(This is a comment elevated from my post on why Democrats and Obama don’t do what progressives want. It is written by Jerome Armstrong, not by me. Jerome was the founder of MyDD (Kos’s Blogfather) and co-author of Crashing the Gates, among other things- Ian)
by Jerome Armstrong
In the fall of 2002, I was busy putting together about a 10-page memo for Joe Trippi on how Howard Dean could win the upcoming Presidential campaign. And it had revolution written throughout. Fundraising, organizing, communicating, the whole thing. In that document was laid out the fifty state organizing campaign, how blogs would build the movement around Dean, and how small dollar online donors could become bigger than the John Kerry’s decades-long amassed donor mailing list. Nothing short of revolutionary. If you’ve read Trippi’s book, you’ll see that he gained insight into applicable tactics from the rip roaring 90′s Raging Bull financial commenting site. I was also on those boards (for better or worse– or much worse), so we were both of similar mind when Joe got the opportunity to take over managing the campaign, on the possibilities. We also saw what McCain did after New Hampshire, with online fundraising, in 2000. It was quite fantastic. Heady days. But the point is that it was all revolutionary for the campaign, especially so being the primary for Democratic President. The electricity of the netroots movement emerged right alongside Howard Dean message that was anti-Bush, anti-war, and full-bore partisanship.
And if you experienced that ’03 campaign, you gained insight into those revolutionary tactics. If you did not, then they didn’t make up what you brought to your next campaign. And the experience didn’t need to be one of being on the winning side either. I have to credit a book that Nate Wilcox had me read for understanding this, by my looking at what happened with TV and how it changed political campaigning, by Ray Strothers called “Falling Up: How a Redneck Helped Invent Political Consulting”.
So, in 2003, we on Dean’s campaign had a big advantage on the rest of the campaigns. Dean, for the most part, knew the message to use. The campaign knew exactly what tools to use to grow. None of the other campaigns (Gephardt, Kerry, Edwards, Lieberman) could figure the internet part out (save Clark’s nascent campaign).
Howard Dean’s Strategy
As we entered the Spring of 2003, the Dean campaign staff gathered together with early bundlers for a strategic retreat in Vermont at the Trapp family lodge. Trippi had always worked on separate presidential campaigns against Paul Maslin. So, wanting to work together, he had brought him on as Dean’s pollster. They put together a campaign strategy that made sense. In short, rely on the internet-based strategy to grow the campaign up to the caucuses and primaries. Dean would lose to Gephardt in Iowa, placing second. Then, followed by Dean winning first in New Hampshire, he’d thereafter steamroll to the nomination. This plan went awry by the Fall though, when public polls came out showing Dean way ahead in Iowa too. Maslin tried to temper Dean’s expectations, but Dean decided a sweep was a must, and the whole campaign strategy was changed. Iowa all of a sudden meant everything.
Dean For America
Second, also from that March 2003 Trapp family lodge meeting. Trippi, Markos, Zephyr, Matt Gross and a few others and myself sat out on the front lawn early into the next morning, drinking and talking about what we were in the middle of transpiring. Finally, around 2 am, the staff comes to shut us up for the night, as the other guests are complaining. As we are ending and walking in, I ask Trippi what’s going to happen when it looks like Dean might win. At the point, it was still unfathomable to most, but I could tell it wasn’t a new thought to him, but instead something he’d been mulling quite a bit, and he replied: “the moment when the insurgent becomes the frontrunner is the moment when he either becomes the establishment or…” and just looks at me, like he was waiting for me to answer, but his face gives me no clue as to how to answer. My thought is that, ‘well yea, the insurgent throws down the revolution,’ but that answer didn’t phase the ‘what happens next’ look on Trippi’s face.
Fast forward about 6 months, I get onto the campaign elevator in the morning, arriving late as usual, same time as Trippi and his wife Kathy Lash. She turns to me and says, “Dean is going to be on next week’s cover of Time and Newsweek.” My first thought was to get them both signed by Dean, which I did later, but I turned to Joe and said to his nodding up, “I guess this is that moment”.
Well, what came next first is that Dean tried to become the establishment candidate. By November and December 2003, the formal endorsements. First Labor groups, then Al Gore & Bill Bradley, were rolled out. Tom Harkin in Iowa. Dean’s poll numbers grew higher. The fundraising numbers went through the roof, but a funny thing was happening with grassroots internet support. It was coming to a standstill around 600,000. I was running all of the online advertising for the campaign, so I firsthand saw the efficacy and resulting metrics for every ad we put out there. We were growing in fundraising, but the movement wasn’t getting bigger. It got so bad, that Nicco Mele had to fudge up the email signup numbers that were public on the website some days (due no doubt in part to Clark’s campaign which I’ll mention below), and we had to figure out techniques to do more than juice them going higher.
What Happens Next
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