Norm Schrieber's Blog - NRO
JOE TRIPPI'S BLIND SPOT: My colleague Jonathan Cohn has written compellingly about the Dean campaign's emphasis on process rather than substance and message--one of the main reasons for Dean's relatively poor showing in Iowa.
How did this happen? One important factor, in my mind, is Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi. Trippi's formative political experiences came in the early 1990s: In 1990, he worked for a candidate who lost a close U.S. Senate race in Oregon after being outspent by something like ten to one (though don't hold me to the numbers).
Then, in 1992, Trippi worked on the presidential campaign of Jerry Brown, who caught fire (albeit briefly) after promising to restrict fundraising to $100 donations--which the campaign believed would empower ordinary people, and which it accepted by way of its much-ballyhooed 800 number. The lesson Trippi took away from both experiences was that there are only two possible roles a candidate can play in a race: He can be on the side that wants to do the bidding of powerful, moneyed interests, or he can be on the side that wants to give power back to the people. In Trippi's view, once you know which side of this divide a candidate stands on, you know everything you need to know about him.
I remember being struck by a conversation I had with longtime Democratic strategist Pat Caddell, a colleague of Trippi's on the Brown campaign, while working on a profile of Trippi last fall. Caddell kept insisting to me that the Brown campaign was the experience that had shaped Trippi's current "thinking." Every time he used the word, I asked him to elaborate on the ways in which Trippi's thinking had actually changed, but the answer was always vague. Finally I asked Caddell straight up to name the substantive issue or issues at the heart of Trippi's evolution. His response: "It was the question of money in politics, of control in politics. It was the disconnect" between insiders and outsiders.
I think Trippi's a brilliant strategist--the person who deserves the bulk of the credit for vaulting Dean to the front of the Democratic pack on the eve of the primaries. But I think this worldview says a lot about what went wrong for Dean in Iowa, and what's wrong with the Dean campaign generally. It's not so much that Trippi et al have chosen to ignore substance. It's that they think process is substance. Unfortunately for them, very few voters feel the same way. |
