Trippi's bet on Net will pay off far into the future
Maybe Howard Dean's campaign troops didn't overthrow generations of political tradition, says Joe Trippi, who was recently deposed as Dean's presidential campaign manager. And maybe they didn't reclaim America from a top-down system of politics and media. But he believes they put into motion some changes that can't be stopped.
Trippi, who gave the keynote speech here Monday at a gathering on ``Digital Democracy,'' seems to have been wrong about his candidate's appeal. Maybe Dean will turn things around, but that outcome is hard to imagine right now.
But Trippi was right about plenty of things last year. He bet that savvy use of the Internet, plus unprecedented reliance on and trust in people at the edges of networks, could help turn a ``who's he?'' candidate into a genuine contender for the nomination.
The forces the campaign unleashed -- and the people who discovered they had a chance to change things -- aren't going to be rebottled anytime soon.
Those forces have big implications for businesses, not just politicians. For example, a genuine conversation with customers and suppliers, whether through Weblogs or other means, can soften the cold exterior most companies expose to the world. Asking for ideas from the edge of the customer and supplier network can bring better ideas into an organization.
The broadcast style has failed the American people, Trippi says, because it crowds out serious debate about serious issues, focusing instead on entertainment.
Yet as the Dean campaign's fast fade demonstrates, broadcast is still the dominant medium in politics. The endless replays of Dean's Iowa concession speech became late-night entertainment, not news.
Dean has flaws as a candidate that hurt him, but that doesn't mean the Internet model of political organization is a failure. Witness the rapid adoption of Weblogs, MeetUps and online fundraising by the other candidates.
The technology is giving us, equally, the ability to stir and make a difference when we are sufficiently worried by policy directions.
And when enough people, using a variety of online means to meet and organize get energized about something, it doesn't take all that much effort or money from any of them to create a lever that can move mountains.
Whether Dean wins or loses, he changed the political climate, Trippi says. He helped the Democratic Party recover its long-lost spine. Major pieces of his antiwar, semi-populist agenda have become part of other candidates' stances.
But what the Dean campaign did most of all was to push boundaries that were just waiting for the right circumstances to coalesce. And they're still innovating.
A few days ago, Dean's Vermont team launched an Internet talk radio show for the campaign. About the only thing this program has in common with standard broadcast talk radio is the microphones and mixer. For every other component, the Dean Internet team -- staff and volunteers -- pieced together low-cost computer and Internet technologies.
It's dazzling in its simplicity and effectiveness. Anyone can do this, with relative ease and low cost. And lots of people, and organizations, will do just that.
The first American revolution -- ``Revolution 1.0'' -- took place more than two centuries ago, says Trippi. Now ``we're in the beta stage of 2.0. The American people finally have the tools to say, `Enough.' ''
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