2-15-03

by Edward Cone
News & Record

Joe Trippi in exile looks healthier than he did on the job.

Howard Dean’s former campaign manager, who walked the plank after the erstwhile front-runner’s humbling losses in Iowa and New Hampshire, spoke Monday at a conference in San Diego. He seemed rested and relaxed, certainly more so than when I interviewed him amid the frenzy at Dean’s Vermont headquarters in late October.

But there was nothing laid-back about Trippi’s speech, in which he blasted the media and the Democratic Party for keeping the powerful in power and stifling the voice of the people. The revolution in politics he helped trigger as an architect of Dean’s online campaign is not over, he pledged, even if the campaign itself seems all but finished.

The same theme resounded throughout the day at the Digital Democracy Teach-In, a day-long event that was part of the annual O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference. Speakers including Wes Boyd, co-founder of the advocacy group MoveOn.org, and Scott Heiferman, chief executive of  Meetup.com, insisted that the Internet’s impact on the political process is just beginning to be felt.

Nobody, though, spoke with more passion than Trippi, still raw from his recent wounds. He blamed Dean’s decline on attacks by the media, which replayed the famous Dean Scream ad nauseum, and the Gephardt campaign, which went negative in Iowa to carry out what Trippi called a “murder/suicide pact.” He defended the decision to go for a knockout punch by spending heavily in Iowa and New Hampshire, saying that it was the only way to deal with a Democratic primary schedule set up to reward insiders and hinder insurgents.

It was at best an incomplete analysis. Politics ain’t beanbag, as the old saying goes, and if Dean couldn’t take the punishment in January it’s hard to see how he could stand full contact in the fall. And Trippi’s analysis overlooked the candidate’s own limitations, which include, in my view, his desire to rescind all of the Bush tax cuts, his focus on the decision to go to war in Iraq at the expense of discussing what comes next, and his ability to connect with voters beyond his base.

But Trippi, a veteran of seven presidential campaigns, nonetheless spoke some important truths. The Democrats, he said, have betrayed their birthright as the party of the people by growing dependent on high-dollar donations. The Dean campaign was able to set fund-raising records with small donations gathered over the Internet. If two million people give $100 each to the eventual nominee, he said, politics in America would be transformed.

His harshest criticism was for what he called “broadcast politics,” the major media and party establishments working together to tell the same old story. “The media jumped the shark on the war,” he said (“jumping the shark” being the term of art for the moment when a television show goes irrevocably bad, as “Happy Days” did in the episode when Fonzie performed a dangerous water-skiing stunt). There was no true debate in the broadcast media and major papers over going to war or the Patriot Act, he said – to find the dissenting voices and nuanced conversations, you had to go online.

Trippi was especially concerned with allegations that he ripped off the Dean campaign by getting big money as a partner in the firm that placed its ads. When I asked him about it in an onstage interview session following his speech, he said he was paid $165,000 for his firm’s work; although I’m still not clear on exactly how much the company netted from the campaign, it is clearly far less than the $7.2 million gross figure thrown around in a scurrilous piece by the Los Angeles Times. Trippi argues that this was an attempt to discredit the whole concept of online campaigns and citizen involvement by smearing him.

Hyperbole, perhaps, but again with a core of truth. The media wants to write off the new politics as a failed experiment, even a fraud. The establishment press sees that money is being raised – they understand that – and they get bits and pieces of the larger story, patting themselves on the back for knowing what a weblog is, maybe even attending a Meetup. But they have been slow to grasp what Trippi, Boyd, Heiferman, and others have accomplished – and what they will accomplish. The real story, the connection of people with politics, facilitated by the Internet, is still not part of the accepted narrative.

One person who isn’t betting on the status quo is John Kerry. His chief technology officer, Sanford Dickert, was at the Teach-In, networking with other attendees and learning what he could. As Trippi noted, this revolution is just beginning, and any politician sighing with relief at Dean’s implosion is making a huge mistake.

Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.