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Joe Trippi Interviewed
MikeCapone writes "Mother Jones and Alternet interviewed Joe Trippi,the guy behind the Howard Dean campaign ('the candidate lost but the campaign won'). He has a new book out, 'The Revolution will not be Televised' (click for excerpt), about how the Internet is radically changing the way politics is done. Choice quote from the interview: 'The open-source stuff was amazing. I mean, 650,000 brains are a lot smarter than the 50 [...] They spotted stuff that we didn't see, came up with ideas we wouldn't have thought of, and made the campaign a lot stronger. Just like how open-source works in running software -- it's the difference between Linux and Microsoft.'"
I think that Mr. Trippi misses the gist of Gil Scott-Heron's lyrics to 'The Revolution will not be Televised'.
Have you Meta Moderated t
Think of seeing an opera star on TV. In person in a crowded hall is one thing. With a televised close-up, suddenly the big stage acting becomes grotesque. That's what happened to Dean.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Having been a sysadmin during the campaign I can't help but question most of the words that come out of Joe Trippi's mouth. The sad truth is that if half of the people here, Trippi included, focussed more on the campaign than on their personal career, we might still be in a campaign now instead of the political action committee, Democracy for America.
The truth is hard to find in Trippi's book. Even in my personal case; I built blogforamerica.com and Matt Gross gets the credit because that's the way the political game works.
Joe can be right just as often as not, but before we go taking his words as gospel I suggest we look behind them a little more.
Trippi didn't get advertising kickbacks. Trippi's firm didn't get advertising kickbacks. Read the book, this is all explained very clearly. The way political advertising works is this: the media firm does the ad buying. They get a 15% commission on the ads they buy. So the Dean campaign gave millions to Trippi's firm to spend on television ads. From that, the firm took a 7% commission, less than half of what the industry standard is. Trippi ended up making a little over $100,000 for his work on the Dean campaign. But he would have made that money whether he had worked his ass off as campaign manager or not. His firm had already been hired to do the media, and as a partner, he would have gotten 1/3 of the 7% commission no matter what. There were no kick backs. There was nothing fishy about the situation. Anyone involved in media or politics knows that this is the way it works, and the speculation that Trippi got kickbacks or embezzled is such pure bullshit.
Having volunteered in Iowa for 10 months prior to caucus I watched the campaign rise and fall from the inside. Here's just a few points:
Bad data management. While you could easily see all the kids with their "coding skills", up-all-night work schedule, and Mountain Dew were writing and re-writing database structure to help target voters, someone with very good database experience was hard to find. As such, we were contacting some people numerous times and not contacting others at all.
Bad communication with supporters, would-be supporters and lay people. The campaign decided the best method to communicate with supporters was the blog. While it was nice for insider news, it was terrible at motivations, suggestions and direction. The television ads to get as many onto the idea of Dean as possible were TERRIBLE. I felt like I could have produced better ads. Also Dean wasn't exactly media-trained. He didn't realize the power of the media and didn't conduct himself the best while in interviews on TV.
The campaign peaked too early. Although this isn't something the campaign could really control at that point. For the media and the competition at some point the appeal of the guy on top is lost. Media over-scrutenizes and the competion attacks. (Let's see if this happens again in Kerry-Bush.)
Lot's of supporters, lack of direction. While this is related to my earlier point, it deserves a follow up. With an army of 650,000 the campaign may have been able to counter it's other problems. However they didn't know how to take all of the resources they had available to them and really make it work FOR the campaign.