Howard Dean on Inter­net dis­rupt­ing pol­i­tics from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

One high­light of the three-day For­tune Brainstorm:Tech con­fer­ence, which just wrapped up in Pasadena, came when Howard Dean, for­mer pres­i­den­tial can­di­date and for­mer chair­man of the Demo­c­ra­tic National Com­mit­tee, began riff­ing on the Internet’s impact on national politics.

Some high­lights from the 11-minute video:

• Howard Dean: “The tech­nol­ogy is mov­ing so fast and it’s hav­ing an enor­mous, enor­mous effect.” He briefly traced the influ­ence of the Inter­net on U.S. pol­i­tics, cit­ing YouTube flip­ping the U.S. Sen­ate to Demo­c­ra­tic con­trol in 2006 because of Va. Sen. George Allen’s Macaca moment.

• The 2008 cam­paign by Barack Obama made spec­tac­u­lar use of social net­work­ing. “2008 was the first elec­tion in the life­time of every­one in this room in which more peo­ple voted who were under 35 than over 65,” Dean told the audi­ence. “This is the pres­i­dent of the younger generation.”

• Dean: “Then along comes the 2009 Iran­ian elec­tion and they could shut down the Inter­net but they couldn’t shut down their cell­phone net­work with­out shut­ting down their whole coun­try. How did infor­ma­tion get out? Twitter.”

• Want to clean up the local stream? Why lobby your local gov­ern­ment “when you can get 100 of your friends to get together and go down there and clean it up?” Dean suggested.

• Dean on the plight of the news­pa­per indus­try: “I don’t know what I would do if I were try­ing to run a news­pa­per today.”

• “We’re see­ing a huge democ­ra­tiz­ing effect, tak­ing power away from gov­ern­ments and giv­ing it to indi­vid­u­als because of the extra­or­di­nary power of elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tions,” Dean said. “The Inter­net puts politi­cians out of busi­ness because it makes it eas­ier to get around author­ity structures. ”

Well, per­haps some day, but that’s just not true yet, given the 95 per­cent re-election rate in House races in the last few cycles. Incum­bents have access to the power of the Net, too.

You’ll notice some cam­era shake mid­way through. That’s because I used a Flip Ultra hand­held recorder, with­out a tri­pod, and they’re very hard to hold steady for long periods.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.