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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.'"
'the candidate lost but the campaign won'?
And not one of them thought, "Hey, Chief, down the volume on that scream..."
W = (-president)^1/2
when a policial canidate uses it.
... for Open Source.
Seeing how Dean got his ass KICKED and all that.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
It means that "he fired up all the troops in the democrate party, before he was stabed in the back." (this is actualy a quote from Rush)
... it makes me just want to
r gg ggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!
yyyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeearrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Joe Trippi--heralded on the cover of The New Republic as the man who "reinvented campaigning"--was born in California and began his political career working on Edward M. Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1980. His work in presidential politics continued with the campaigns of Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, Richard Gephardt and Howard Dean.
He's got quite a bit of experience as a campaign manager - maybe he just needs to be a little more selective in his employers...
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
I'm not sure Howard Dean is the best "horse" to hook the open source wagon to! We already have to overcome the linux is only for geeks issue. Do we want add on the screaming fanatic with no grasp on reality issue as well.
I understand that the Howard Dean scream was to motivate his people. It doesn't mean he's insane. yada yada yada. It doesn't matter what I think, I'm already on our side. What do the big companies decision makers think? In the USA they tend to be white, middle-aged, conservative (Republican).
All I'm saying, right or wrong, Howard Dean may not be a good influence on the Open Source acceptance in the mainstream.
He convinced a bunch of fools to part with their money using the Internet just like the Spammers and he didn't even promise to get make their dick bigger! The Dean campaign was the great Internet swindle of 2003. Just like the Dot Com boom companies and their IPOs. Thus making Howard Dean the Democratic version of the Pets.com mascot.
Dean's Newbie-ism:
JT: When we started, Howard was sort of a technophobe; he'd barely just begun using e-mail. He didn't know what a blog was. He went from "What's a blog?" to coming into headquarters saying "I want to blog today." And by the end of the campaign, he was asking, "Why doesn't the White House have a blog? If I'm elected president, I'm going to have a blog."
Problems of scale:
JT: As we grew to 650,000 people, the site was still an amazing self-policing thing. The problem was, once you get to 650,000, how do you communicate with them personally the way I, as the campaign manager, or Dean, as the candidate, had been communicating with 432? I used to answer every email personally, and suddenly I was getting 10,000 emails a day. That's the thing I'd like to figure out for the future. It was the one big problem we had, because we'd built this thing on personal communication and connection.
Solution to problem of scale:
Obviously, they just need to run slashcode.
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Chipotle food, locations, pics, links, polls and discussion!
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
It's interesting to see Trippi himself say it so nakedly. Of course, I don't see him talking about the other big conflict of interest: the millions of dollars in advertising kickbacks he walked off with.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Expropriating an old catchphrase on the cover of his book, and then expropriating free software concepts inside it. Both, badly.
B
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
Just like how open-source works in running software -- it's the difference between Linux and Microsoft.'"
All these years I have been half expecting RMS to shout "YEEAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!" to conclude a Linux/GNULinux rant.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
Last I checked, Linux has yet to win the OS wars.
What success did his campaign really have? Aside from charging up the angry Bush-haters, he made no headway with the mainstream. When the primaries came, he couldn't manage to win even one. Even John Edwards came up better than Dean, and now he's the Vice-Presidential candidate.
This open-source nonsense is just that. Outside of the liberal, techy crowd, Howard Dean and his movement is a distant and faded memory.
Slashdot Moderation: From positive to terrible in 2 "insightful" posts.
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.
Actually, this is not a politically slanted article. The point is that Open Source principles (many eyes make all bugs shallow, etc) aren't just for software. This is as much about politics as the GNU manifesto is about C code.
/. readers and editors are left-ish. Read the FAQ entry on why it's US-centric; the same arguments apply.
Now for the potentially flaming part: open source principles may be more useable by the left than the right ("command and control" issues, as he says in the interview), but that hardly means this is a politically biased article. And yes, the majority of the
Last night's edition of "Nightly Business Report" was saying just the opposite, that the Internet's effect if pretty minimal overall and the biggest results come from good ol' rallys, picnics and door to door volunteers talking to everyday people in the street. Web sites could be rallying points for the jacked-in crowd, but the vast majority it's still just AOL/MSN, pop-ups and spam, with a few emailed photos from relatives and offspring at college. However, NBR was emphasizing personalized, point-casting the message toward individuals over the mass media network broadcasting as a winning strategy.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I've become weary of such declarations. Ironic that the 2004 primary season paralleled the dot-com boom: In both cases the Internet created a tremendous amount of "buzz" and everyone said "The Internet has 'radically' changed the rules and the old model is obsolete" -- yet when all was said and done, "buzz" did not translate into stable business models nor votes, and the declaration of the total death of the old order and conventional wisdom turned out to be premature. (The scream was only part of it.)
The Internet brings incremental changes. "When it comes to technology, most people overestimate the impact in the short-term and underestimate it in the long-term." -- Arthur C. Clarke
Brent J. Nordquist N0BJN
The networks were taking the feed right off the directional mike, while Dean's famous whooping hardly made a dent in the ambient noise of the cheering supporters.
Once again, like 98% of voting Americans, I'll simply be reduced in November to choosing the lesser of two evils.
Dean's direct, logical approach was refreshing. [I recall where his support numbers grew larger in sampled populations as the degree of education increased. His support among PhDs was high.]
Logic didn't win, though. Nor can real people win that make public mistakes once in a while.
No, the only ones that can win the presidency are properly handled actors in collaboration with large money donors and the right adverising talent.
American politics is pure product selling, complete with the deception, innuendo and emotional button pushing that works so well for any other product.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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.
Oh brother...
Former director of the CIA says reports on Iraq were "an honest mistake"
I have been searching for this on google news to find a context, but I can't find any story about this. The only "honest mistake" that I have found in the news this was Sandy Berger accidentally stuffing top secret documents down his pants.
Also says that there is no plausable connection between 9/11 and Iraq
2 things-
#1- That is not what the report says. The report enumerates the many Iraq/Al Qaeda connections, but says there is no evidence that Iraq contributed to 9/11. The plausability of such a contribution is not discussed.
#2- We are fighting a war against terrorism, not a war against Al Qaeda. Iraq was one of the biggest state supporters of terrorism in the world.
though most of the hijackers did move through Iran.
You mean Iran supports terrorists too? Its almost like they are in an axis of evil or something.
And oddly enough, that threat you mentioned? The one that was so dangerous it fell in less than two weeks?
Yup- rational people see that as a big achievement for the President.
The one which we STILL haven't found any proof of actually being even remotely close to the threat the president and the Republicans kept hollering about?
If you were actually as knowledgable about the current events as you claim to be, you would realize how retarded that sounds.
Well, it's gone, but some of the terrorists who are there now are going to be beheading an american citizen every 72 hours.
Actually, it looks like they have figured out that beheading Americans doesn't do them any good, because (unlike Spain and the Philippines) we don't roll over and play dead when the terrorists make a threat.
In other words, shut the fuck up, you ignorant fool
Why am I not surprized that you resort so quickly to childish insults?
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush