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.'"

Comments

650,000 brains

[Waltan Hammett]

And not one of them thought, "Hey, Chief, down the volume on that scream..."

Umm, perhaps this is not the best analog...

[gatkinso]

... for Open Source.

Seeing how Dean got his ass KICKED and all that.

it means

[mpost4]

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)

This is good news

[gowen]

... it makes me just want to

yyyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeearrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr gg ggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!

Does anyone else think this is a bad idea?

[Tye_Informer]

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.

Interesting stuff from article...

[diagnosis]

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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The Revolution will not be blogged either

[eltoyoboyo]

I think that Mr. Trippi misses the gist of Gil Scott-Heron's lyrics to 'The Revolution will not be Televised'.

'the candidate lost but the campaign won'

[Otter]

It's funny -- I was just talking with someone about the conflict of interest between candidates and campaign managers. Theoretically, the campaign manager's goal is the candidate's victory -- in reality, his long term prospects depend as much on how his campaign is perceived than on how the candidate eventually fares. So, for example, Kerry may have been the winner of the 2004 primaries but the only thing anyone will remember is Joe Trippi and blogs and the cult-ish atmosphere the Dean campaign constructed.

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.

Re:'the candidate lost but the campaign won'

[acaben]

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.

The Campaign Won?

[USAPatriot]

The Howard Dean campaign was an example of all hype and no substance. The man who gots lots of press from the young and hip made no impact after his campaign was over.

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.

The 'mike' wasn't open source

[ianscot]

Supposedly the way "the scream" came off had to do with quite common directional microphone tech. It didn't play badly at 1 AM or whatever in a crowd in Iowa, it just got blown out of proportion.

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.

Joe Trippi and his book

[mchadwick]

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.