Joe Trippi's Wild ride - Part Two
The bat. It is the once iconic symbol by which Dean raised his money. "The bat," says Trippi gravely, "is a powerful thing. Because this whole campaign is about putting power back in the people's hands."
You can still log on to BlogforAmerica and watch the Trippi mind in action. There are bat goals—say, a $1 million bat with a three-day deadline, or the "Thank You Al Gore!" bat, which raised more than half a million—and you can watch the bat turn redder and redder as the contributions pour in. It's as addictive as a game show. "A bat?" the other campaigns howled. Until, well, the bat worked. Soon Kerry had a "hammer."
Trippi used to consider it a badge of honor every time one of the other campaigns stole something, which used to happen constantly. Soon everyone had discovered the Internet! Soon everyone had a blog! But Trippi figured that by the time everyone else took him seriously, it would be too late. Remember the exponential
theory. While the Dean forces were doubling by the hour, the other campaigns were making fun of them. "Now, even if they want to catch up, it's too late," he crowed in September. "They missed their chance to kill us. Now they have to fight us."
Back when Dean was riding high, Trippi would sit in his once at five in the morning plotting new ways to "freak everybody out." Like running ads in Texas. Texas! The cojones. Or flying 500 evangelical Deaniacs from Texas to Iowa to knock on doors and say, "I'm from Texas! I know George Bush! He sucks!"—which, at the time, seemed like a brilliant idea. Or getting all those people who were showing up at Dean Meetups to write letters to strangers in Iowa. He supplied 40,000 people with two stamps, stationery and instructions to "say what you feel." So many of the Dean faithful participated in the letter-writing drive—"Dear [Person in Iowa], I live in Seattle, and I think Howard Dean is great"—that there were people in Iowa who were getting three a day. "You go to the mailbox, and there's this handwritten letter, and it's from some schmo in Seattle!" says Trippi, presuming that people would think this was a good thing.
But his real talent was in the care and feeding of his "peeps." Trippi knew it wasn't enough to put up a Web site; you had to interact with them, empower them, listen to them. Which is why you would find him, at all hours of the night, instant-messaging perfect strangers out in DeanWorld.
Isn't that a little.weird?
"You don't get it," he replies. "It's them. These are the people who are doing it"—"it" being the Howard Dean phenomenon—"and I'm gonna pay attention to them."
Some of the best campaign ideas—what Dean's rivals called gimmicks, until they worked—came from bloggers who'd log on and send in their suggestions. Trippi read them all. When Dick Cheney was going to raise a quarter of a million dollars at a fat-cat luncheon one day in July, one blogger suggested a Cheney bat. They beat the vice president's haul with 9,621 $50 donations while Cheney was still on the soup course. Then there were the "house parties." One night, a few thousand people opened their homes simultaneously for a Howard Dean lovefest-capped by Howard making one enormous conference call, "which I still don't quite understand," says Joe, laughing.
Back at headquarters, back in the glory days, the cultlike fever was even worse. Twice a day, at 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., the young staff would go into a hallway and do "Push-ups for America." Occasionally, Howard would come in, roll up his shirtsleeves, get on his hands and knees and join them.
Trippi would stay in his once. "They're frickin' nuts."
******
In August the campaign hit its peak when Trippi took his show on the road. Buoyed by the response from the hinterlands, his team came up with an idea: the Sleepless Summer Tour. The rock-star connotation was intentional.
The plan was to hit ten cities in four days, on almost no sleep. When the tour touched down in Seattle and 10,000 people were waiting for Howard Dean, Joe knew this was huge. But it really got good when they landed in Texas. Bush Country. What better place to shove it up W.'s ass?
Trippi sits in the back of the bus from the airport to the first event in Austin, on a Pepsi-induced high. For the entire ride, he and his partners—McMahon and Mark Squier—joke about how they could "whack" John Kerry in the next debate, which was going to be sponsored by Latinos.
"Maybe we should attack Kerry in Spanish!" Joe suggests. "He won't know what we said!"
"No," says McMahon, "we should ask Kerry a question in Spanish."
They ponder the ways Kerry could "nuke us."
"It could be a race between us and the ketchup money," says Joe. "But it won't be a race between us and Kerry."
The bus unloads at Ruta Maya, a big old barn-slash-coffeehouse that is packed to the rafters with Bud-guzzling Dean supporters and signs that say take back our country. The crowd is so huge that speakers have been set up outside to handle the overflow.
"Holy shit," says Joe.
Inside, Dean is on fire. Trippi does what he usually does when Dean speaks: He mouths the words and moves his hands like a symphony conductor, occasionally jumping up and down. "Don't yell so loud!" Dean is saying. "Karl Rove'll hear you over in Crawford!" When he says Bush is from Texas, they boo. "You're right, you're right, the president comes from Connecticut. Isn't this a great crowd? I'll tell ya, I won't get away with talking like this eight months from now. I'll have to be presidential."
Joe and Steve McMahon exchange raised eyebrows. Um, maybe they should take that line out. The problem, says Joe, is that "the worst way to get him to do anything is by telling him to say or not say something." That will almost guarantee he'll do the opposite.
Next stop: San Antonio, where more than 5,000 people are screaming for Dean in an auditorium. Even Howard seems genuinely surprised. "Five thousand? Inside?" Dean asks. Yes, Governor.
Joe shifts into manic-action mode. No detail is too small to agonize over. Can someone move the podium a few more inches to the front of the stage—now? Can the TV cameras see the texas is dean country sign? Let's put some more "folks" up there on the stage. "We want the right mix of faces," he explains. (Translation: We don't want everyone standing behind Howard Dean to be white.) As the crowd starts to chant the campaign's slogan—"I AM Dean for America!"—Howard bounds onto the stage and proceeds to give a speech that is electrifying. Joe jumps up and down, lip-synching along with Howard, doing his little conductor thing, as Howard yells, "You have the power! YOU have power!"
"When we started, in January," Joe says, "we had one-tenth this room. Nationwide." For a second, his eyes mist up again. But then the speech is over, and Joe's all pissed off because they didn't play the LeAnn Rimes song "We Can," which he has personally chosen as the frickin' theme song for the campaign.
That night the Sleepless tour is booked at a Residence Inn off a highway in San Antonio. It's 11 p.m., but Joe has no intention of going to sleep. The bat has just hit $700,000. The night is young.
Dean joins the crowd of press and staff scarfing sandwiches and beer. "Are we having fun yet?" asks Howard.
We're about to. One of the "blog masters," Karl Frish, a.k.a. Karl-with-a-K, starts doing his Joe Trippi impression. He has him down cold: the slurred GoodFellas voice, the angst-filled rolling of the eyes, the whuhs. He does Joe the day he got his hair cut for Judy Woodruff and the day he returned to headquarters to discover that his staff was gathered at the window, watching the Vermont sunset. "The sunset!" he'd screamed, apoplectic. "Do you think the Kerry campaign is watchin' the frickin' sunset?"
The crowd, including the candidate, is in stitches. Karl-with-a-K goes on to his Lieberman impression and then the crowd-pleaser: Kerry. Dean is loving it. He nudges Steve McMahon to do his Kerry impression. Then it's Dean's turn. He stands up and does his own Kerry—complete with the hand slapped across his chest and the deep, self-important voice ("I served in Vietnam.").
More yuks ensue over the fact that John Kerry is also in Texas tonight and "only twenty people" showed up for his Texas Meet-n-Greet. "But if those twenty people e-mail one hundred people.," says Karl, cribbing the Dean stump speech. Dean cracks up, then decides to go to bed. "See you in five hours," he says, retreating to his room.
"Let's go find a bar," says Joe.
The following morning, the gang is back on the plane at 6 a.m. Joe is slumped in his seat up front when Howard strolls on board to applause from the press, waving the San Antonio Express-News. "Great news! Great news!" Dean says. He has a big announcement to make. On the front page of the second section is an article about the power of the Internet.and it's all about John Kerry! "Eat your heart out, Joe Trippi," Howard proclaims as Joe squirms in his seat. "We're gonna frame this and give it to Trippi!" One reporter asks Joe to read the story aloud. He groans.
When the plane lands in New York, Trippi forms a huddle with his staff on the tarmac at LaGuardia. "Remember, no matter what happens," he says, "nobody can ever take this away from you." He chokes up. The staff is in tears.
******
A few weeks later, at midnight on September 31, Trippi has successfully shocked the planet. The Dean campaign has broken Bill Clinton's fund-raising record of $10.3 million in a single quarter (and that's when the guy was frickin' president!). Not only did they break it, they shattered it, bringing in $14.8 million, in donations that averaged $77 a pop.
The staff presents Joe with a two-foot-long bat cake, but Trippi is pissed that they didn't hit $15 million.
The next morning, he sleeps in—which, for Trippi, means getting three hours of sleep instead of two. When he stumbles into the once, Kristen hands him a stack of press calls to return and gives him a little hug. "You did it," she says. The Dean campaign will be the media darling today, but Joe knows better than anyone how fleeting such things can be. He holds his head in his hands.
One of the young staffers bursts into his once. "We SUCK, but right now we're the greatest team in baseball!"
Trippi laughs. "Thanks, man," he says.
Back then, things were happening so fast—too fast—that he'd even gotten offers to jump ship, most notably a third-party feeler regarding the Clark campaign in September. As if. Joe swears he wouldn't work for any of the other Dems with a gun to his head. "It's Howard Dean, don't you get it?" he says. Howard Dean, "not Joe Trippi," who moved the masses, who got all those schmoes, including Joe Trippi, to believe again. Of course, it would also be Howard Dean, and not Joe Trippi, who would screw it all up.
As the money keeps rolling in and the press swarms outside his door, Trippi sits at his desk with eleven empty Diet Pepsi cans lined up in front of him, making phone calls. He has decided to personally call every supporter who broke each $100,000 mark. The plan is to send each of them a Louisville Slugger bat signed by Howard Dean. (At the time, it seemed like a good use of Joe's energy.) "Hello, Martha? This is Joe Trippi from the Dean campaign.. Yes, it is," he says to some lady in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her $25 contribution won her a baseball bat! Martha can't thank Joe enough. "No, thank you. It's you, Martha, it's you and people like you. You are the campaign.."
And the weird thing is, he believed it.
A few minutes later, Kristen stomps in. "He's here."
"Who's here?"
"The governor. Asshole."
Dean strolls into Joe's lair in jeans, his son's windbreaker and a T-shirt that says lowe's home improvement.
Trippi whistles. "Man, you can dress."
"You like this?" says Dean.
"Yeah, you got this whole hip-hop thing going. The shirttail-hanging stuff. I can't pull that off."
Dean smiles. He wants to know what Joe thinks. About the record-breaking fund-raising drive, about the new barrage of press. About everything. Just two guys, neither of whom thought they'd ever be sitting here running for president. And winning.
"I thought you were shockingly on message this morning," says Joe.
"You trained me!" says Howard. "I do a good job when I'm paying attention to you." Joe laughs. "Really. I actually listened to what you said. See? I'm trainable."
******
Four months later, Joe Trippi is standing in the gymnasium in Cedar Rapids, watching the man he thought was trainable rev up one of the last crowds to witness Howard Dean, front-runner. Trippi paces the floor. Gone is his little conductor thing. He isn't bouncing up and down and lip-synching along tonight. He's just staring, blankly, quietly, at Howard on the stage. Howard, in the eleventh hour, has rolled out a new speech (more hope, less rage), a new look (green sweater) and a wife! "They must be really desperate," cracks a TV producer. But even an appearance by the elusive Judy Steinberg Dean, in a frumpy blue sweater set, isn't enough to turn things around.
Trippi grabs one of the Iowa volunteers. "Tell me the truth," he says. "How does it look? I don't care about polls. What are you seeing out there?"
"You want an honest answer?"
"Fuck," says Joe.
Close to midnight, he is riding in a van from Iowa City to Des Moines. "I'm
fine, I'm frickin' fine," he's saying. "I think we're gonna win."
His cell phone rings. It's his pollster, Paul Maslin, who not only has bleak news out of Iowa—but bleak news out of New Hampshire. Trippi hangs up and stares out the window.
His phone rings again. "WHAT? Aw, fuck. I hate this business. This fucking sucks. Okay, thanks." He hangs up. "They're robocalling our ones," he moans. Their "ones" are the Iowans they've identified as absolutely, positively Dean voters (though it would turn out that they were absolutely, positively wrong on the number). He has just gotten a report from the field that Dean "ones" are getting bombarded with computer-generated phone calls telling them to make sure to caucus for Dean—then giving them the wrong address.
Who would do such a thing?
"Kerry," he snaps. "They're the only asshole snake campaign that would do it." He sighs. "Every frickin' day now, I'm reminded of why I got out of this in the first place."
The following morning, the morning of the caucus, Trippi runs back and forth in the four-degree Iowa weather between the Des Moines headquarters and, a block away, the Dean Storm Center, ground zero for the 3,500 Deaniacs who have left their jobs and their families to come to Iowa and knock on doors. Many of them are wearing fluorescent orange hats that say the perfect storm and buttons that say i see dean people. They're screaming, "Two, four, six, eight! Howard's gonna operate!"
Trippi looks wasted. He seems to have shaved only half his face, and his hair looks like Jack Nicholson's in The Shining. He spends the morning revving up the troops—"You did it! You did it!"—but most of them want two things from him before they venture back out into the cold to knock on doors: his autograph and a picture.
These are the people who slavishly participated in the Internet phenomenon, sending checks, buying teddy bears, blogging past midnight—in the process, getting as attached to Joe Trippi as they did to Howard Dean. Trippi patiently indulges every request. "Mr. Trippi! Mr. Trippi!" the faithful yell. Everyone seems to have a suggestion for Joe—who, after all, encouraged this, cultivated it. There's the overly pierced kid who has a "brilliant idea" for how they can win.Alaska! Another who has written a thirty-second ad that he insists on reciting to Joe: "Hello, I'm Howard Dean.." Another who has "a company that has a unique way to get Howard Dean to the White House." But the coup de grƒce comes when two guys who drove up from Missouri corner Joe. "Excuse me, Mr. Trippi, I know you're busy, but." They tell him they've driven all the way up here with a statue that they'd like to plant somewhere in Iowa but are unsure which precinct is most deserving.
"A statue?" asks Joe.
"Yeah, man," says one. "It's cool. It's a statue of the corporate guy pissing on the average man." Sure enough, the hideous statue is out in the parking lot.
Trippi stares blankly. "Whuh?"
"It's, like, what it's all about, man."
"Okay," says Trippi. "Thank you. But please. I wouldn't do it today. Please. Just go out and get votes for the governor."
In retrospect, this might have been the big mistake. Sending these guys out to knock on doors of Iowans. But this was the monster Joe Trippi had created. Live by the blog, die by the blog.
Later, as Trippi stands in the back of yet another auditorium, listening to the guy (from Vermont!) he made a contender, one of his aides whispers in his ear.
It looks bad. Really bad.
Trippi nods. He starts to tear up, then catches himself.
"So we'll come in second? By how much?"
Less than 5 percent, says his aide. (No one seems to anticipate Kerry trouncing Dean by nineteen points, not to mention Edwards coming in second.)
Trippi returns to headquarters. The kids in the orange hats are sitting in front of a TV, listening to the pundits predict doom and gloom for Dean. You can hear a pin drop. And Wolf Blitzer.
Trippi walks up a set of stairs, where Steve McMahon is sitting alone in a dark room, sucking on a Tootsie Pop, shaking his head.
It's over.
"Okay," says Joe.
Worse than over. They're going to come in third.
He gets in the backseat of a car headed to the "victory party" at the Val Air Ballroom, in Des Moines, where, hours later, Howard Dean will deliver his freakazoid concession speech. The following morning and for days to come, Howard will get crucified. But for tonight, Joe is still standing by his man.
"How great is this?" says Joe Trippi, as Howard rolls up his sleeves and begins to . He's serious. He likes it. He really likes it. The Deaniacs are loving it, too. (Maybe you had to be there.) "This has got to confound the press to no end."
Um, yeah.
Then Howard does his primal scream—AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGH!
So why is Joe Trippi still smiling?
Because, in the end, he really was a true believer.
One week later, Howard Dean celebrated his second stunning primary loss, in New Hampshire, by whacking Joe Trippi, the guy who believed when nobody else did, the guy who built this thing from nothing, the guy who would have killed himself for Howard.
Because, in the end, it was Howard Dean who didn't get it.
********
Lisa Depaulo lives in New York City. |
