Little known fact: I elected Senator Wyden. Perhaps an overstatement, but aroune 1979, my wife and I lived in Portland OR for a year. Wyden was running for Congress for the first time. My wife called his office with a question about one of his stands, and dang if Wyden himself didn’t call back and talk with my wife for 20 minutes. So, she and I went door to door for him, and have been Wyden fans ever since.

Joe Trippi says that we shouldn’t be calling it the “information age.” It’s really the age of transparency and empowerment. The Dean Campaign was just a blink, one of the first glimpses of how the changes are going to happen. WRT to TV, Joe says that in 1956 when Nixon gave his Checkers speech, “Bullshit had a medium.”

Wyden: The challenge is to make sure that the decentralization is accompanied by as much accoutantabilility as is possible in the public interest.

Trippi: Authentication on the Net is very tricky. About two weeks before Iowa, an email went out from DeanForAmericas.com asking for volunteers but not if you were gay. (Note the plural in the domain name.)

Wyden: I helped kill Poindexter’s TIA. (Isenberg from the audience: “It’s back as the Matrix.”)

Trippi talks about how the FEC rules work against grassroots organizing. For example, you have 15 days after the quarter ends to file a report on all contributions. That’s fine when you have a few thousand large donors, but when you have 240,000 donors, you end up wheeling in 20′ of reports.

Trippi: The Kerry campaign, like every campaign, is about “Look at me, I’m amazing!” The thing the Dean campaign got right was that he said, “Look at you, you’re amazing.” Kerry ought to say, “I cannot catch this guy by myself. But you can.” Two million Americans would put in $100 and we would take our country back.

Jerry Michalski: What do we do after the campaign?

Trippi: If people were asked to engage and contribute in the campaign, Kerry could govern the same way: “I’m not going to get this health care plan passed. You will.” If we had a leader who believed that people were there to catch them before they hit the sidewalk, he’d do amazing things.

Q: Will the Republicans figure this out?

Trippi: Absolutely. They already have.

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