Matt Gross, the head blogger, drove all the way from Utah without the promise of a job, or even calling ahead to say he was coming. He was hired on the spot and created Dean’s “Call to Action” site, now the 3,000th most-visited Web site, making it more popular than Madonna’s. By comparison, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry’s site is 159,000th in the rankings. College students who signed on in May for a summer’s lark aren’t going back to school. They call themselves “Dropouts for Dean,” and they’re imagining themselves blogging from a White House office. Joe Trippi, the 47-year-old campaign manager, presides over this youthful enthusiasm exuberance. Summoning Kasey, his West Highland white terrier, Trippi asks the dog, “Would you rather work for George Bush or be dead?” Kasey promptly rolls over and plays dead. “Good girl,” he says, giving Kasey a treat. Trippi and his wife, Kathy, brought Kasey with them from their Virginia home, and she’s become the campaign’s mascot. When Dick Gephardt remarked that Dean must not like dogs because he hurried by one at a Democratic event, the campaign put up a picture of Dean and Kasey on its Web site. Kasey is now head of Canine Constituent Services and receives bones from all over the country. “She’s one smart dog,” says Trippi as Kasey plops down in the heavily trafficked hallway outside Trippi’s office. Thus her nickname: Speed Bump.

The experts warn Trippi that his candidate has peaked too early. He dismisses the criticism as old politics. “You can’t peak too early in this thing,” he says. “The guy who peaks too early is the guy who gets to roll through the whole thing.”

Trippi’s theory is that the race could be over before the first vote is cast if Dean continues to outpace his rivals in fund-raising. Democrats are eager to settle on a candidate and avoid the prolonged infighting that wounds a nominee. The rush to judgment is heightened by the California recall, which is sucking oxygen out of the Democratic race. Presidential candidates have to vie with Arnold Schwarzenegger and his rivals for media exposure. The presidential race is on ice until the end of September, when the results of the candidates’ third-quarter fund-raising is due. The big labor unions are holding off on endorsing anybody until they see who can raise the most money. Labor’s heart belongs to Gephardt, but labor leaders are not convinced he can win. If Dean can post the same kind of impressive dollar figures he did in the last quarter, he might get labor’s endorsement–a development that would mortally wound Gephardt and shake up the race. Dean has to prove he’s not a one-quarter wonder and that his Internet base is real. Party professionals looked at Dean with new respect when the little-known former governor from tiny Vermont reported taking in $7.6 million–the highest total among Democrats–in the three months ending June 30. If Dean can duplicate that performance for the quarter ending Sept. 30, he will be well on his way to winning the nomination. It’s not just the dollars, it’s the number of people the dollars represent, and the energy they bring.

When Dean asks his Internet followers for money, he gets an almost 50 percent response–a phenomenal return rate. Dean has tapped into a highly motivated core of voters with the capability of sustaining an insurgent candidacy. If the Internet had matured to where it is today when Gary Hart, the new-ideas candidate, challenged former vice president Walter Mondale in 1984, Mondale couldn’t have gotten the nomination, says Trippi, who worked for Mondale. Hart was stopped because he couldn’t raise money quickly enough to sustain his momentum after beating Mondale in New Hampshire. Just as the 1960 televised debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon signaled the dominance of television, Dean has shown the power of the Internet. Not bad for a governor who barely did e-mail and had never heard of blogging. Now he’s doing it, though his blog needs brightening up; it reads like it was written by an automaton. When one respondent accused Dean of having his stuff ghostwritten, Trippi emailed back that if it were ghostwritten, they’d do a better job.