First, he wanted to show how much the "Net roots," as he called them, had accomplished in a year: January to January. "That's why I am here today," he said, "because I think you started something amazing... a dot com miracle." (His soundbite phrase for Monday.) "It must survive Howard Dean and his candidacy."

The miracle is that an alternative to campaigns-as-usual had finally become visible with the Internet's semi-maturation as political tool. "Broadcast politics has failed us miserably; failed the country miserably," Trippi said. "The American people now have the beginnings of a platform to change it." This alternative had proven itself in the one way that counts on everyone's scorecard: raising money.

That Dean had raised it in small amounts, in distributed fashion, aided by a social movement which began to gather online and kept gathering, along with the blogs and the spirit of active participation-- all of that motion meant something. For it had proved something. Before 2003, the record take for a Democrat in a single quarter was by a sitting President, Bill Clinton, who drew $10.5 million, Trippi said. Dean, an asterisk to many people at the time, raised $14.8 million in the third quarter of 2003, then $15.9 in the fourth.

Any system that can do that is a potentially powerful force. A candidate who can bank those sums is not only a threat to win, but a threat to disrupt the rules by which campaigns are run, paid for, and won. Just how surprising Dean's performance was to the political establishment can be heard in this column from Dick Meyer, editorial director of CBS News online: (July 17, 2003)

Dean - maverick, outsider, underdog - cleaned his opponents' establishment clocks in the second quarter. He raised $7.6 million, almost $2 million more than the second-place finisher, John Kerry.

Dean raised more cash from small donations than any legitimate, major party presidential candidate has since the 1970's. Certainly, he's the only candidate in ages that used small donations to actually win a money race. In 2000, 74 percent of Bush's donations were $750 or more and 65 percent of Gore's. Stark contrast to Dean's 29 percent.

A whopping 73,226 people contributed to Dean's campaign in the second quarter, 50,000 more than contributed to Kerry's.

This is something very rare: a good news story about money and politics. I've never seen one of these before.

Who would have imagined that it would be money that pushed Dean over the edge into the realm of "credible candidate"? Go figure.

Trippi's lesson here is not the banal one, "money talks," but a slightly more subtle point. Money is the one thing that talks to everyone, including those who may be dismissive or out to lunch about online politics or the Dean's campaign's innovations, such as they stood. Money signaled the system that something was up.