At the moment, the biggest winner on the left is Trippi. He will be the Left's "Rove."
Internet wiz boosts Dean
By MIKE WILLIAMS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
BURLINGTON, Vt. -- His office looks as if a small tornado just passed through, with stray papers scattered on the floor and boxes of campaign paraphernalia heaped against the walls. His desk is a battered folding table crowded with a laptop computer, a half-case of Diet Pepsi and piles of papers, photos and whatnot.
Joe Trippi doesn't look like a buttoned-down political operative, a label that probably would make him cringe and his staff of eager young campaign novices laugh. But he has spent two decades in the trenches of presidential politics. And this year the longtime campaign hired gun may have struck pay dirt when he signed on as former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean's campaign manager.
In the eight months since Trippi took over, Dean has vaulted from unknown outsider with single-digit support to front-runner in the race to pick a Democrat to face President Bush next fall.
While it could all unravel before -- or after -- the voting begins next month in Iowa and New Hampshire, Dean hasn't yet suffered a lasting reversal.
'A perfect storm'
Instead, the Dean-Trippi team has stunned the political world by raising record amounts of money for a Democrat and steamrollered its opponents with an Internet campaign that has drawn millions in contributions and thousands of volunteers.
"What they've done is surprising," said Ron Faucheux, author of several campaigning books. "The Internet has been used in campaigns successfully for a number of years, but Dean has really brought it to another level. It's sort of a perfect storm of candidate, ideology and technology."
Trippi is careful not to claim to be the first to inject the Internet into politics, noting that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), another insurgent, raised millions via the Web in his failed 2000 bid. But Trippi is getting credit for pushing the cybercampaign envelope.
"Joe was willing to invest the resources," said Donna Brazile, who ran Al Gore's 2000 campaign. "He was sitting in the right seat at the right time and he did something the others didn't. He's always been out there, willing to turn over boxes. He's not a traditional political character."
Definitely not traditional, but certainly a character.
Trippi, 48, son of a working-class Italian immigrant, presides over the bustling Dean headquarters like a cross between a drill sergeant and a guru.
He's the battle-hardened veteran, the pep-talking chief of the shock troops, the, never-sleeping spiritual heart of a campaign that has blitzed its opponents so far.
"How do you compete with George W. Bush's $200 million?" he asked. "We sat in the conference room in January saying to ourselves, 'Well, we aren't going to get $2,000 checks from fat cats. It isn't coming from Enron.' Then came the total eureka moment. We realized in this modern world there was only one way that 2 million Americans would give Howard Dean $100, and that was the Internet."
Trippi grew up in Los Angeles, the oldest of five children, his father a florist and his mother a waitress. The couple split up, and Trippi remembers eating cereal with water because there was no money for milk.
Nobody in the family was political, but it was the early 1970s, when the faint afterglow of the turbulent, idealistic '60s still hung over the nation's youth.
"I remember watching Sen. Robert Kennedy on television when he came to L.A., and telling my mother he was just down the street at the Ambassador Hotel," he recalls. "The next thing I know, he was shot. That stayed with me."
Trippi ran track in high school; most of his friends were African-American. A track buddy talked him into applying for college, and he wound up at San Jose State, bent on studying aerospace engineering because he was fascinated by airplanes.
He completed three years of engineering courses before succumbing to politics. He got involved in helping a long shot in a city council race, then led a successful campus campaign to run off San Jose State's president, who did not favor affirmative action.
"We had a terrible time focusing him on his schoolwork because he was too busy learning by doing," said Terry Christensen, who taught Trippi in the political science department. "He was so excited doing politics."
Worked his way up
Just a few credits shy of earning his degree, Trippi left college in 1979 when he was recruited by Carl Wagner, a senior strategist for Sen. Ted Kennedy's 1980 bid to take the Democratic nomination from President Jimmy Carter.
Trippi signed on, loaded his creaky Ford Pinto to the gills, and drove to Iowa. He never looked back, moving on to work for Tom Bradley's unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign in California, then Walter Mondale's presidential bid in 1983-84.
Back in Iowa for that, Trippi came up with a scheme to score scarce tickets to a vital party dinner by plastering buses carrying Mondale supporters with banners for rival candidate Alan Cranston, whose staff unknowingly forked over the tickets.
"He's a legend," said campaign consultant Mike Ford, a longtime friend. "All the stories are true. The one word I'd use to describe Trippi is smart."
Trippi went on to work in the 1988 campaign of Colorado Sen. Gary Hart; after Hart self-destructed with the Donna Rice scandal, he switched to Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt -- now Dean's main rival in Iowa.
But after the 1988 campaign, a decade of frantic work, bad food, no sleep and off-the-charts stress caught up with him. Trippi swore off presidential campaigns.
"After every one, you swear to yourself, 'Never again,' " he said. "You tell your friends, 'If I try to do this again, don't let me. Do whatever it takes, but stop me.' "
Except for doing a few ads for Jerry Brown in 1992, Trippi stayed true to his word through the 1990s.
After forming his own consulting company with two partners, he contented himself with a few congressional campaigns each season. But his main focus became high-tech companies back in San Jose, which by then had been magically transformed into Silicon Valley.
And that's where Trippi's Internet genius, if that's what it is, comes from.
"I was always a techie," Trippi said. "Do you remember the first portable computers that Radio Shack sold? I had one. It had these big, black rubber ear cups that had to be attached to the telephone."
During the tech boom, Trippi got involved with a company called Wave Systems. Fascinated by a chat group started by the company's shareholders, he led a movement that eventually forced management to open up to shareholder suggestions. It demonstrated the power of the Internet, and Trippi was already considering how it could be adapted to politics.
Fast-forward to 2002. Trippi was just finishing a bruising congressional race when one of his partners badgered him into spending some time with one of the firm's longtime clients, Howard Dean, the five-time Vermont governor who was starting a presidential run.
"I had told myself never again, but there I was in a living room in Lynn County, Iowa, and this guy was saying everything I had believed in for all my years in politics," Trippi said. Within months, Trippi moved to Vermont from his home on Maryland's Eastern Shore and signed on full time for Dean.
The two reportedly have become extremely close.
How far they go will become clearer over the next two months. Dean is running neck and neck in Iowa with Gephardt and enjoys a commanding lead in New Hampshire.
"I was just lucky enough to have skipped out of politics for a while and understood that you don't order the Internet around," Trippi said. "You just have to let go. That's what makes this campaign different. It's owned by the 500,000 people who have signed up saying they want to join Howard Dean in taking our country back."
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