dr. dean, we hardly knew you
From today's NYT: "You're going to see a leaner, meaner organization," Dr. Dean, who has asked his 500 staff members to skip their paychecks for two weeks, told reporters on an 8 p.m. conference call. "We had really geared up for what we thought was going to be a front runner's campaign. It's not going to be a front-runner's campaign. It's going to be a long war of attrition. What we need is decision making that's centralized."
Yes, centralized. Fire someone who built the most extraordinary grass-roots organization in history, and hire a Washington lobbyist in his stead. Now we're making progress.
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Comments (17)
I'm a Dean supporter, and less concerned about letting Trippi go than you are.
The grass roots organization had at it's core Dr. Dean, not Mr. Trippi.
Adding the internet to the mix was obvious, not withstanding priceline.com's patent because they crossed out "fax" and replaced it with "internet".
Trippi burned through 40 million dollars (a lot of which directly profitted his firm) on ads that were dreadful enough that the distributed base was balking at making more donations.
Ad to that Trippi's record of scorched earth, but ultimately unsuccessful insurgent campaigns (Jerry Brown for Gov in the early '90s), and it's not necessarily a bad thing that he left.
Iowa and New Hampshire were poorly managed.
I like to think of this as something very much like a dot com bust, though I hope (I'm a Dean Precinct Manager) that it's one of the few that reorged, as opposed to the ones that vanished.
Great. A while back I posted saying I liked Dean's campaign model but not Dean himself. Oops.
I wonder how many of Dean's decentralized group of campaigners/supporters will see this as a total turn off and flock to someone else. (Or worse yet, to nobody at all.)
An addition that I forgot:
I think that Trippi is a genius at getting insurgent campaigns off the ground, but I don't think that his record regarding wins is anywhere near as good.
Also, unlike most of the dot-bombs, I think that the product (Dean) is a viable one, which is why I think that this is salvagable.
It would be one thing if he said he was just firing and replacing Trippi.
It's another to flop to centralized just like all the other guys.
As a long time Dean supporter, I've watched the campaign grow from nothing to something huge. Trippi did a good job at first. He appeared to be overwhelmed for the last four months. Like all of us, Trippi has strengths and weaknesses. There are "serial entrepreneurs" who are good at startups but are less good at growing the company beyond startup stage. I think of Trippi in those terms.
Dean needs a good handler. Clearly. Trippi let him get into a (three week long) slugfest with Gephardt in Iowa. That alone should have got him fired.
No one seemed to care or comment when Kerry changed campaign managers. Why the double standard with Dean?
Another committed Dean supporter here.
Larry, I think you are misunderstanding the "phenomenon" as much as everyone else has. Like Matthew said - it wasn't about the campaign. It was about Dean. His early supporters happened to be technically savvy and managed to spread the word like wildfire.
Trippi was smart in letting this decentralized campaign it take its course. But I started raising my eyebrows about his tactics well before Iowa, as it seemed the campaign was becoming more about the campaign itself, and not about Dean. Trippi allowed it to lose focus. And in the midst of it, he blew $35 million dollars, on some of the worst political ads I've ever seen, which were created and placed by his media company.
Read through the reader comments on BlogForAmerica.com. Over and over again, the general response format is "Thanks for your work Joe, now let's get this campaign back on track." I've yet to talk to a Dean supporter who is upset about this move.
Trippi said over and over in the past - he didn't create this. He just stood back to let it happen. Everyone though he was being modest, but he wasn't. It's the truth. His departure will have little (if any) negative impact on the campaign, and overall will result in a net positive.
As Donna Brazile said even before this campaign - "Everywhere [Trippi] goes, he leaves a mess for someone else to clean up." I thank him heartily for his help up to this point, but he has shown to be unable to follow through. Under his leadership, he allowed Dean's campaign to be injured, perhaps critically; if we are to have any chance to come back, this was the right decision.
-j
Too bad about Joe Trippi. I think Dean needed a fresh look from the media - and a personnel shuffle gets reporters to say, "OK, what's different now?" rather than looking for things to prove what they now think (probably "Dean is an unstable, unelectable guy."). Don't forget that Kerry did just this a couple of months ago when his campaign was declared D.O.A. by the press. They now look back and think that was a good idea.
I commented here before that presidential campaigns are all about centralization. Dean did great by being different. I guess he doesn't want to be different anymore. Too bad.
I'd dispute that there's quite the "grass-roots organization" as we've been led to believe. Let's face it, it's no more grass roots than MTV. I'm not claiming that there are not well meaning, principled, enthusiastic, committed people involved; I'm merely saying that they may have misunderstood their roles and over-estimated their importance. They aren't contributors: they're consumers. Trippi is an amazing individual. He understands that there is no fundamental difference between an insurgent political campaign and a guerilla marketing campaign. i.e. make top down look like bottom up. Now however, the cat seems to be out of the bag so the impulse is to hire a traditional marketing manager and see if we can't get Dean in the White House. This whole "grass-roots" thing was a little delusional; characterized more by narcicissm, hubris and parochialism than anything else. A touch of irrational exhuberance, if you will. Like calling onto like, never quite convincing others or even galvanizing the support of individuals outside the group i.e. the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire.
An interesting question: if all politics is local - and it is - what is the neighborhood of a netizen? What is now the nature of the relationship between a community and its representative? Where is the point of action? It seems that the analog between constituency and locality is no longer valid.
The levels to which men and women will go to obtain the power of the White House should never be underestimated.
FWIW, there is a story at The Daily Kos, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/1/30/04918/5575, strongly implying some serious monkey business in Iowa, with push polling, and Dean "1"s being given the wrong caucus address.
FWIW, some of the larger caucuses started 15 minutes early.
Is it possible that the "dotcom campaign" got hacked?
When you have people new to the process in the campaign, it's not so hard for someone to walk in with a zip disk and get that sort of data.
Everything I've read that's official said Trippi was not fired, and actually asked to stay on in most of his responsibilities. They just wanted a new manager at the top. And who cares if the guy spent a few years as a lobbyist? He's not there to make policy, he's there to spend the money better, as someone with experience at that level. And as much as we appreciate Trippi's work, it carries on, along with his support. But Trippi made a pile of $ disappear, much of it going to his own company. Which is still involved. So its a minor/major change. Neel was involved with the campaign a long time ago, btw... he's just gotten a promotion.
If he's really got 500 paid employees, they need a little "centralization". Not as opposed to "grassroots" but as opposed to "disorganized counterproductive chaos"
Larry, I think you're being a little hard on the campaign. A grassroots campaign is incredibly important, but if "the most extraordinary grass-roots organization in history" can't win primaries in two states that had Dean clobbering the competition only a week before, some changes have to be made; if you want to govern, you have to win. Dean isn't abandoning his grassroots message - in fact, Roy Neel seems to have started his stint at DFA with a big glass of Kool Aid - but the power of a movement isn't a substitute for a smart, efficient, well-run campaign, and that's where Neel's specialty lies. Neel's hiring doesn't mean The End Of Grassroots As We Know It; if it did, I suspect there would have been a mass defection at the upper levels of his staff. What it does mean, however, is someone at the campaign who knows how to take the immense movement Dean has built up and get it to win actual elections. This doesn't mean lockstep centralization a la Bush, but it does mean getting supporters together on a common message, targetting them where they need to be, making up for years of volunteer inexperience (bringing in people new to politics has a practical downside), and just generally turning this from a social movement to an actual electoral campaign.
I don't disagree that the Dean campaign is indicative of a tremendously important social movement. However, it's also a presidential campaign. As a result, it's something of a unique animal: a social movement with strictly quantifiable goals. If the Civil Rights movement had been given three months to earn 2000-someodd delegates from across the country or else fold up its tent, I don't think anyone would have objected to a Neel-like presence to turn the ship around.
One of the biggest problems with social activism is that too often, ideological purity starts becoming more important than success. The best thing for American politics would be a successful Dean campaign, and if that means getting their shit more strictly together for a few months, then so be it.
I originally was for Dean because I thought he was runnng a grass-roots campaign. I believed this because of the way he got Internet activists involved and got them to contribute.
I thought Trippi was the one that brought this grass-roots campaign about. He evidently understood the Internet.
When Dean began to get endorsements, I began to wonder. Perhaps all the grass-roots stuff was just another gimmick. I don't know whether to blame Trippi or Dean for this.
When he tore into the other candidates, I was upset. This is not what the grass-roots wanted. I, for one, wanted him to talk about the needs of the average guy. Not attacking everybody else. "Grass-roots" means that you not only collect money from average guys, you also advocate their interests.
Then he hired a new manager who used to be a telecom lobbyist! Some commenters here say the campaign needed "centralization." This was the last straw. "Centralization" is the opposite of a "grass-roots" campaign - which is thoroughly "decentralized." It was obvious - at least to me - that Dean does not want to change the party.
It's a shame. No one running is interested in getting the little guy truly involved - not just those on the Internet, but the poor as well. It's also unfortunate, because such a campaign, I believe, would bring a Democratic landslide.
John Edwards, anybody?
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