January 8th, 2008
Trippi: Netroots will be critical on Feb. 5
The Nation has an interview with Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s ex-campaign manager, now with the Edwards campaign. It’s a web-only article, no doubt because - despite the fact that it was “edited for length and clarity” - it’s still a rambling, hard to follow braindump.
Even so, he brings up some points that I think are notable. For starters, he points out that the craziness that is February 5 - that is, Super Duper Tuesday - makes web organizing even more important than it ever has been. That’s because, he says, no campaign can cover all those states in the compressed time frame. They have to rely on volunteer, online organizers.
There’s no way for any campaign to compete with its own resources that day. It’s got to decentralize. Count on lots of supporters. And frankly, there’s not a whole lot that paid media can do on that day. Twenty states, you could blow all of whatever Obama’s got in the bank on California all by itself and still not have a penny left for any other state.
At some point between New Hampshire and South Carolina, the campaign loses its ability to do it. At that point, there’s no way a campaign can do what has to happen on February 5th. The traditional old style, top-down centralized campaign structure doesn’t work. Twenty states and all you’ve got is the candidate on a tarmac and what you’ve built on the Net in terms of being able to decentralize and mobilize in all states.
While Edwards and Obama might be competing for the most web-organized, one thing is clear: Hillary Clinton is the least. Probably because she is the least able to turn the campaign over to “decentralized people taking responsibility, the campaign giving up power, using the tools.”
The rest of the interview, the part that’s just really hard to quote, is about media coverage of the campaign. When you consider that the media annointed (or at least carried the message from the campaign) Hillary as the “inevitable” nominee (because she had raised so much money) and either Giuliani or Romney on the Republican side, again because that’s where the money was, — and then you look at the actual results … you couldn’t be more wrong by following the conventional wisdom reported in the media.
So what the net is showing is that it’s not just the early, big money that matters. As Trippi points out, it’s also who the net will coalesce around and the campaign’s ability to turn that interest into organizers on the ground and ballots in the box.
I [the press is] like ridiculously bad. This whole thing, the whole year was between Obama and Hillary. Why? Because they raised $80 million bucks? By the way, it’s the same mistake they made with Dean. The big reason they kept saying Dean was so fricking amazing was because of the money.
A final point is that the media looked at the Democratic field and hand-picked the contenders: Clinton and Obama and, somewhat reluctantly the media allowed that Edwards was #3. As for very capable other contenders, Sens. Biden and Dodd, for example, they never had a chance. Perhaps just because they were competing against the top 3. But because they were competing against Clinton and Obama, they couldn’t raise money and that’s what the media looks at, and so they’re outta here.
Finally, yes there is a mention of Ron Paul, to wit:
I always thought thank God because the [Inter]net’s here, and it’s coming online just as all this other [stuff] is happening and it’s the place where some guy who has no shot [can make it]. [It's] really interesting about this time around, because there are glimpses of both those worlds. There’s a guy named Ron Paul who I don’t think has anything going for him except the Internet and how people are rallying around what he’s saying.
