Joe Trippi follows Ken Mehlman as we eat our bad desserts in the packed room. He says [notes, not transcript! As always.]:

I agree with Ken that the party that puts the resources into the new medium usually ends up dominating that medium. It’s a little worrisome that we may have just awakened a sleeping giant.

I want to talk about something bigger than any campaign. The Net is a new medium that’s different: it empowers the average American. TV doesn’t. TV may have been the most powerful appliance in the American home, but the power was for the networks and the advertisers. The Internet is about to change everything. It’s finally matured and come of age. It’s the most powerful tool ever put in the hands of the American people. It allows them to make their own networks, let their own voices be heard. It’s not top down but bottom up. The changes it will bring will be even bigger than the early visionaries suggested.

The naysayers are generally right for 10-15 years — people said no one would want sound in pictures, etc. The Net is maybe where Nixon was with the Checkers speech.

For the past 40 years, we have had broadcast politics. Politics has been about collecting big fat checks and putting ads on TV. The American people got left out. Retail politics becamse making sure you got to that guy who can write the $2,000, not talking with the voters. The Dean campaign set out to change that system, not just changing presidents. Hundreds of thousands of Americans contributing less than $100 put together $50M+, more money than any Democratic candidate has ever raised…that was because 100s of thousands of people used the Internet to communicate with each other. That’s the main difference between broadcast politics and the new politics of people actually getting involved in their democracy again.

This change is going to come and it’s going to be mind-blowing.

When TV came in, the visionaries said what was going to happen, but they couldn’t conceive of what the changes would actually be. We needed millions of people to use Amazon, to use eBay. That got people used to the Internet. We needed MoveOn.org and MeetUp. That got people ready for DeanLink that let people find others in their zip code, create their own event. They did this without any command and control from the Dean campaign. It’d be a mistake to underestimate the bottom-up power of the Internet. There are a lot of people in the recording industry today who wished they hadn’t underestimated Napster, etc. For Washington to believe it’s immune that it’s immune to the bottom-up power of the Internet is a huge mistake.

What was really different about our campaign?

We started with 7 people and 432 known supporters nationwide on Jan 31. I found out about MeetUp from a blogger, Jerome Armstrong. By the end of the campaign,l we had 190,000 Americans signed up to meet up on the first Wednesday of every month and then go out and work for Dean.

There’s a misunderstanding about blogs. We decided to launch the first presidential campaign blog in history. It changed our campaign radically. [He tells the 50-posters anecdote and the red-bat anecdote.]

The real change in America will come from people using the Internet, using the tools we all build…

He mentions Dean’s new org, DemocracyForAmerica.com, and his own, ChangeForAmerica.com

Q: Does this bottomup technology really play well for the Republicans?

A: We’re at this weird moment, like the Nixon-Kennedy things. The Internet is just one tool among others now. Over time, it won’t be a tool for the campaign. It’ll be a tool for the American people. They’ll organize themselves whether the politicians like it or not. It could be this year. An organization could come from the grassroots and totally take over one of these campaigns.

The most bizarre one was the Disney fight. Roy Disney has a guy on the phone who has a web site that talks to 1.5M Disney shareholders. You’re starting to see these little hiccups that don’t make a lot of sense on their own, but collectively it’s pretty clear that bottom-up change is coming. Which part raises more money under $100? $1,000? Republicans. The one category the Democratic Party leads in is over $1M. The Internet just changed this. The Internet let people say We want to be involved in our government. The Dean campaign didn’t make it, but the genie is out of the bottle. It’s gonna happen.

Q: Would you advise Ralph Nader to be more respectful of the new medium? He said he doesn’t have time to spend on line.

A: There are studies that say more and more people spend more time online than in front of their television sets. Over time, they’ll become the same box. You cannot ignore this or just get in the bunker and pray that you’re alive when it’s over. The American people now have this tool. The Dean campaign was just the very first babystep of what’s coming.

The political press by and large doesn’t understand the Internet, and the Internet press doesn’t understand politics.

Q: Will the Internet get out the vote in November?

A: Yes. The real debates over the issues is occurring on the Net.

Q: Are you seeing disruptive campaigns in other countries?

A: We tried everything, including SMS. It just didn’t work; we had 5,000 people. Korea is an example of a government changed by the Net.

We put up a list of undecideds in Iowa and suggested that supporters write letters. But the Net is transparency, so the Clark and Kerry campaigns sent people to our site and used the list to send their own letters.

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