a Howard Kurtz Style tour de force profiling Trish Enright and the Joe Trippi and explaining how the meta-openness of Burlington has fueled much of Dean's favorable press coverage.
washingtonpost.com
Schmooze-Makers
Howard Dean's Campaign Team Charms His Way Into Print
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 18, 2003; Page C01
BURLINGTON, Vt.
Driving a snow-splattered Chevy Blazer toward Vermont's Green Mountains, Tricia Enright is chatting with Howard Dean on a cell phone.
An Associated Press reporter wants a response to John Kerry's latest accusation, that Dean had fudged his position on the Iraq war. Enright, the campaign's communications director, hands the phone to her rumpled seatmate, the always-talkative Joe Trippi.
"I would just say, 'Look, if it hasn't been clear in the last year, I'll make it clear again today: I'm the only major candidate to have opposed the war,' " Trippi, the campaign manager, tells his candidate. "There's no way he's going to convince people. That's insane."
The talk turns to Wesley Clark's recent comment that Dean had once offered to make the retired general his running mate. "Clark's crazy to raise this," Trippi declares. "Let him raise it but just knock it down while being respectful. Why's anyone gonna vote for him if they think he can be vice president?"
The 21/2-hour ride amid days-old Burger King wrappers -- with Enright alternately demanding directions and erupting with volcanic laughter, Trippi holding forth while guzzling Diet Coke -- is like a scene from a wacky buddy movie, except that this odd couple is plotting media strategy for the Democratic presidential front-runner.
The contrast is hard to miss. The no-nonsense former Vermont governor is not a schmoozer and makes little effort to charm the reporters who swarm around him in growing numbers. Reporters who have spent hours with Dean express surprise that he never asks a single question about them. With crowds, Dean shakes hands and fields questions but, like the general practitioner he was trained to be, he is cordial and patient without throwing his arm around anyone.
But Enright, 37, and Trippi, 47, are let-it-all-hang-out types who constantly chatter about their frustrations and anxieties. They have forged a joking, bantering, let's-go-out-for-drinks relationship with journalists, pulling back the political curtain in the manner of John McCain's bus-caravan campaign.
"Maybe we're dumb that we're so open about it," says Enright. But maybe not, since journalists who enjoy the give-and-take are more likely to convey the campaign's point of view.
As for Dean, Enright says: "He likes people. He might not like reporters."
"It's not about liking reporters," Trippi insists. "The guy is more of a doctor than he is a pol."
The cramped headquarters, with its coterie of dressed-down young staffers, feels like the sort of Internet start-up that Trippi once worked for in Silicon Valley. The senior advisers are so overwhelmed that Trippi has to keep changing his cell-phone number to limit press calls, and Enright and her tiny staff admit they cannot keep up with the hundreds of daily inquiries. And that doesn't even count the waves of foreign journalists the campaign has basically had to ignore.
"There are days when I want to be under the desk," Enright says. "You literally cannot handle the incoming."
The guerrilla-warfare operation was on display when Dean was secretly discussing an endorsement with Al Gore. Dean told Trippi that he needed a large media contingent for appearances in Manhattan and Iowa but would not say why.
"You want us to call the press and tell them to get to Harlem and then get on a plane and go to Iowa, and we can't tell them what it is?" Trippi asked. That was the order.
Trippi, who eventually figured out the Gore connection, called Enright with the vague instructions. "Joe was like, 'Just trust me, man,'" Enright recalls, using dude-speak.
Trippi started phoning reporters. "I said, 'We have a seat on the plane for you, but don't start digging or you'll never be on the plane again,' " not quite meaning the melodramatic threat. "Every single one of them started digging immediately."
Above all, Trippi didn't want the secret to spill and give Joe Lieberman, Gore's former running mate, a chance to complain. "Then it's out on someone else's terms with that trashy 'woe is me' stuff."
The news leaked anyway, at 5 p.m. the day before the Dec. 9 event, leaving Trippi shaking his head about the Internet-driven news cycle. "The press corps is now so freaked that if five people have something off the record, four of them believe that one will pop it."
When Tricia Enright got out of college, she spent two years working in a Dewey Beach bar in Delaware.
"Everything you know about politics, you learn waiting tables," the New Jersey native says. "It's like dealing with reporters -- how do you deal with an out-of-control customer where no matter what you do, they'll never be satisfied."
Enright did several stints in the Clinton White House, where she became friendly with George Stephanopoulos, but spent most of her time at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. She was deputy communications director for the 2000 Gore campaign, where she came up with the idea of having the candidate consult regular people before one of the debates with George W. Bush. Enright was working for Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin when she applied for the Dean job. She heard nothing for five months until Trippi called and begged her to come to Burlington.
Enright, who wears five rings and favors corduroy shirts and red sneakers, is by turns bubbly, overwrought, charming and sarcastic. She is the kind of person who says goodbye with a kiss and hug after meeting someone for the first time. And she constantly teases Trippi, calling him a "mad scientist."
Trippi can spend hours regaling reporters, peddling his campaign spin with evangelical intensity. His rambling conference calls with the press are causing some eye-rolling. But he doesn't speak in crisp sound bites and is uncomfortable doing television interviews.
"I hate it. I feel like I have a .357 magnum pointed at my head," Trippi says. He pauses. "I don't want to blow the damn thing."
As Enright wolfs down lunch at her desk, her phone keeps ringing. There's a message from Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter. Enright calls another reporter who might know what he wants. "I need some intel," she says.
Striking out, she calls Alter, who says he wants to interview Dean on what kind of Democrat he is. She offers to arrange a face-to-face meeting, believing that Dean is better in person. "My job is to make him look good, your job is to have a good interview," she tells Alter.
Stephanopoulos is on the line. "George!" she exclaims. He wants to interview Trippi on his Sunday show. "Does he have to be in D.C.? We'll try to get him there."
Time correspondent Karen Tumulty calls about Dean's upcoming foreign policy speech and is surprised when Enright agrees to send her a preliminary draft. "I find them phenomenally open," Tumulty says.
Enright's computer screen is filled with e-mail from reporters, including Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, who has just written a piece on a controversial mogul who had lent Dean a private plane, forcing the campaign to end the arrangement. Though they have been crossing swords, Enright sends a conciliatory note: "Not half as bad as I thought it would be."
Trippi pops in. "Was there any press coverage of me saying I'm taking the fall for not calling Lieberman?" he asks. Trippi wants to shield Gore from the charges of betrayal. Enright checks -- campaign staffers compile a daily packet of clips and tape all television segments involving Dean -- and reports that Trippi's quote was picked up.
Despite being in the center of a media maelstrom, Enright doesn't seek stardom. "I shouldn't wake up in the morning wanting to see my name in the paper," she says. "I tell our guys, don't believe your own headlines."
She breaks up when an assistant shows her the new Dean calendar and she's Miss February -- a less-than-glamorous shot of her in the airplane seat next to Dean, fast asleep.
She announces to no one in particular: "I'm going to get myself married out of this campaign if it's the last thing I do."
On a recent Sunday in New Hampshire, Dean moved from one packed town hall meeting to the next. At one point an advance man used his body to block a correspondent from asking a question. Even a reporter for the state's only network affiliate, WMUR-TV, had to grab Dean on the run for an exchange that lasted less than two minutes.
"If you can catch him one-on-one he'll talk to you, but it's getting increasingly difficult as he becomes increasingly popular," says Tom West of the Nashua Telegraph.
Enright and Trippi concede that Dean is becoming less accessible to the media but say that's in part because of conflicting demands. When Newsweek decided in August to put the surging candidate on the cover, Trippi says, Dean was scheduled so tightly that all they could manage was a five-minute shoot in a makeshift tent on the tarmac at Dulles Airport.
When CNN's Judy Woodruff wanted an interview with Dean this month, Trippi sliced 10 minutes off two events to accommodate her because her show reaches political junkies. "I have a big crush on Judy Woodruff," Trippi jokes. "My wife wants to kill me."
But there is another reason that the campaign has grown wary of letting reporters interrogate Dean at will. "I know damn well they're only looking for something we said wrong, to find something to catch him on," Enright says.
Trippi and Enright are upset, for example, over a New York Times story by Rick Lyman last month on Dean flunking a military physical 33 years ago but later spending months on the Aspen slopes. When the first-edition story came out, Enright's deputy, Jay Carson -- using his cell phone while taking his cues from a staff conference call on his desk phone -- called Lyman to complain that the key quote had been taken out of context. The piece had Dean conceding that he probably could have served, saying: "I guess that's probably true. I mean, I was in no hurry to get into the military."
But the question that Lyman had asked was what would have happened if Dean had hidden his back problem from the military. The story was changed in later editions to say "he probably could have served had he not mentioned the condition."
Dean was more upset, though, that his mother, Andree Maitland Dean, was quoted as saying, "Yeah, that looks bad."
"My mother is going to wake up and feel as though she betrayed me," Enright recalls Dean saying. "How could you do that to an 85-year-old woman?"
Lyman says the quote from Dean's mother was "ambiguous" because an editing change, which he later fixed, did not make clear that she was referring to her son's lack of military service, not his skiing. He says that he took the campaign's complaints "very seriously" but that the article provided a "very fulsome explanation" of the draft controversy.
Times Washington Editor Richard Berke adds that Dean's mother "is fully capable of dealing with the press, and the campaign has made her available to reporters in the past."
As the Dean camp sees it, journalists are recycling old news as more of them join the hunt. A classic example, they believe, was Isikoff's Newsweek piece this month on Dean's refusal to unseal nearly half his gubernatorial papers.
"Everyone's known about that story," Enright says. "All of a sudden Michael Isikoff does [it] and it's a news flash. It's certainly frustrating when you're dealing with stories and say, 'Guys, there's nothing new here.' It's new to whoever's writing it."
Isikoff says that the issue had received almost no national media attention and that he unearthed new details about the extent of Dean's secrecy effort. As for Enright, he says, "she's been reasonably good-natured about all this stuff."
Part of Enright's job is coaching the candidate, and she isn't shy about that. She once told Dean that he has a bad habit of repeating reporters' questions before answering them, thus incorporating their charges and allowing them to frame the issue. "You know why you do that? Because you're a doctor," she told him.
Dean was struck by the observation. "You learn that in medical school," he said. Enright advised him to curb his tongue.
But that's easier said than done. Enright gets a report from the field that Dean has responded to Kerry's criticism that he was "trying to have it both ways" on Iraq. It seems the candidate had not taken Trippi's advice to keep it simple.
Instead, Dean offered a long explanation about his support for the so-called Biden-Lugar measure that he said would have required President Bush to certify to Congress that certain actions had been taken.
"He got down in the weeds," says Enright, clearly unhappy.
Trippi and Enright decide to seize the offensive. Trippi was determined to knock down "this whole rap about Dean being a peacenik and out of the mainstream on defense and foreign policy." Enright knew that if she leaked the speech to the New York Times and The Washington Post it wouldn't get more than a couple of paragraphs. So, at the suggestion of policy director Jeremy Benami, she offered Times correspondent David Sanger and Post reporter Glenn Kessler a package deal: the chance to interview Dean on a flight from Burlington to Omaha on Friday, Dec. 12, three days before the Monday speech.
Dean was not wild about the idea of doing tough, back-to-back 50-minute interviews on a plane, but Enright convinced him that it was the best way to get a platform for his foreign policy views. Both reporters were told they had to hold their stories until Sunday for maximum exposure. That was also the day that Newsweek would be releasing its second cover story on Dean, and Trippi would be appearing on ABC's "This Week."
When Kessler arrived at the Vermont headquarters, Trippi made a show of asking his dog a question: "Would you like to work for Bush or would you rather be dead?" The terrier rolled over, paws in the air.
Despite the antics, Trippi was dreading his appearance with Stephanopoulos. He had never done a Sunday show before and was having trouble sleeping.
At 5 a.m. Sunday, the phone rang. A Stephanopoulos producer told Trippi he was being bumped. Great, Trippi thought.
"You know why, don't you?" the producer said. American soldiers had captured Saddam Hussein. Trippi never got back to sleep.
Newsweek pulled the cover story while the magazine was at the presses, substituting a picture of the bearded, disheveled Hussein for one of Dean in a wrestling pose. The Sunday papers, though, were already on delivery trucks. "Dean Strives for a Nuanced Approach to Foreign Policy," said the Times. "Dean Working to Be Seen as Foreign Policy Centrist," said The Post.
Now the question was what tone the antiwar candidate should strike in responding to Hussein's capture. In a morning conference call with Enright, Trippi and other senior staffers, one adviser said that Dean should make clear the arrest didn't fundamentally change things in Iraq. No, Dean said, this was not a day for politics. He would congratulate the president.
On Monday morning, Enright gave the cable networks an advance text of Dean's foreign policy speech, figuring she might entice them with the newly inserted portion about Iraq. Fox News, CNN and MSNBC carried Dean's opening remarks live.
Enright was pleased. She walked into Trippi's vacant office, sat down on his overstuffed red couch, closed her eyes and fell asleep for three hours.
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