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:
We couldn't figure out how to communicate to people that there was this--pardon the expression--a "holy shit" moment happening here. In other words, our Internet supporters were complacent. They were, "Man, we've got more money than anybody. We're ahead in Iowa and we're ahead in New Hampshire..."
I remember sending out an E-mail that said…something like, "If you've never heard the depth of our need for your support right now, hear it now," and the blog comments were, "Why is Joe sounding so desperate? He's never sounded desperate before. We're on top of the world here. We're ahead." And so I think there was a disconnect between our Net roots' understanding of the body politic and what was happening at that moment after Gore endorsed us.
The Powers that Be had struck in a pattern predictable from before; the Governor was undergoing the trials of the frontrunner. All effort had to swing from creating a movement and building the tools for expanding it further... to grinding infantry work in Iowa: finding voters who would turn out for Dean and persuading them it's worth a shot.
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