Joe Trippi's Wild Ride
"CQ" Magazine
The first sign of trouble wasn't Howard Dean telling that poor old man in Iowa to sit down and shut up, or Howard Dean instructing the reporters traveling with him on the day of the caucus to "get a new life," or even Howard Dean growling like a rabid wolverine onstage. It was Trippi. Trippi was too calm. Joe Trippi doesn't do calm.
"Whuh?" he says, slouched against a wall in a gymnasium in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in his wrinkled London Fog trench coat, twenty-four hours before his guy implodes. "You don't believe what you read in the papers, do you?" he says. "We're gonna win this thing." He pauses. He's smiling. He is as calm as I have ever seen him. "What are you gonna say? That I crashed and burned in an Iowa cornfield?"
Trippi laughs. This is scary.
"Where are we?" he asks.
Cedar Rapids.
"Oh."
Something happens to a man who has given his entire life, his entire soul, over to a political candidate. And is about to watch it all blow up in his face.
Just a few weeks ago, Trippi was the Genius, the new Carville, the guy who turned a short and prickly former governor of Vermont (Vermont!) into the short and prickly shoo-in for the Democratic nomination. Every day, twenty hours a day, for over a year, Trippi had been methodically, painstakingly building what would turn out to be—win or lose—the largest grassroots organization in the history of American politics. It was, as he liked to put it, "a frickin' revolution." Dean for America! YOU have the power! All that money in little, teeny checks. All those true believers whom he nurtured and fed and who bought all those bumper stickers and Dean teddy bears on the Internet. All those treks across the country with his PowerPoint presentation, trying to convince the unenlightened that Howard Dean was presidential material. All those late-night blog sessions with weirdos in ponytails and ponchos. All that hope and idealism and innocence.about to crash and burn in an Iowa cornfield. Because, in the end, even the most brilliant strategist couldn't save Howard Dean from Howard Dean.
So why is Joe Trippi smiling?
"Because this is the fun part," he lies. "We finally got to the fun part."
******
It's late September, and the revolution is in full swing. Joe Trippi is wearing a Diet Pepsi that just exploded in his crotch—"Aw, FUCK ME!"—and doing eighty in a thick fog down a winding two-lane highway in Vermont. "This make ya nervous?" he asks, revving it up to ninety to pass a truck, bouncing in his seat, his fists pounding the steering wheel to Warren Zevon. "Try not to talk through the next song, okay?"
It's close to midnight, and Trippi is driving the "four and a half frickin' hours" to New York City because he missed tonight's plane out of Burlington (just one of the problems with having your campaign headquarters in frickin' Vermont). He has to be in Manhattan first thing in the morning to give a pep talk to the New York campaign team, attend "some stupid lunch" with magazine editors ("Great, like I have something to say to Glamour magazine"), meet with Tom Brokaw personally and with Dan Rather's "person," have a sit-down with Bob Kerrey to try to persuade him not to go with the other Kerry, hop a late-night flight to Detroit for breakfast with some union guys, then fly back to New York in time to prep Howard for the next debate. Life is good.
"WHAT?" he screams into his cell phone. It's Kristen Morgante—his fiercely capable assistant, a pretty 24-year-old who often prefaces her reports to Joe with "Listen, asshole." "His mom's gonna be calling me? ME? About what?" He moans like he's just been stabbed. "Why, Kristen, why?" It turns out Howard's mother is concerned that her son is worn-out and wants to discuss this with Trippi. Like a lot of people, Mrs. Dean is apparently under the impression that Howard actually listens to everything Trippi tells him.
A minute later, Kristen calls back. Now the man himself is trying to reach him, she reports. "Fuck!" Trippi says. He's lost his signal. He contemplates what could be so important to Howard this late at night. He's dialing like a madman and finally gets through to headquarters. Howard didn't say anything, um, wrong today, did he? Not today. The only glitch was when Howard veered off his prepared speech, the one they'd handed out to the press. "He delivered the first one and a half pages of it," Trippi explains. "He promised to deliver the first three pages of it and then go off." He laughs. "But that's one of the reasons people like Howard Dean. He's unscripted. He speaks extemporaneously. And I don't wanna mess with that." Well.maybe sometimes. "When I leave, I'm terrified. Half the shit he's had to apologize for is stuff the staff did when I was on the road."
And the other half?
"You can't tell him what to say. I mean, you just can't. It pisses me off sometimes."
So how much do you and Howard talk about personal stuff?
"Huh?"
Personal stuff.
"Shhhhh, this song's amazing. This is the best song in the world." He cranks up Neil Young's "Cortez the Killer."
He hits the replay button. "You talked through it," he whines. "So now we have to play it again."
His phone is ringing. "Kristen, CHILL! God, please chill. I'm frickin' fine." She's worried about him driving. A few hours earlier, much drama ensued at headquarters when Trippi left for New York. Kristen, his wife, Kathy, and the rest of the harem—a group of sassy women who worry endlessly about Joe Trippi—had wanted someone to drive him. But Trippi pitched a fit. "This is not helping!" he shouted, flailing his arms over Kristen's desk. "It doesn't help me when you're worried about me, do you unnerstand?"
Back in the car, he turns up Warren Zevon's "Excitable Boy." He sings along, pounds the dashboard, bounces in his seat, spits tobacco juice out the window. "They don't get it," he bitches. This is Trippi's favorite insult. "This ride is the closest I'm gonna get to a vacation for the next year."
Another several dozen middle-of-the-night calls transpire between him and "the Web team," "the blog team" and the rest of the Deanie Babies back in Burlington, who are chronicling their latest Internet haul-Web-site fund-raising being just another one of Trippi's innovations. Trippi wants to know—every half hour—precisely what the take is. One of the kids makes the mistake of telling Trippi they're up to "about $800,000" tonight. "NEVER tell me it's about something!" Trippi yells. "Cardinal rule! This is about discipline in the campaign. Do not EVER give me a number that ends in zero. Do you get it? NO ZEROS! Spread the word. And, oh, if it really does end in zero, just add a one to it, okay?" He takes a breath. "And hey, man, thank you for being there this late doing this." And has he mentioned how much he appreciates him?
Every twenty miles or so, he gets a little misty. Every song reminds him of some kind of profound shit. This one reminds him of when Kathy left him for frickin' Larry when they were still dating, this one was what he played when she was gone. There are songs that remind him of September 11 and songs that remind him of his mother. But mostly they remind him of what's-his-name. Like "Pinball Wizard." "When I hear this, they're talking about Howard Dean." It used to remind him of his days fixing pinball machines in the student union to pay his way through San Jos‚ State University—before he dropped out to work for all those losing Democratic presidential candidates: Ted Kennedy, Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, Dick Gephardt, even Jerry Brown. But now it's Howard that Elton's talking about. "How do you think he does it? I don't know," Trippi sings. "He's a pinball wizard, there's gotta be a trick.. See, they all think it's a magic trick!"
He pulls over at a rest stop, almost clipping the gas pump. He needs to replenish his Diet Pepsi supply; he drinks a case of this stuff a day. But the rest stop, too, reminds him of Howard Dean—the last time he made this trip, they were together. "When we left, I said, `This is gonna be four and a half frickin' hours. Can we stop to get some Diet Pepsi?' And Howard says, `Of course, Joe.' Then he got on the road, like pedal to the metal, and wouldn't stop." Joe remembers begging him, "The next exit, can we stop?" But Howard just kept driving. "The next exit, can we stop?" But Howard, being Howard, kept whizzing past the rest stops. "I knew it was a game," says Joe. "So finally, about halfway through, I said, `You know, Dick Gephardt would have stopped by now.' " And at the very next exit, Dean slams on the breaks and finally lets Joe pee and buy a Pepsi. "He can be so fucking stubborn," says Joe, laughing, like this is a foreign concept to Joe Trippi. "You just gotta unnerstand him."
But does he like him?
"To tell you the truth," says Joe, "I respect him more than I like him, and I'm not sure he likes me very much. But I think he respects me."
He smiles, pops in some Peter Gabriel, stuffs a wad of cherry Skoal in his mouth, cracks open another Pepsi and asks if I can shut the fuck up for a while. Please.
******
When Joe Trippi showed up in Vermont in January 2003, Dean for America had $157,000 in the bank, seven staff members working out of a room on top of the Vermont Pub and Brewery, 432 supporters that they knew of and, as Trippi likes to put it, "an asterisk for a candidate." (Worse than an asterisk: a former governor of Vermont!) When in walked Trippi. At that moment, he remembers hearing two voices—both of them in his head. "One of them is screaming, `Run out of the room! Get out of here right now! You're a sicko! Don't do it!' And the other voice is saying, `You gotta do this.' " Of course, he did.
Back then, there wasn't exactly a long line of consultants clamoring to work for Howard Dean. Trippi was an easy target. At 46, he had long since "checked out," as he loves to say, had given up the dream of ever running his own "presidential." In fact, he hadn't even worked full-time on a presidential campaign since 1988—during which he watched his first chosen candidate, Gary Hart, implode over Donna Rice, and his second, Dick Gephardt, win Iowa but lose the nomination to Michael Dukakis. He was bitter, cranky and broke. (He claims he's still owed $89,000 in expenses. Then again, Howard Dean has yet to pay him a dime in salary.) For a great many reasons, he got disillusioned. With the system, with his career, with just about everything. Full of angst and disappointment—which, okay, he thrives on, but still—he gave it up.
He continued to do races, of course—congressmen, governors, mayors, whatever—but he had given up The Dream. He swears. He even moved out of Washington to a farm on Maryland's eastern shore with his new wife, Kathy, and a donkey named Dinky.
Problem is, guys like Trippi never get it out of their system. Steve McMahon knew that when, last fall, he started calling Trippi, hounding him to join the Dean campaign. "You gotta come see this guy," he crowed about Howard. McMahon is one of Joe's partners at Trippi, McMahon " Squier, the consulting firm Trippi cofounded—and stayed with, even through his "disillusionment." Steve and the rest of the firm had been helping Howard for years in his four races for governor of Vermont, but they knew they needed something more: Only Trippi had walked the walk for twenty years in places like Iowa and New Hampshire; only Trippi knew how to run a campaign from the ground. McMahon realized that if Howard was really serious about this president thing, he needed the scrappiest, most innovative, most fearless guy out there. A guy who needed Howard as much as Howard needed him.
Trippi recalls how McMahon reeled him in. "First it was `I think Howard is seriously thinking of running for president.' And I'm like, `Great, good for you, that's wonderful, good for him, fuck off. Click.' " Then it was "Get your ass to Iowa." McMahon wouldn't take no for an answer. He begged and badgered until Trippi schlepped to Iowa with his duel bag—like a child going to camp, he has his name written on masking tape across the front—where Dean was making an early, unnoticed appearance. Trippi stood on the sidelines and watched. He watched the energy, he watched the passion. He had it, fucking Howard Dean had it. "He spoke to me," says Trippi. He was saying all the things Trippi didn't think politicians, let alone Americans, believed anymore. Stuff about taking back your country. "YOU have the power!" Howard screamed. And Trippi fell in love.
******
Seven minutes into my first meeting with Joe Trippi, he cries. It's late July, a heady time, when Howard Dean is beginning to morph from asterisk to holy shit. The polls are on fire, the money's pouring in, the press is enamored. Jesus, Trippi was right—you really could get thousands and thousands of people to send $66 checks to a former governor of Vermont!
He's in his once in Burlington—a sty decorated with three-day-old burritos, cans of shaving cream on the windowsill, phone cords that he constantly trips over and an enormous oil portrait of Howard Dean, looking young and crisp and fresh, that Trippi says he'd like to paint a mustache on. In front of him are thirteen empty cans of Diet Pepsi lined up on his desk with wads of chewed-up cherry Skoal stuck in them. He's slumped in his chair, wearing his usual uniform of overlaundered Gap polo shirt with whatever he had for breakfast on the front and khakis that are always an inch or two too long and frayed at the bottom from having swept the floors from Des Moines to Manchester.
The tears come when he talks about his father, whom he could never please and who spent his life telling him he was "a bum." And when he talks about the relay race at Hollywood High, when his scrappy team came from behind to win. And when he talks about his friend Paul Tully, the strategist who dropped dead at 48 in a
hotel room in Little Rock in the middle of the '92 Clinton campaign, killed by this business. But the tears first come when he talks about.Kevin Costner.
Kevin Costner?
"You don't get it," he says.
Costner, it turns out, did a treacly movie called For Love of the Game that is well-known in the Dean campaign as "Trippi's movie." When he first tells me that I have to watch it to unnerstand him, he insists that I not say in print that he told me to watch it. Until I discover that Joe Trippi has told everyone in the Burlington headquarters to watch the movie. So they could unnerstand him. It's about an old pro baseball player, he explains, "who's pitching the game of his life, knowing"—drama-queen pause—"that it's his last game." He gets choked up. "That's what's going on here," he says. "This is it for me."
There is one particular scene in the movie that so resonates with Trippi that the young members of his staff will frequently walk into his once and shout the line. It's when the catcher approaches Costner on the mound and says: "We suck, but right now we're the greatest team in baseball."
He pulls himself together. "I don't usually come unglued," he lies. Then he shouts: "We SUCK, but right now we're the greatest team in baseball!"
Almost on cue, his little dog, Kasey—an overly caffeinated terrier who appears on the Dean Web site as the "director of canine outreach"—comes scampering into his once. "Kasey!" says Joe. "Sit!" He rises from his desk and stands menacingly over the dog. "Would you rather work for John Kerry or be dead?" The dog whimpers. "WOULD YOU RATHER WORK FOR JOHN KERRY OR BE DEAD?" Kasey rolls over and acts dead.
"Good girl! Good girl!"
******
He was supposed to run the family flower shop, Trippi's Florist in Jamestown, New York. That's what Joe's father, a dincult man even by Sicilian standards, had in mind for his firstborn and only son. There was nothing else Joe could do that would ever please his father. "He told everybody else how proud he was of me," says Joe, his voice cracking, "but he always told me I was a bum." Joe, in turn, did his own Sicilian thing—trying desperately to impress Dad, but sticking it to him at the same time.
Dean staffers say privately that Howard, like Dad, doesn't appreciate Joe enough, that no matter what he does it's never quite enough. Perhaps it's no coincidence that Dean has his own father thing. His was Park Avenue—the dad who wanted him to stay on Wall Street and was less than overjoyed when he went to medical school instead. Dean has said in interviews that he spent his life trying to please his father. It is exactly what Joe Trippi says about his own dad.
Trippi's parents split when he was 3, and his mother, Peggy, took Joe and his baby sister to Los Angeles. She would have three more children and remarry, "I don't know," says Joe, "two, three or four times."
He doesn't know?
"I was 3 when it started. She was a single-mom waitress with two jobs—Denny's and a nightclub—and five kids. I would listen to her come home complaining about the big dinner party that she worked her ass off for all night and left her with a fifty-cent tip."
I ask Trippi if his mother is proud of what he's doing. "I don't have a clue if she knows I'm working for Dean or not," he says. They can go months without talking.
By the time Joe was a teenager, his father had moved the shop to California, to be closer to the son who couldn't please him. The idea of Joe getting an education was something neither of his parents ever mentioned. "My father believed going to college was playing hooky from real life," he says. His best friend from the high school track team rescued Joe from a life delivering flowers to dead people by one day persuading Joe to come along with him to take the SATs. Joe didn't even know what the SATs were, but he aced them and got accepted to San Jos‚ State.
The long road to Dean began in his freshman year, when he became the campus agitator. It was a 17-year-old Trippi who led the movement to oust the president of San Jos‚ State when he came out against anrmative action. It was Trippi who led fights over student parking and over the row of campus shops, because their money was with a bank that supported apartheid in South Africa—and he didn't let up until the shops' accounts were moved to another bank. The only problem was, one of those campus shops was Spartan Florist, his father's business. "I knew exactly what I was doing," says Trippi. He remembers vividly the raging calls he got from his dad, who was shamed and humiliated.
"They're asking me," his father yelled, "can't I control my own son?"
"Tell them no, you can't," Joe replied.
Joe and his father were estranged for years after the Spartan debacle. When Trippi dropped out of San Jos‚ State just a few credits shy of graduation—to drive his gold Pinto to Iowa and work for Ted Kennedy for president—his father called him a bum and a political hack.
Four years later, Trippi was a top gun in Walter Mondale's 1984 campaign for president. Mondale was the kind of father figure Joe had never had. There were days, Joe recalls, when Mondale would ask him an awful lot of personal questions as they traveled from Iowa to New Hampshire, then finally to Pennsylvania, where Mondale's primary win of that state put him back in the game. It was a huge win for Mondale, and Trippi, who ran the state for him, had delivered it.
The night of the victory celebration, Mondale summoned Joe Trippi to his suite at the Bellevue-Stratford in Philadelphia. The crowds were waiting in the ballroom for the vice president, but Mondale had something to take care of first. "I go to the presidential suite, and there's Fritz Mondale and this scrawny old Italian guy." Trippi begins to cry. "My dad." In the middle of the campaign, Mondale had located Trippi's father and flown him to Philadelphia for a reconciliation. At the end of the emotional meeting, Mondale—who famously carried a pair of big red boxing gloves on the campaign trail—decided it was time to give up the gloves. He autographed them—"To Rocky Trippi"—and handed them to Joe. "I wouldn't be here if it weren't for your son," he told the father.
After that, Joe and his father planned a trip to Sicily. It was time to heal the wounds. But Joe took another race first—thinking, when it was over, then he'd go to Sicily. His father died before that could happen, alone in his chair, of a heart attack. When he was buried in Jamestown, Joe laid one of Mondale's boxing gloves in the casket. "I was selfish—I kept the one with Fritz's signature."
At that point, Trippi was considered a prodigy in that rarefied world of political consulting where you can get your ass kicked but still be respected by your peers for the little victories—an Iowa here, a New Hampshire there. But that's also when he started getting fed up with the world. His whole "fuck this" period, as he calls it, began in May of 1987, when he was working for Gary Hart. He believed passionately, truly, in Hart and then watched him commit political suicide, abetted by the media, with Donna Rice on his lap. He started to wonder, What am I doing this for?
The following year, a close friend of his who worked with him on Kennedy and was now a chief aide to a congressman called in a panic: "Joe, you gotta help me, you gotta help me. The Washington Post is trying to do a story saying I'm gay." Trippi made all the calls he could to squash the story, but his friend was outed. "That Sunday, the day they ran the story, he killed himself. Jumped out a building and killed himself."
Then, a few years later, his 5-year-old son, Teddy, was run over by a car. Trippi was shooting some ad for a gubernatorial race when he got the phone call. He was already separated from Katie, his first wife and the mother of his three children. He flew back from the job, the almighty frickin' job, barely in time to hold his son's hand. Teddy endured thirteen hours of emergency brain surgery, but he lived. Did Trippi need any other sign? Any other omen to reevaluate his frickin' life? He married Kathy soon after Teddy's accident and repaired to the farm. Which is where he was, sitting in his father's old chair, when McMahon convinced him to come to Howard. "I'm sitting there, I've sworn it off, I'm not shootin' up heroin anymore," he says. "I don't care how good the shit is, I'm not doin' it." He was doin' it. He went to Iowa and got sucked right back in.
He had another reason to stay away.
He hates to discuss it, but he's sick. "I'm not really into this inquisition into my health," he rants. Then, as is his custom, he simmers down ("Are you mad at me?") and allows that, well, okay, having serious diabetes probably isn't a good thing when you're running a presidential campaign. (For a doctor.) He's supposed to get lots of sleep, eat well and regularly, exercise and avoid stress. He admits that "every doctor I've ever seen has told me, `Get out of the business—you're gonna kill yourself. This is the worst fucking business you can be in.' " He pauses. "So I'm stuck in the position of pitching the game of my life. And I don't know if I can make it nine innings."
He's not exaggerating. He's ill. At times it is painfully obvious. All of which certainly raises the question: Is Howard Dean worth killing yourself for?
His current doctor is Judith Steinberg Dean, Howard's wife. Isn't she worried about him? "Can we get over this already?" (The last thing he frickin' needs, he explains, is The Washington Post's Dan Balz asking how he feels every day.) Later he admits that occasionally Howard will ask his wife in Joe's presence, "`How's he doing?' And she keeps telling him it's doctor-patient privilege," says Trippi, strangely relieved that he can continue to kill himself.
Last summer he also cracked a couple of ribs. When Howard realized Trippi was in excruciating pain—the staff had to tell him!—"he comes in and starts doing the doctor thing," says Trippi, rolling his eyes. " `Does this hurt? Does this hurt?' And I'm like, `Ow!' I think he actually enjoyed jabbing me in the kidney."
So how did he crack his ribs? "Oh."
After falling asleep standing up at a Dean event one day, then crashing to the ground. At least he thinks it was that. It might have been the day before, when he threw himself on the floor, on purpose, to illustrate his dissatisfaction with Howard—who finally decided to put some line in his speech that Trippi had been begging him to include for weeks. What's a couple of cracked ribs to illustrate your point?
******
Back in his office in late summer, Trippi pops a disk into his laptop. "Check this out," he says. "It'll scare the living fuck out of you." It's his PowerPoint presentation titled "You Have the Power," the one he's been taking around the country—to union guys, members of Congress, donors, whoever he thinks he can convert—that shows, in fancy charts and graphics, just how formidable the Dean movement is. In money, in people, in "Meetups." On each of Joe's little charts, the Dean campaign is a big surging line, while everyone else is flatlining. That was then.
"We're about to do something really fucking dumb," he recalls telling the various groups he's done his presentation for, if "we" don't rally around Dean. "All because of what? 'Cause John Kerry keeps telling you we're not electable? What the fuck makes him electable? We're kickin' his ass! Last time I checked, the only way you're electable is if you're the nominee."
Trippi also loved to tell his audiences, "I don't care if you run out of the room right now and tell John Kerry" everything he's shared. "Because there's not a damn thing he can do about it."
"Because he's not Howard Dean," Joe says. "That's his problem. The rest of the guys, they still don't get it. They're still like, `What's the bat about?' "
End of Part one. |
