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Edited on Tue Jan-24-06 05:20 PM by Radical Activist
I resisted reading this book for a long time because, frankly, I hate Howard Dean. Then a friend, who shares my feelings about Dean, recommended it and said Trippi writes about a lot of things my friend and I were screaming about during the last Presidential election.
Its a great book, especially for a full-time campaign junkie like me. I related to a lot of what he wrote about working on campaigns. It made me like Trippi regardless of what I think about Dean. He obviously made many great points about internet organizing.
I was interested in what he wrote about the conflict between himself and Kate O'Connor. Its a familiar dynamic in Presidential campaigns. The person who travels with the candidate, O'Connor in this case, has a great deal of power and influence over the campaign, even if they aren't officially in charge. Campaigns become chaotic (more than usual) if there isn't one clear person in charge. Trippi portrayed O'Connor as someone who was concerned about Dean being pigeon-holed as a liberal and his ability to move back to the middle during the general election.
The push and pull between these two staffers sheds a light on why I disliked Dean so much. At one event, usually in front of a core Democratic crowd, he would sound liberal and claim to be from the "democratic wing of the Democratic Party." At a different event, and in some national media interviews, he would caution that he's really a moderate centrist. During the entire campaign I felt Dean was trying to have it both ways, on his positions, on his ideology, on his record. He had the framing of a progressive with the record and program of a DLC centrist. That's why I viewed him as a gigantic fake and I now see that one big reason for that impression is that Dean was being pulled in two different directions by his staff and didn't know which way to go.
I'm sure this will royally piss of the Dean fans, which is why I didn't post it in General Discussion for a flame war. Anyway, its a good book and Trippi makes some wonderful points.
I think the next step is to more fully integrate the more traditional field organizing with the kind of online organizing that Trippi was doing. I think the Dean campaign could have done a better job of feeding the meetup and internet volunteers into a broader, coordinated field campaign. Trippi has a lot of experience crafting a good message, but ultimately John Kerry won Iowa because he had a very solid field organization. Sometimes I saw Dean people in Iowa doing counterproductive things like pissing off the supporters of candidates they were bird dogging. That's a big mistake in a caucus system.
The next step will be to make the traditional field organizers and the net organizers work together to form a seamless organization. In future elections, we can't have a wall dividing the net organizers and the field organizers and have them answer to different bosses. Its all one thing and all field organizers will also have to be good net organizers and vice versa. If a primary campaign can do that in '08, they'll be in good shape.
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