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The Revolution Will Not Be Televised : Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything by Joe Trippi
This is how the inside jacket cover sets up the story:
When Joe Trippi signed on to manage Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign, the long-shot candidate had 432 known supporters and $100,000 in the bank. Within a year, Trippi and his energetic but inexperienced team had transformed the most obscure horse in the field into a front-runner, creating a groundswell of 640,000 people and raising more money than any Democrat in history--more than fifty million dollars--mostly through donations of one hundred dollars or less.
I'm a sucker for a David-Goliath drama so I found Trippi's tale a good read. However, in this story David starts out pummeling Goliath then spectacularly implodes just at the moment triumph appears imminent. From an historical perspective, the most important element of the book is how Trippi was able to grow grass-roots interest in the Dean Campaign given his obscure beginnings as governor of Vermont and, then translate that interest into a fund-raising cash machine. In my mind, the pre-requisite for this phenomenon was the huge dissatisfaction with George Bush among the left-leaning American electorate coupled with the fact that the leaders of the Democratic party had supported Bush in his relentless drive to war in Iraq (a war whose basic premise later turned out to be false). The three Democratic party elders who were also running for president in 2004 (Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Joe Lieberman, and Rep. Dick Gebhardt) had all voted for the resolution authorizing Bush to go to war in Iraq. These guys had already been steam rolled by the Bush machine on Iraq and countless other issues yet the people were now to trust them to lead the opposition? Before Trippi could work his magic, he needed a message that could resonate. Dean's anti-war, fiscally sound yet populist economic message stood out from the crowd.
So how did he pull it off?
In a nutshell, the genius of the 2004 Dean campaign was extreme decentralization. This strategy might have been born out of desperation but one must give Trippi credit for having the imagination and balls to carry it out. Instead of all actions and activity of the campaign being conceived of and implemented from headquarters in Burlington, Vermont, Trippi empowered ordinary citizens to help with the campaign by organizing events and contacting their friends. This can best be exemplified by the campaign's use of Meetup.com.FN1
Meetup.com is simply a web site where people of similar interest (it could be anything: stamps, Star Trek, Howard Dean) are matched and given a time and place to meet, organized by the web site, which reserves a public place in each city (Starbucks are very popular) and notified all the members of that interest group of the time and place.
ibid at page 83. Trippi put a link to meetup.com on the Dean web site and the number of individuals interested in a Dean Meetup around the country went from 432 to 2,700 within weeks. This eventually snow-balled into 190,000 people around the country registered with meetup.com to go to local Dean "meetups". The power of this forum was that the people organized themselves for what essentially were Dean pep-rallies. Occasionally someone from the campaign would show at a meetup but, generally, they were run by local self-appointed Deaniacs. Imagine the power of having 190,000 people around the country self-organizing themselves to support Dean without the campaign having to spend a dime in advertising, in campaign literature, in meeting halls, in air fare, in paid staff hours, etc. FN2
This tactic had two separate pluses in my estimation. First, you have an extremely efficient and effective method for reaching voters at the grass roots level. Second, meeting in small groups on a regular basis made these people feel engaged in, and part of, the Dean movement. Traditional political campaigns, per Trippi, have a very narrow focus of sucking money from supporters (the chicken dinner rumba) and then dumping money into TV advertising--the hallowed presidential campaign magic bullet. The Deaniacs, by comparison, attended these monthly meetups like it is was a religious revival. They invested in the campaign emotionally, they felt involved.
In a real sense, the Deaniacs were involved in the campaign. Yes, hundreds dropped everything in their lives, drove to Burlington, Vermont, and volunteered for the cause. Every campaign has those few hundred, young true believers (yes, I'm sure even George Kucinich had college groupies, a few anyway). The Dean phenomena was on a much larger scale, a national scale. Dean was able to mobilize hundreds and even thousands of supporters practically anywhere in the country solely through the internet. How did Trippi make these people feel involved? In addition to the meetups, he had Governor Dean writing a campaign blog (published on the campaign's web site) to give daily reports to the Deaniacs. The Dean site hosted a message board where the Deaniacs could debate every aspect of the campaign. Campaign staffers read the posts and participated in the discussion. Quite often, according to Trippi, information coming from posters was utilized in making campaign decisions. Lastly was the army of web bloggers who offered up their political opinion on the Dean campaign and, thereby, generated internet buzz about the campaign. They operated as something of an alternative mass media (totally off the airwaves). The result was an army that Trippi & Company mobilized to participate in the cause starting with $100,000 and short on time.
So why did it crash?
Trippi states that he saw the disaster in Iowa coming. BTW, in his estimation, the flame out was well under way before the "I have a scream" speech given after Dean came in 4th in the Iowa caucuses.
We got on the cover of Time and Newsweek. We are the story. And finally, the other people in the campaign are beginning to mumble what I've been screaming for a year: "Hey, we're gonna win this frickin' thing."
Only I don't believe it anymore. The Iowa caucuses are a little more than a month away and we are bleeding. Our momentum is gone. Our message is getting lost. We're spending all our time and energy deflecting attacks from other campaigns. Our guy has become an unmitigated disaster on the road. The unscripted candor that served him when he was the longest shot is now being played like a sort of political Tourette's. The press continually mangles the context of what he says, amping up his words in their own cynical version of "Twist and Shout". We've got no adults with him on the road--no seasoned political people--and so, naturally, he's gaffing his way across Iowa.
ibid, xii. Do all candidates have to be baby-sat to make sure they do not injure themselves in front of cameras? It's a depressing reality. For me, this is probably the one part of the book I was not happy with--i.e., Trippi's explanation of what happened. Essentially, his thesis is that if Dean would have just pushed all his Vermont cronies into the background and hired more seasoned political professionals like Trippi then we would have been inaugurating President Dean in a few weeks. Dean was Dean and his weaknesses finally came to the surface. Could Trippi have put humpty dumpty back together again had he been allowed to? I doubt it.
But as Joe Trippi correctly points out, the real story of the Dean campaign was not the crash and burn in the Iowa cornfield. The story was the people, the Deaniacs, and the revolutionary way in which they were organized using new technology. Essentially, Dean's 2004 campaign was the first true wired campaign. I'm sure they shall be studying it in college political science classes for years to come.
After reading Trippi's book, I was moved to write him a letter, a copy of which is reprinted at this location on my site: Trippi letter. Basically, I have a problem with Trippi's vision of the "revolution". He seems to think that a presidential candidate shall come along who shall totally give in to his plan of how to run a campaign and, thus, take it all the way to the White House (thereby setting off global nirvana). Dean is still Dean (the man who screams and makes not-so-well-thought out statements in extemporaneous remarks and who refuses to release his private files from his years as governor of Vermont). You can't take the warts off him through technology. Career politicians all have huge warts. Technology can't fix that. In truth, we progressives have been waiting for the next Bobby Kennedy. The internet cannot create him (or her). When he or she arrives, the campaign will not be about the internet or message boards or blogs. It will be about his or her vision for the future of America and how we shall solve its problems. The Trippi strategy will enhance this candidate's reach and amplify his or her message, but the web cannot bring into being a polished visionary.
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FN1 Trippi credits Jerome Armstrong of MyDD.com as having turned him on to meetup.com. We have since learned that Jerome ended up on the Dean Campaign payroll; however, it is alleged that he did not give a full & complete disclosure of this fact on his blog. Link.
FN2 According to Trippi, the Dean campaign eventually paid Meetup.com $2500 in exchange for their work in organizing thousands of local meetups. Still, one hell of a return on investment. Further, they also created online tools for their own web site that mimicked meetup.com. Again, according to Trippi, another 170,000 individuals signed up through this program: i.e., a total of 360,000 were self-organizing themselves for Dean meetings / rallies across the country on the web.
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