Zephyr Teachout
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Zephyr Rain Teachout was the Director of Internet Organizing for Howard Dean's presidential campaign. The daughter of Peter Teachout, Professor of Constitutional Law at Vermont Law School, and the Hon. Mary Miles Teachout, a judge on Vermont's Superior Court, Zephyr is a graduate of Yale University and Duke Law School, where she was the editor-in-chief of the Duke Law Journal; she also holds an M.A. in Political Science.
She co-founded and was the Executive Director of the Fair Trial Initiative to support attorneys working on death penalty cases. And she was the founder and executive director of Baobabs College Labs, a project of Music for America.
After the presidential campaign ended, she worked at America Coming Together and Current TV and was a fellow at the Berkman Center.
She is a leading advocate of using the Internet for creating local offline groups with political power. Her writings include America Offline, an Open Letter to the DNC [1] Come Together, Right Now: The Unlit Fuse [2], CB's, Meetups and Virtual Volunteers [3], and Constitutional Limits on the Extraterritorial Reach of the Offenses Clause [4].
In January 2005 Teachout sparked controversy by claiming that the Dean campaign had paid two popular webloggers, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of Daily Kos and Jerome Armstrong of MyDD, to ensure positive coverage on their sites. Dean's Director of Internet Communications, Mathew Gross, who later oversaw blogger outreach for the campaign, disputed Teachout's statements. While Teachout did not suggest Armstrong or Moulitsas knew of the Dean campaign's motives, Armstrong responded to Teachout's claims by pointing out that he ceased blogging while employed by the Dean campaign and that Moulitsas ran a prominent disclaimer on Daily Kos disclosing his capacity as a "technical consultant" to the campaign.[5]
In 2005-2006, Teachout taught political science at the University of Vermont. In November 2005, she put an end to rumors that she was considering a run for Vermont's at-large congressional seat,[6] which was being vacated by Bernie Sanders in his ultimately successful 2006 campaign for the U.S. Senate.
In 2006, Teachout joined the Sunlight Foundation as the group's national director.
