Bush campaign learned from Howard Dean.

American Prospect Online - When I met with George W. Bush’s campaign spokesman, Terry Holt, in January, he couldn’t stop talking about the importance of grass-roots organizing and running a person-to-person campaign that focused on getting people talking to people in their neighborhoods. I thought this sounded a lot like the sort of thing that Howard Dean’s campaign manager, Joe Trippi, was wont to say, and I told Holt this. Replied Holt, “He’s right.”

At a mid-March George Washington University conference on the politics and the Internet, Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman was effusive about the Deanies. “Joe Trippi and Mathew Gross provided an incredible example and an incredible lesson for everyone watching,” said Mehlman in a keynote address. “Give them both a round of applause.” It was one of the odder minor moments of the political season.

On April 29, Bush volunteers will stage another one. That night, the Bush campaign will sponsor a nationwide “Party for the President” that functionally reproduces the Dean campaign’s September 29 “largest conference call in the world,” as Trippi described it at the time. It will be a night of house parties, aka low-dollar fund-raisers that gin up the base. Not only will the Bush backers party at home like the Deaniacs, they’ll get a conference call, too.

Garance Franke-Ruta continues on with how Bush is like Dean and thinks Kerry may beat Bush the same way he beat Dean.