Meet the OPOs

Gross, frustrated with the static nature of Dean's initial Web site -- "Every time I'd go over to the Dean site, nothing was on, and Dean had this blue blazer that made him look like a Century 21 real estate agent," he recalled -- had flown from Moab, Utah, to Burlington, made it past security at Dean headquarters and arrived in Trippi's office with one message: "You need a blog." He was hired on the spot.

Almost everything about the Dean campaign was pioneering -- the blog, the fundraising haul, the e-mail list, the Meetup events that staffers from other campaigns jokingly referred to as a "bar scene out of 'Star Wars.' "

Anxious to replicate Dean's success, other candidates started Web operations in 2004, with more politicians jumping on the online bandwagon in last year's midterms. A fledgling network was ready to be enlisted by the 2008 candidates, with salaries as high as $100,000 as a lure.

On the Democratic side, Gross has worked with Rospars, who has worked with Tim Tagaris, 30, online strategist for Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut. On the Republican side, Stephen Smith, 25, works with Finn, Romney's online strategist, who used to work with Patrick Ruffini, 28, the top online adviser for former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

It's a mostly white and male group -- "Pretty crazy, huh?" said Finn, 26, one of the few female online strategists -- and it's so tightknit that when Christian Ferry, 32, was appointed McCain's e-campaign director in February, the reaction was "Christian who?" Most didn't know Ferry, who worked for McCain's 2000 campaign.

Rospars, after working for Dean, co-founded Blue State Digital, an online political strategy firm, and helped create the online department for the Democratic National Committee. Smith, a Tennessean and a Bill Frist loyalist, built iFrist, an online political volunteer program for the former Senate majority leader. Gross, a rock drummer and a longtime environmental activist, started Dean's Blog for America, the first presidential-candidate blog.

They're political junkies at heart, not former pajama-clad computer hackers who've put on a suit to join a campaign team. Smith, for example, studied political theory and history at Princeton. Rospars was a political science major at George Washington University. As they see it, it just so happens that they're (mostly) technically proficient.

And since most have been or are bloggers themselves, they're familiar with Peter Daou, 41, Internet director for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.); he's seen as the Yoda of the blogosphere because of the Daou Report, a comprehensive snapshot of the Web's blue and red blogs that he wrote until joining the Clinton campaign.

For the most part, the OPOs are tech evangelicals first and partisans second.

"I've always believed that the bigger the online world grew, the better for our democracy," said Daou. "A voter somewhere is sitting in her living room, going online, and participating in ways that voters in the past couldn't. That's exciting."

"It's an opening up of the process -- 'I'll read a blog, I'll post a video' -- a way of bringing more supporters in," added Ruffini.

Dean's campaign proved conclusively that the Internet can be an important fundraising vehicle, and that role has increased exponentially in the 2008 campaign. Obama's and Romney's fundraising prowess in the first three months of the year sealed their status as serious presidential contenders, and much of their success came through Internet programs such as ComMitt and MyBarackObama.