This is interesting — there are some rumblings out there that newly announced Democratic Presidential candidate General Wesley Clark may be looking to position himself as the polar opposite of Howard Dean, whose campaign has become the best example to date of what I’ve been calling “micropolitics”. One well-informed Democratic blog, the Daily Kos, is reporting that Clark is going so far as to even dismantle the online grassroots organizations that spontaneously sprang up when he first started exploring a run, in favor of a more centralized campaign run by experienced political operatives.

If that’s true, it’s pretty remarkable. I’ve been watching this space for over a year now, and I’ve been preaching the virtues of micropolitics for longer than that. In the last six months I’ve seen this set of ideas go from something nobody — and I mean nobody — bought into something highly buzzworthy. If you had said a year ago that a campaign blog would be emerge as a highly visible part of a Presidential candidate’s media strategy, you’d have been laughed at; and yet today, many campaigns have blogs, and some candidates (Howard Dean, John Edwards, and Dennis Kucinich, to name a few) are posting directly to those blogs, rather than having staff members do it for them. Remember back in the 90s when we all used to be abuzz about “disintermediation”? Hey, in this case, it actually happened!

So, if Wes Clark is kicking back against micropolitics — and I hope he’s not, it’d be a shame — I suggest he’s wasting his energy. His Web site isn’t encouraging, though: it would appear that Clark has a “100 Year Vision”, but what he does not have, alas, is a blog.