In my previous entry, I asked, “Will any of the campaigns in 2008 or 2012 show the sort of bold courageous leadership necessary to have a campaign that is of, by and for the people?” It reflects the way people seem to be thinking about the question, “what is Dean’s legacy on upcoming campaigns?” Maybe that isn’t the question we need to be asking at all.

Whenever I heard Gov. Dean tell people, “You have the power”, my mind always went to that scene in The Life of Brian, where Brian tells the crowd, “You are all individuals” and everyone responds as if by rote, “We are all individuals”. Too often, I attended Meetups where people talked excitedly about “having the power” and then asking the folks around them what they were supposed to do with that power.

In 2003, Gov. Dean spoke out against the trend in media consolidation, and some say led to the media attacking him by drastically overplaying the “Dean Scream”. The media consolidation has only gotten worse since then with yet another blow to a diverse media being delivered yesterday by the FCC.

Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films illustrates the danger of excessive media consolidation. We need a new media ecology, a media ecology where discussions about the future of our country are not controlled by large corporate conglomerates, and perhaps that is where we find one of the most important aspects of the Dean Legacy.

How many of you are coming to this site, because you found out about alternative digital media sources during the Dean campaign? How many of you have started creating your own media with comments here, diaries on DailyKos, blogs of your own, and pictures and videos posted online?

We can be the new media. We can do it without a presidential candidate or a Meetup leader telling us what to do. We can express our own opinions, report the news as we see it and listen to others doing the same. Sure, it may take a while before a new citizen driven digital media overtakes the old corporate owned broadcast media, but as Gov. Dean told us, “you have the power.”

(Originally posted at the TPM Cafe Book Club as part of the discussion about the Dean Legacy.)