You tend to put your own belief system in the vessel of the guy that you're supporting. Clearly that happened with Howard Dean as well.-- Trippi.
San Diego, CA: Feb. 9-10 When Joe Trippi took the stage here at O'Reilly's Digital Democracy Teach-In, it was an address to Net loyalists by a fallen hero. Trippi had lost three battles in full public view: Iowa, then New Hampshire, and then his position at the top of what he yet called an "insurgent" campaign. If you knew the history, knew the crowd, and had followed Trippi's press, it was an appearance not without drama.
Of course, loyalist did not apply to everyone in the room in their attitude toward Trippi or Dean or even Net politics. I found skepticism about all three at the conference. But the bonds were real enough to make his talk a more intimate act than "figure in the news speaks out." As Scott Rosenberg of Salon said to me the following day, Trippi was talking to his troops. For a core group at the Teach-In this was true. And Joe Trippi received a hero's welcome: two standing ovations, with 50-60 percent joining in.
The d-democracy event was a shrewd and late addition to a larger happening: the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference at the Westin in downtown San Diego. It's known as E-tech. Some 800 were expected for E-tech, and perhaps a quarter of these came to Monday's events. In that group were about 45 journalists, including correspondents for Wired, Reuters, AP, Salon, the Nation, CBS News, plus all the webloggers doing the blow by blow, or commenting on parts of the day. (See Jeff Jarvis, Ross Mayfield and this page for lots more. Ross's post lists many others who blogged.)
"I am out of the campaign, I am not out of the fight." So said the general to the troops. (Read the transcript here.) And a few days later, the chatter at E-tech was confirmed. Trippi started his weblog, Change for America, with its lead post: Still in the Fight.
There are cynical ways to read these developments, but I think Trippi's blog is a good idea-- if it's different, and really him, linking and thinking, arguing with people while freely interpreting the news. I want to see how someone with his knowledge of politics does a newsy blog, with a comments section-- a far more promising proposition, intellectually, than Trippi mixing it up with Chris Matthews in a pundit's role for MSNBC. The line at the microphone was daunting, so I never got to ask my questions of Trippi:
Since you are not out of the fight, what part of the fight can be won by putting Joe Trippi into the game as commentator for MSNBC? And, a follow on question, have you considered how this could wind up a fatal compromise with your great adversary, broadcast politics? Or perhaps you have a belly of the beast strategy to share?
In San Diego, Trippi was with people who understood--but did they really understand?--what the Net could do for American politics; what was different, in some cases radically different, about the Dean campaign as it grew; and what bubble of hope had been lost when the Dean candidacy crashed in Iowa and then New Hampshire.
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