[sxsw] Trippi
Joe Trippi begins by pointing to a non-Net reality that shaped the campaign: After Jimmy Carter was elected, the Democratic Party’s Hunt Commission changed the rules to work against insurgents. Since then, the rules have been tightened further. The only way for an insurgent to win, Joe says, was to win Iowa and New Hampshire.
We are now at the point TV was at 40 years ago, he says. The Dean campaign was the Kennedy-Nixon debates. But TV is a one-way medium. “The Internet is the singlemost powerful tool ever put in the hands of citizens.” It allows us to network together, and we’re just learning that we can change the country if we take action in common cause with others. Corporations and campaigns won’t be able to keep secrets any more.
The Dean campaign was just the tip of the iceberg, he says.
He talks about how the Internet took an obscure governor and made him into the front funner, raising more money than any Democrat in history. How?
Blogs. That’s where the debates about WMDs were happening in the blogosphere, not in the mass media which had embedded its reporters. Likewise, the blogosphere really pushed the awareness of the problems with electronic voting machines. He talks about how he first heard about MeetUp on the mydd.com blog.
Also, giving up some centralized control.
“There are 2 million Americans who would borrow $100 to get rid of George Bush, and it’s going to happen this year.” That, he says, will change American politics forever. “There’s only one medium in the world that allows this to happen.”
We did have to give up some control. But what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with allowing people to work for their candidatee in their communities the way they want? MSNBC after 12 years has 250,00 viewers. In just a few months, the Dean campaign had 600,000 members. That’s the power of giving up control.
“A guy like Dean [an insurgent] isn’t supposed to get to where he got to. It’s a dot com miracle.”
“You’re not going to tear down a system as corrupt as this one that’s been built up over 40 years, it isn’t going to be torn down in 13 months.” But, he says, it will happen.
It’s not just about defeating Bush: “If Howard Dean had gotten elected, there’s practically no way his health care would have passed.”
In 2008, we’ll all look at the Dean campaign and laugh at how primitive it was.
Trippi: We were in trouble well before the Iowa primary. The Gore endorsement motivated the other candidates to decide to “kill” Howard Dean. And the press said, “Oh, man, he’s going to be the nominee. We’re supposed to scrutinize the nominee and be tough on him.” That’s the first time the candidates went after someone at the same time that the media went after him. And a 527 backed by Gephart and Kerry were beating the living daylights out of us with a million dollars. “And Iowa is the worst state in the union for a guy like Howard Dean”: 65% of caucus attendees are over 65, and Gephart is telling them that Dean is going to take away their Medicare. “It had nothing to do with whether the Internet worked or the 3,500 orange hats.”
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