Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: michael97123 who wrote (3807)	7/27/2003 1:14:41 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793587

Dean's Manager Weds New Tech and Old Tactics By Dan Balz Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, July 27, 2003; Page A05 BURLINGTON, Vt. -- When Joe Trippi was a boy, all he wanted to do was design airplanes. Now he has to find a way to keep airborne a political campaign that has been defying gravity. Trippi is the campaign manager for former Vermont governor Howard Dean. At 47, he is a veteran field operative who in the course of a long career in presidential politics has gone from slogger to blogger. "We're blending the shoe leather and the mouse pads," Trippi said, devouring an omelet one recent morning at a diner here a few miles from the campaign headquarters. Trippi seems an unlikely person to help lead the Internet revolution in politics, a rumpled and sometimes controversial personality who broke into national politics doing the gritty and old-fashioned work of organizing. Now he is a little like one of those Silicon Valley entrepreneurs of the late 1990s. Will the start-up company called "Dean for America" grow almost exponentially -- the political equivalent of the old Moore's Law of computing power -- or burst like the speculative tech bubble that laid waste to the dreams of so many young tech executives? It's not hard to find skeptics, particularly in other campaigns, who praise Dean and Trippi for getting to the Internet first but who question whether they can sustain the energy and growth of the past few months. A strategist for another Democrat said the question that remains unanswered is the same one that tripped up many start-up company executives: Does the company have a real product? Trippi is nothing if not confident. "The mistake others make is to say it's all Internet-driven," he said. "It's not all Internet. We're using the Internet as a tool for organizing. . . . It's [Dean] and his message that makes all this possible." Trippi is convinced that the Internet-organized energy surrounding Dean's campaign and the fundraising potential demonstrated in the second quarter, when the campaign raised $7.6 million -- about $4 million on the Internet -- are leading indicators. If he is right, then the campaign's goal of signing up 1 million volunteers by the end of the year might be real. If not, then Trippi might be witnessing a far more transitory phenomenon. Before this year, Trippi had not spent much time with Dean. His political consulting firm, Trippi McMahon & Squier, had handled Dean's gubernatorial campaigns, but the work was done mainly by partner Steve McMahon. When the Dean campaign was reorganizing last spring, Trippi, with more experience in presidential campaigns, ended up as the manager. "The first day I got here, I said, 'Put Meetup.com's icon on the Web site,' " he said, adding that others on the campaign thought that was an odd request. "It took me a week to get it done." What others might not have known was that in Trippi's background was a fascination with technology. Growing up in Los Angeles, he became an aviation buff, and he enrolled at San Jose State University because the school had a good program in aerospace engineering. He was on track to join the aerospace industry until a local political campaign attracted his attention. Soon he was living the life of a nomadic organizer, often under the tutelage of the late Paul Tully, one of the Democratic Party's legendary organizers. Trippi was an organizer for the presidential campaigns of Edward M. Kennedy in 1980 and the Walter F. Mondale in 1984 and was deputy political director for Gary Hart when his ship sank in the spring of 1987. Later that year, he signed up with Richard A. Gephardt's presidential campaign. He is known for unorthodox ways and a style that sometimes leaves wreckage in his wake. "No one ever gave Joe a book on decorum," said Donna Brazile, who was Al Gore's manager in 2000 and worked with Trippi on several campaigns in the 1980s. "There's no such thing as cleaning up after Joe. You'd need an entire garbage truck." Brazile called Trippi smart and creative and someone with a penchant for long-shot candidates. "I sit back and admire Joe for what he's doing," she said. Months before joining Dean's campaign full time, Trippi said, he had seen Dean's potential as he surfed through various blogs and watched interest in the former Vermont governor grow on the Meetup.com Web site. He said he understood how that interest could be tapped because of the knowledge he had acquired over the past few years when he did consulting for several technology firms. "I went back to my roots," he said. Trippi recalled Gary Hart's description of grass-roots organizing as a series of concentric circles, a campaign that grows larger and larger. "It dawned on me a couple of years ago that the Internet is exactly that," he said. "It's concentric-circle organizing on steroids." Old friends and current rivals question whether the Dean campaign will be as good at putting together slates of delegates and other crucial parts of a campaign's infrastructure as it has been at tapping the energy of the Internet. Trippi said the campaign's fundraising success will make it possible to start that kind of work sooner. Trippi is more than a one-person operation. The deputy campaign manager, Bob Rogan, a former chief of staff to Dean, helps keep the operation running, and a staff that once was one of the smallest of all the Democratic campaigns is among the largest. The most difficult challenge, Trippi said, is to break the habits he has learned from the old economy of politics. "Everything I was ever taught in a presidential campaign was you have a top-down hierarchy, a military command and control," he said. "You do that and you suffocate this thing. We wouldn't grow one person. I know that I have to let go and the risks associated with doing that, and I have a hard time letting go of the steering wheel." washingtonpost.com