Net literacy was, of course, sky high among this group, political savvy less so. And so Trippi came to teach, as well as explain what happened in the crash, and defend himself from critics, including that morning's Los Angeles Times. It carried a "hey, possible controversy" story about Trippi's firm billing the Dean campaign. (See the Washington Post's deeper analysis and Ed Cone's commentary. Trippi's defense is here.)
First, he wanted to show how much the "Net roots," as he called them, had accomplished in a year: January to January. "That's why I am here today," he said, "because I think you started something amazing... a dot com miracle." (His soundbite phrase for Monday.) "It must survive Howard Dean and his candidacy."
The miracle is that an alternative to campaigns-as-usual had finally become visible with the Internet's semi-maturation as political tool. "Broadcast politics has failed us miserably; failed the country miserably," Trippi said. "The American people now have the beginnings of a platform to change it." This alternative had proven itself in the one way that counts on everyone's scorecard: raising money.
That Dean had raised it in small amounts, in distributed fashion, aided by a social movement which began to gather online and kept gathering, along with the blogs and the spirit of active participation-- all of that motion meant something. For it had proved something. Before 2003, the record take for a Democrat in a single quarter was by a sitting President, Bill Clinton, who drew $10.5 million, Trippi said. Dean, an asterisk to many people at the time, raised $14.8 million in the third quarter of 2003, then $15.9 in the fourth.
Any system that can do that is a potentially powerful force. A candidate who can bank those sums is not only a threat to win, but a threat to disrupt the rules by which campaigns are run, paid for, and won. Just how surprising Dean's performance was to the political establishment can be heard in this column from Dick Meyer, editorial director of CBS News online: (July 17, 2003)
Dean – maverick, outsider, underdog – cleaned his opponents’ establishment clocks in the second quarter. He raised $7.6 million, almost $2 million more than the second-place finisher, John Kerry.Dean raised more cash from small donations than any legitimate, major party presidential candidate has since the 1970’s. Certainly, he’s the only candidate in ages that used small donations to actually win a money race. In 2000, 74 percent of Bush's donations were $750 or more and 65 percent of Gore’s. Stark contrast to Dean’s 29 percent.
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