Several folks, the Plum Line's Greg Sargent among them, noted several days back that Howard Dean was set to a launch a targeted new health care reform campaign. The former DNC chair's focus, stories said, would be backing what's known as the "public option." That option would offer Medicare-style coverage to all Americans who want it, competing alongside private insurer options. Opponents to the public option tend to argue that the federal government is an unfair competitor, putting private insurers at a disadvantage with its size and power. Proponents make the case that giving Americans the choice of government-run insurance creates useful competition in the health care market that will drive up the quality of health care while driving down the cost.

Generally speaking, though, as the Christian Science Monitor's Alexandra Marks noted, there's not a very strong public understanding of what the public option means. As the health care debate (re)heats up in Washington, the race is on to define it. Marks notes that public opinion on the public option has varied widely from the days of Harry Truman through today. Whether a majority or minority likes the idea of a public insurance option coexisting alongside private ones depends in large part on who last defined the term.

Which brings us to StandWithDrDean.com. With the web campaign, Dean is attempting to define the public option as a nonnegotiable part of any progressive approach to health care reform. He draws a line in the sand, saying "If Barack Obama's healthcare plan gets changed to exclude a public option like Medicare, then it is not healthcare reform." (Question from a strategic perspective: Dean's three minute video is awkwardly edited. He flubs a few lines. The cuts back and forth between segments are rough. He pronounces idea "idear." Okay, that last one's just a personal quirk. But do you find the production endearingly homespun? Or not ready for prime time? Discuss.) Dean's asking for help in collecting 250,000 signatures on an online petition to be delivered to Congress in the next few months.

Presidential silver medalist John McCain jumped back into the political fray yesterday with the launch of a "grassroots organization" called Country First...Speaking of the PACs you launch after you don't quite make it to the White House, Democracy for America -- the organization that grew out of Howard Dean's presidential run -- is putting some pressure on his apparent successor as Democratic National Committee Chairman...It's worth reading the L.A. Times' Kate Linthicum's interview with Scott Goodstein, who headed up the text messaging program for the Obama campaign, just to hear what question prompted this answer: "South Carolina. Oprah Winfrey"...and more.

Looking back at the past 18 months, what’s remarkable about the 2008 campaign is how unremarkable it’s actually been when it comes to the use of the Internet. While Patrick Ruffini earlier argued that Barack Obama’s website is boring, it’s been stewing in my mind for months that the entire cycle has been rather ho-hum.

All campaigns, from the presidential level on down, have seemed to be unwilling, or unable, to rewrite the rules of the game when it comes to how technology is used in electoral politics. They have (pardon the word play) been shiftless in producing a paradigm shift. And maybe, after the upheavals of 2004 and 2006, that should be expected.

Barack Obama's victory over Hillary Clinton is the first time an insurgent has beaten the establishment candidate in the Democratic primaries since Jimmy Carter in 1976. This is interesting and important for all kinds of reasons. One, as I've written before, is that it suggests that the era of Big Money and Big Media pre-selecting the nominee of the Democratic party may well be over, in no small part because of the affordances brought by the internet: lower costs of communication and collaboration, and less allowances for hypocrisy and dishonesty in campaigns.

But there's another big reason why Obama's victory is so important. He is riding herd on the largest and most potent new political organization anyone has seen on the American landscape in at least sixteen years. He's probably got anywhere from four to eight million email addresses on top of his 1.5 million donors and 800,000 registered users of my.barackobama.com, his social networking site.

What happens with this organization if Obama wins? What will he do with it? And what will it do with him? For a website that is focused on how the candidates are using the web, and the web is using them, by the time November rolls around, this could be the billion-dollar question.

This isn't the first time this question has arisen in modern American politics, by the way. And usually the answer is "Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss." It's just that the internet should force us to think about the possibilities of a different answer. Not only that, I think Obama is thinking about a different answer.

More reporting from the front lines of academic research on politics and the internet: Now I'm sitting in on a panel with presentations on the connections between the Dean campaign and the New Left (no, he didn't slum with the Weathermen); John Kerry's innovative (!) use of the web post-2004; and Italian firebrand and antipolitician extraordinaire, Beppe Grillo.

Glenn Greenwald gives respect to Ron Paul and considers a comparison with Howard Dean; Danny Glover makes another comparison, this time to Ross Perot, warning that Paul may started getting similarly hounded in the press; Fred Thompson suggests that he won't be president after all; blogger Craig Stoltz gets excited over the New York Times' Debate Analyzer; a new section of Fred Thompson's website seems strangely underdone; and Mitt Romney ads are showing up on Gay.com. Way!

Ron Paul is in the internet's sweet spot for politics. That is, he is an remark-able candidate with a clear message that the mainstream media has been ignoring. The net reacts to censorship by routing around it; in the case of politics, the net reacts to mainstream silence or disrespect by creating or using new media systems to spread a message that people find compelling. The 2008 election just got a whole lot more interesting.

Newt Gingrich is advising Fred Thompson to use video when, or if, he announces; asking if the Internet really matters in election politics; Barack Obama launches Generation Obama; and Obama, Sam Brownback, and Ron Paul are the only candidates to support an act that would create "a kind of Google for the federal government";

When Howard Dean “friended” Micah Sifry on Facebook, Micah announced his skepticism about the meaning of this relationship: “What kind of “meeting” is taking place here, between a famous person’s Facebook profile and college students?”

With all due respect, I think Micah’s question falls into the linguistic trap of whether social network “friends” really are your friends. If we set aside our notions of authenticity (that’s often a useful thing to do, anyways) we’ll see that what’s happening here is the establishment of a new channel of communication between a citizen and a political leader - nothing more or less. And that’s quite a lot.

Howard Dean on "the most extraordinary invention for empowering ordinary people since the invention of the printing press: ....speaking for myself, even after the campaign four years ago, I didn't realize what a powerful tool this is.....It has re-democratized America. There is an enormous shift in power." More after the jump...