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."
He didn't. But maybe as a writer he now will.
Jay Rosen is chair of the Journalism Department at New York University. His weblog is PressThink.
Transcript of Joe Trippi's Feb. 9th speech, Down from the Mountain.
"Okay, so I rambled a little." (Trippi at his weblog) And don't forget his Q and A with journalist and weblogger Ed Cone.
Wired magazine's Noah Shactman: Trippi: Net Politics Here to Stay
Scott Rosenberg of Salon: "More than anything else Trippi said here, his confession of this 'transparency problem'--his admission that, at its hour of greatest need, the Dean campaign was unable to level with its own online loyalists--seemed to break faith with the campaign's revolutionary aspirations. What good is building a vast open network to route around the existing power structure if you can't use it?...If in the weeks before Iowa, Dean's campaign had told its followers that things weren't going so well, maybe the media would have pounced on his vulnerability; but maybe his troops would have rallied."
Alex Beame, columnist for the Boston Globe, It's game over for Dean's Web dreams.
And as for the Deaniacs — where can they go? The received wisdom is that the power of the Internet mobilized Dean supporters from men and women who had been alienated from politics as usual. But if they really want George Bush out of the White House, they will have to wake up before 8 p.m. on Nov. 2, skip the trip to Starbucks, and pull the old-fashioned lever down at the polling place.
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