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..."

'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.

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.