Trippi: Net Politics Here to Stay

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SAN DIEGO -- Forgive the hundreds of thousands of people who gave Howard Dean more than $40 million in contributions last year. They might have thought they were trying to elect a president, but they were wrong, according to Dean's former campaign manager, Joe Trippi.
Instead, he said, all that money was used to beta test a new, online revolution in American politics.
Speaking at the Digital Democracy Teach-In -- part of this week's O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in downtown San Diego -- Trippi issued a spirited defense of the former Vermont governor's campaign, and his role in Dean for America's mercurial rise and fall.

"This wasn't about one guy," he said. "This is the beginning of the tools, and a platform, to take the country back."

Talking largely about Dean's presidential quest in the past tense, Trippi blamed rival campaigns and an irresponsible, hopelessly conventional news media for knocking the one-time front-runner from his perch. And he warned that those same forces are now trying to discredit the Internet-fueled brand of activism that was the hallmark of the Dean candidacy.

"Why do they want this movement to fail?" he asked. "What's so scary about millions of people becoming involved in democracy?"

After Dean's worse-than-expected showing in Iowa, it became an instant media cliché to equate his campaign to the high-flying, fast-falling Internet bubble companies of the late 1990s. But Trippi said such comparisons were all wrong.

"This wasn't a dot-com crash," he said. "The Howard Dean campaign was a dot-com miracle."

For months, everything was going along just miraculously in Dean-land, according to Trippi: the most money ever raised by a Democratic presidential candidate, hundreds of thousands of supporters, an increasing willingness on the part of Democrats to speak out against the Bush administration.

Then Al Gore endorsed the ex-governor. Instantly, "alarm bells went off in every newsroom in the country, in every other campaign in the country," Trippi asserted. And those bells said, "Kill him. Kill Howard Dean right this second or else he's going to be the nominee."

According to Trippi, the media -- "who, frankly, could never figure out what the Dean campaign was" -- teamed up with the former governor's competitors to "wreck the Dean campaign with their attacks."

After three or four weeks of this white-hot assault, Trippi asserted, Dean's popularity melted.

But Trippi's argument was called into question only moments after the long-time political operative left the stage. more..