At the same time, Trippi as shot caller for Dean had entered a dangerous area where only the rules of Realpolitik can win you the prize. These were not the terms that existed between the Dean campaign led by Trippi and the movement for Dean that helped bring 600,000 forward in one way or another.
and there was really no way….we couldn't figure out a way to communicate what was happening to us in a way that either didn't sound desperate — I do not know what the word is for it-- but did not ring alarm bells the wrong way...
"Figure out a way to communicate" involves the press. The conditions of scrutiny Dean had entered disallowed honest communication with the base in the very public terms the Dean campaign had half-pioneered. If you leveled with supporters and sent out the call, "we're in trouble if we don't make a big turn away from what we're doing," then the press--on frontrunner alert--would seize on that.
The master narrative has a well worn device for this: the "campaign in disarray" story. Mistakes are fodder, not only for reporters but also the comedy teams on television-- a serious consideration when you are still introducing the candidate as a person. The situation demands from Burlington an absurd level of public confidence, but it was precisely too much confidence that was hurting the campaign.
Transparency--a buzzword but not only a buzzword--is a first casualty of Realpolitik. "We weren't trying to keep the Net roots out of the loop," Trippi explained. "We were trying to keep John Kerry out of it." You cannot afford transparency or deliberation as the race intensifies. Could this be announced? Impossible. And so your distributed supporters, organized in affinity style or by weblog, had to sense it happening, or read between the lines of what the campaign was saying. What alternative was there? E-mail 300,000 of your best people and ask them to keep it quiet? "The press reads the blog."
That was the tipping point, in the story Trippi told to E tech. Net politics had done a lot, and confounded the establishment. But it was still immature, only half developed. A lot of people feel that way about Trippi himself: Adina Levin is one: "He didn't take responsibility for the disorganization in his own campaign and the lack of precinct organizing savvy that made the Dean get-out-the-vote effort less effective than Kerry. He didn't take responsibility for communication failures and flaws."
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