Joe Trippi and the Blog That Changed Politics

The French Revolution was ushered in with the help of a rather drastic device called the guillotine. Much less invasive technology — the Web log or “blog” — underlies the current
revolution in American politics, according to Joe Trippi IOP 2004, an Institute of Politics fellow last fall, who managed Howard Dean’s 2004 run for the presidency. In fact, it was through reading a blog entry posted in early 2002 that Trippi first learned of Dean’s presidential aspirations. And once Trippi assumed the job of campaign manager, one of his first acts was to oversee the creation in March 2003 of “the first-ever blog of any presidential campaign” — a site that eventually became known as “Blog for America.” The blog served as the nerve center for the entire Dean campaign, prompting the other candidates (including George Bush, John Kerry, and five other Democratic hopefuls) to follow suit, launching their own Web logs. But no one used the Internet so effectively — as a tool for raising money, generating ideas, recruiting volunteers, and spurring action — as the Dean forces.

A 2003 cover story on Trippi in The New Republic dubbed him “The Man Who Reinvented Campaigning.” After Dean’s run bottomed out in Iowa, the author of that article defended the previous “hyperbole,” calling Trippi’s innovative use of the Internet a “breakthrough [that] has changed politics
forever.”

How did a campaign operative — in the course of a failed election bid — pull off what might ultimately be viewed as an even greater feat, changing the nature of campaigning itself? Trippi attributes it to “plain, dumb luck — being the right guy at the right time.” He entered politics at age 17 and has since played leading roles in the campaigns of Walter Mondale, Richard Gephardt, Alan Cranston, Tom Bradley, and scores of other candidates. But Trippi is also fascinated with technology, dating back to his days as an aerospace major at San Jose State University, when he snuck into physics labs and played around with holograms, lasers, and other gizmos. “There aren’t that many people who know both politics and technology,” he notes. “I just happened to be the guy that brought them together.”

The potential of blogs became apparent to Trippi in the late-1990s, when he spent time perusing online bulletin boards that discussed companies he’d invested in, including the computer game maker, THQ. One contributor, named David Haines, posted frequently on that board, commenting not only about games, but also about personal matters like the birth of his children. When Haines died of a heart attack in his early 30s, Trippi recalls, “people who’d never met him started eulogizing him over the Internet and even took up a collection for his children’s education. It dawned on me that if you could build a community around a person known only through his Web postings, what would happen if you tried to do that with a candidate in a presidential campaign?”

He got the chance to test out this idea in the Dean campaign. By that time, the technology was finally ready for prime time, he says. “Blogs barely existed in 2000 when John McCain was running.” But by 2003, there were a couple of million blogs, a few of which attracted hundreds of thousands of readers. What better way to spread the word about somebody no one had heard of?

This was all new to Dean, Trippi notes, “as Howard had never blogged before, nor had he e-mailed all that much.” But there was really no other choice. When Trippi joined the campaign in 2003, the operation was modest to say the least: “seven people sitting around Vermont with a bunch of shoeboxes,” as he describes it in his new book, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. With only $100,000 in the bank, there was obviously no TV budget. Instead, Trippi turned to the Internet as an organizing tool for forging a decentralized, grassroots movement. “The Web is the only practical way of bringing large numbers of people together,” he says. “We needed a medium that spreads information like a virus to spread the word about Howard Dean, and it worked.”

By the time the Iowa caucus convened in January 2004, the campaign had linked up 600,000 people through the Internet and Blog for America. “Howard Dean proved you can raise more money than any Democrat in history (all with donations averaging less than $100 each), and get 65,000 people out on the street, without any help from anybody in the party power structure,” Trippi says.

Of course, the organization’s success in these areas wasn’t all due to blogs. The maturity of the Internet as a whole was critical. Nevertheless, Trippi says, “blogs are the only way we know of that allows the free flow of ideas to a large number
of people in real time, or almost in real time.” Blogs and the Internet are more powerful than the printing press, in his
estimation, because the printing press doesn’t allow millions of people to respond immediately. “This is the most powerful medium ever put in the hands of the public.”

Blog for America posted regular accounts from the campaign trail, photographs, progress updates, and recommended discussion topics, with boxes for comments. Dean staffers were besieged with thousands of comments per day.

Less passive than Web sites, blogs can help forge a sense
of community by enabling supporters to learn more about their candidate than they could possibly find in an individual magazine or newspaper, while exchanging ideas with one another and members of the campaign staff. “We actually read our blogs and got countless ideas from them that made us better,” Trippi notes.

The Bush and Kerry teams, by contrast, did not use the Web interactively, he claims. “Bush’s Web site, in fact, didn’t allow comments. For them, it was all about raising money on the Net rather than empowering people.”

Through the use of blogs and e-mails, Dean supporters took action independently and spontaneously. Someone, for instance, might suggest leafletting a particular BART station
in San Francisco. “They’d do it without telling us in advance,” Trippi comments. “Each week, there were hundreds of things like that going on.” In July 2003, for example, Dean bloggers raised $500,000 (with average contributions of $50) to outcompete a Dick Cheney fundraising event at $2,000 a head. The bloggers also started the “Dean Corps — a sort of low-impact, weekend Peace Corps,” Trippi writes in his book.
“That was the beauty of the Dean campaign. The campaign was what the bloggers helped make it.”

A decentralized system like this might seem chaotic and even risky, but Trippi believes the benefits greatly outweigh the possible drawbacks. What’s more, he’s convinced this is “the way of the future. The Dean campaign gave a hint of what you can do.” In 2006 and 2008, he adds, we should see even more decentralized campaigning facilitated by Web logs.

Trippi thinks the Internet revolution may be just what’s needed to spawn a viable third party. Before the rise of the Internet, he says, “people disenchanted with the two main parties had nowhere to go, no way to raise money. The Net allows you to do that.”

It remains to be seen how mainstream politics will adjust
to this powerful new force, Trippi says, “but it clearly has to because the genie is not going back in the bottle.” After putting his imprint on the future of American politics, he admits to being uncertain of his own next step, though one thing is certain: Trippi, like the genie, won’t be going back in the bottle anytime soon. — Steve Nadis