One possible reason Dean looked so good and then fell so hard in Iowa and New Hampshire:

Given the relentless hammering he took from the media, Dean was lucky to get 26% of the New Hampshire vote. Even so, Dean may be done for. Or, more to the point, done in. Some will say that he strung his own rope, but it looked more like a media lynching to me. Assuming I’m right about this, why did television want to hang Howard Dean?
I may have an answer. It may be that, once again, we have met the enemy and he is us. By pre-announcing the possibility that this might be The Internet Election, we issued fair warning both to the traditional media and the big money politicos that a threat was at hand.
If Dean could actually raise enough money online to match in aggregate the much larger and fewer donations Bush has bought from the plutocrats with his tax cuts, it would shake the system to its rotten core. Worse, if information from the Web and the Blogosphere were to start defining enough personal realities to contest the great mass of tube-zombies at the polls, the gazillions presently spent on television campaign ads would start to wither. An enormous amount of power and money might be at stake.

Of course, anything this short must be out of context, or incomplete, if it was written by Barlow. So, read the rest.
The Barlow link is via David Isen who is concerned about the implications of Dean’s new campaign manager:

Howard Dean, the erstwhile “Internet candidate,” urgently needs to explain to his core Nethead constituency why Joe “Nethead” Trippi is out and Roy “Bellhead” Neel is in. Neel was president of the US Telecom Association (USTA) in the late 1990s….
But now, unless the Dean campaign does something immediate and heroic to shore up its Nethead core, it is time to “Move On.”

I think that it is pretty clear that a candidate who tries to rely only on ‘netheads’ will not be viable. ‘Netheads’ do not encompass a large enough part of the voting population yet. But watch 2012 and beyond.
The Isen link is via Lawrence Lessig.