Howard Kurtz wrote ahead of the development that reporters want a two-man race for Christmas. If at that time, you are threatening to run away with it, the press looks (and "votes" via headlines) for a lead challenger to emerge; if there are several challenging, the press looks for a frontrunner. These are the semi-predictable parts of a zeroing-in mechanism, in which every movement is magnified. One can complain about the heightened scrutiny and magnifying effect, but this is sometimes like saying: hey, turn that lens back, I want to be out of focus, take me out of frame.
You run for president to make it into that spotlight, which either consumes its subjects, or clarifies them on the public screen, fixing an image of the candidate for the electorate just tuning in. If Dean and Trippi were not ready for that, they were not ready for Prime Time.
With the arrival of the new year, the countdown to the caucuses began. Richard Gephardt, in Trippi's incendiary phrase, began his "murder-suicide" by stepping up the attacks on Dean. Criticism, missteps and gaffes began to characterize news coverage. "We ran straight into broadcast politics," he said. This, according to Micah Sifry, is "the webocrats catchphrase for top-down, capital-intensive politics, where the main goal is having or raising enough money to buy broadcast power to send a message to the passive masses."
But Dean's Net supporters did not realize what was happening, Trippi said. They got complacent when their man seemed to be well ahead. "There was no way to communicate to people how high the stakes were right at that moment," Trippi said. The Dean campaign had "this huge target on our back," and it now had to win at broadcast politics, while avoiding minefields that come with being The Story every day. There was the air war fought with ads, the Frontrunner Stumbles plot turn from the press, the attacks by rivals (and by Dean himself, which could turn off voters.) An old quote of Dean's appeared, in which he mocked the Iowa caucuses.
"We were having a hard time saying, 'we could be in real trouble here,'" Trippi recalled. And this is where he made his most interesting observation. I had more than a dozen conversations with journalists about it, as we all tried to figure out what it meant. One thing was unanimous: Reuters ("How Web Support Failed Dean in Crunch") got it wrong. Here's the key passage:
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