I'm in Joe Trippi's presentation and I'll attempt to blog it live. We'll see how this goes.
Zack from MoveOn.org is leading the interminable introduction. He says that he warned Joe not to use blogs as part of the campaign, and in hindsight, it was blogs that "build the Dean campaign." There is no trace of irony in his delivery.
The Dean campaign broke new ground by making itself a "social movement" and, unlike all other presidential campaigns, was willing to cede control of the campaign to the people supporting it. (This is probably one of the reasons it failed, in my opinion.)
Now Joe's up. I'm paraphrasing him from here on out.
The Democratic party, after the Carter campaign, set up internal barriers to stop insurgent campaigns. After Gary Hart in 1984, the party went back to strengthen those. The front-loaded primaries are one way of doing this. The Republicans figured out long ago how to defeat insurgents, but the Dems are just now catching up. See McCain for an example.
These barriers meant that the only way the Dean campaign had a chance was to come in hard and fast, well-funded, aiming to win Iowa and New Hampshire. No insurgent could have a chance any other way. All the campaigns that tried to avoid Iowa/NH got blown out of the water.
Our current system is rusted and broken, and has been since TV changed politics in the wake of the Kennedy/Nixon debates. At that time, we just didn't know how bad it would be. Now fundraising is the most significant qualification to join the race.
"We don't have health care, not because Gephardt didn't have a good plan, or Dean didn't have a good plan, or the Clintons didn't have a good plan, but because the special interests can put up Harry and Louise and kill it. It doesn't matter what the plan is." (Is he nuts? Well, of course he is. )
The internet is the only medium that lets democracy come back into the fray. All other media is top-down. The Internet is the most powerful tool put in the hands of average Americans. It's a bottom-up phenomenon. The people who use the net will begin to change everything, not just in politics, but across the board.
The Dean campaign began with 432 known supporters nationwide. It grew to 650,000 Americans and raised more money than any Democrat in history, not with $2,000 checks, but averaging less than $100 per person.
How did we get there? Mainstream media had a homogenous message, but all the important debates - WMD's, DMCA, and so on - were happening in the blogosphere. Trent Lott happened there. Paperless voting machines are getting discussed there. Not in the mainstream media.
The campaign embraced the meetup.com immediately when they saw critical masses of people start to form. One thing the campaign did was that every day today there's an American waking up saying "I can make a difference." Broadcast politics have been wiped out. (Does he know who John Kerry is?")
$25 can change the way the Democratic party's nomination process works. This year, there two million Americans in this country who would borrow $100 to get rid of George Bush. The day that happens, politics will be changed forever.
In the campaign, they had a whiteboard and knew they needed to raise $200 million. Not going to happen in $2,000 increments. Analyzing smaller increments started to look like the answer.
Not only would this grassroots movement change the occupant of the White House, but it would also empower the American people to get rid of the lobbyists and the special interests. Only the internet gives the American people that power.
What worked and didn't work?
The largest political SMS machine - wow, 5,000 users. Not so helpful, but the attempt was made.
MSNBC has an average audience of 250,000 people, after 12 years on the air. In 13 months, Dean grew from 432 to 150,000 people. Almost every really cool idea on the Dean campaign came from the blogs.
Signs: Iowa for Dean, etc. was on the web site. A blogger let them know they had forgotten PR. Someone from London wanted an Americans Abroad for Dean sign. A thank-you note came from another woman in Spain. All this happened in 10 minutes. Under the old way, the would have been a warehouse full of signs and the omission would never have been fixed until the election was already over. No campaign has as much brainpower as 60,000 Americans.
At a press event in NY, they decided they needed a red bat for Dean's appearance - with five minutes left. Just as Dean gets there, a campaign aide runs up with a red bat he's somehow found. The red bat was an idea from the blog readers to signal the audience they had made the fundraising goal, and the blog readers know the idea had been posted only 30 minutes before.
This wasn't giving up control; it was blog readers making the campaign better than it ever could have been.
Without the internet, Dean could have gotten nowhere near where he got with this campaign due tot he way the rules are set up. It takes more than 13 months to tear down the old structure, but the genie is now out of the bottle. Washington is not immune from change for the people. The net isn't going to knock the system down, the people are going to do it using the net as a tool.
The campaign spent $100,000 to attack Bush in Texas, and asked the people for money to keep the momentum going. In regular politics, a million-dollar fundraiser usually nets $650,000 - but the Dean campaign netted $900,000 by raising a million with that ad buy. Now that the campaign is over, the establishment attacks Joe Trippi as a way of preserving the old way of doing politics.
Now for Q&A:
Someone asks about the 2 million Americans with $100 each. Trippi says that the best thing about that money is that it's hard money which can be spent any way the campaign wants to, unlike soft money or 527 organizations. It's not enough to change presidents - without popular support, politics won't change and we'll have another Carter.
q: Do you think the internet is now like it was before corporations got involved?
a: The Dean campaign couldn't have happened if Amazon.com hadn't happened - the 'net wasn't mature enough and people wouldn't be willing to use credit cards to contribute. That's why the Dean movement didn't happen last cycle - it wasn't mature enough. No one in Washington is talking about the grassroots - they only care about the money. That's why the change isn't coming from Washington, it's got to come from the people. No one's going to change your country for you. So how to do it? That's what the Dean campaign started to answer.
q: is this something unique about progressive politics, or will the conservative movement pick up on this as well and ultimately balance out?
a: the Republicans, even more than the Dems, are a top-down party and will be much less willing to give up control. The Kerry campaign might not even be willing to do that. The media, the recording industry, are top-down and that's why they get blindsided because they just don't understand the bottom-up movement that's coming.
q: if someone said that moveon.org was only now doing what freerepublic.com has been doing for years, what would you say?
a: I wouldn't disagree. Rove and these guys have built a Death Star by bundling obscene amounts of money - the only apparatus for the Dems to be competitive is grassroots. Part of being an opposition party is that the only way to get power back is for the people to take it.
q: Did Trippi have any notion that the media was going to knock Dean down at the first chance it got?
a: The campaign was in trouble long before the Dean scream. The Gore endorsement was a watershed event. It unleashed two forces: all the other candidates decided to target Dean, and the press realized it had to get tough with the presumptive nominee. Those two things happened at once long before the first vote was cast, unlike any other Democratic presidential campaign in history. When the campaign made some mistakes, all those forces combined to kill the campaign. No one has ever faced the kind of independent attack ads like Dean did in Iowa. Iowa also happened to be the worst state for a guy like Dean because it is the oldest average voter in the state.
Posted by wasylik at March 14, 2004 04:35 PM | TrackBack