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It was the middle of baseball season when the underdogs of the Howard Dean presidential campaign first stepped up to the plate against the pin-striped Bush juggernaut. The contest? A kind of Home Run Derby for dollars. The venue? For the Bush team, a $2,000-a-plate fund-raising event guest-starring Dick Cheney held at a CEO's house in South Carolina. For the Deanies, a virtual collection plate on the campaign's Internet home page urging supporters to pony up against the "special-interest contributors" meeting in Columbia.

The question? Whether Howard Dean, who in early 2003 was a little-known ex-governor from a rural New England state, could match the well-oiled, high-performance political fund-raising machine that had already built a $35 million war chest by the end of the second quarter for a candidate likely to run unopposed.

When the clock had run out, the vice president had cleared nearly $300,000 from 150 businessmen and women who had come for lunch that July day. The former Vermont governor, however, had attracted $508,640 -- nearly 70% more. It was, by any measure, a stunning performance, all the more so given that 9,621 supporters had responded to the call, donating an average of $50 apiece.

"Thank you for making this challenge a huge success, beyond what the timid among us in Burlington thought we could do (yes, even me)," campaign manager Joe Trippi wrote at 1:30 that morning on "Blog for America," the campaign's Weblog.

Humble though he may have been in the wee hours of the morning, by the next day, Trippi, a man invariably described as "rumpled," is back in his office, looking weary but sounding like someone whose team is suddenly a contender. Camera crews are getting antsy in the lobby, but Trippi wants to savor his victory. "Howard Dean is running a campaign that empowers people to make a difference," he says. "If you and the rest of America come to believe that we can actually be a government of the people again, that we don't need 33 lobbyists for every member of Congress, then we'll kick their ass."

Pretty cocky attitude for a campaign that started out less than six months earlier with seven people and $157,000 in the bank. But with a second-quarter fund-raising blitz that raised a record $7.6 million, mostly from small donations, Dean was suddenly in the top tier of Democratic presidential candidates -- third only to Senators John Kerry and John Edwards in funds raised. What's more, by running the country's first presidential campaign organized primarily through the Web, Dean had managed to attract more than 302,000 supporters to a grassroots movement that was growing exponentially -- much of it with little supervision from campaign headquarters in Vermont. He was simultaneously on the covers of Time and Newsweek, was surging in the polls, and was being spoken of as a real prospect for the Democratic nomination.

Desperate as the Democrats are to get back in the game, party regulars find Dean's surge alarming. They invoke the painful memory of the McGovern debacle, and warn darkly that the party will lose the election if it lists toward an angry "far left" stance. The centrist Democratic Leadership Council recently ran a story in its magazine asking, "Could [Howard Dean's campaign] be the next dotcom bust?"