting started. I snapped a couple of pictures to add to the Meetup photo blog. Most of the talk was about the upcoming appearance by Dean on August 23 in Falls Church as part of his "Sleepless Summer" tour, telling people what they can do to help out (phone bank, ticket sales [tickets?], stage set-up). Then there was talk about house parties, like the one we attended last week. Finally came the time I had been waiting for: the letter writing to people in New Hampshire.

Yours truly in the act of composition (note a fellow sufferer in the background)

The personal letter writing campaign isn't getting much media attention, according to Jill, but it strikes me as a perfect example of how the Dean campaign is putting its grassroots power at work. The idea is simple: the campaign sends out addresses, blank envelopes and stationary, a small flyer, and a stamp, and asks that Meetup attendees write a personal letter to someone in Iowa or New Hampshire explaining why the Meetup person is excited about Dean. Now, there's something like 77,000 people signed up for Meetup, and if only a third of them actually attend a meeting, and if only half of them writer a letter, we're still talking something like 15,000 personal letters. Some people write more than one (people were encourage to write two, as the packets had two addresses each--I ended up writing three, Jill wrote one). Some people take addresses home with them and write on their own stationary and use their own postage.

I wanted to really grab the attention of my intended recipient with my first letter, so I started it off like this:

The letter writing campaign is the perfect activity for Meetup, where most of the attendees are there because they are already committed to the campaign (so don't really need more info about the candidate, at least not the kind that has to be screamed out over a crowd) and likely have already contributed or can't afford to. What they do have is time--else they couldn't attend a Meetup--and energy, and what better use for both of those resources than the art of making personal contacts, one-to-one, between confirmed supportors and possible supporters. As our Canadian friends would say, "Beauty, eh?"

I'll go out on a limb here and predict that Dean Meetups will surpass 100,000 registrants by the next monthly meeting because of this very real, practical and useful role that the campaign has found for its grassroot supporters. Most of us support Howard Dean because we think we can make a difference, and if it's one letter at a time, so be it.