Trippin'

Joe waxes nostalgic…

All modern campaigns and transactional campaigns are built around a candidate who proclaims to the nation "Look at me -- aren't I amazing?".

The Dean campaign (and any transformational campaign successful or not) was built around a candidate who proclaimed "Look at you -- aren't you amazing?"

This strikes me as essential. More than ideology, or any other factor -- true transformational leadership can only come from a candidate who fundamentally gets that it isn't about him/her -- it's about us.

Seems like "it's about us" is Joe Trippi's way of saying "It was about me." (Joe responds, quite gracefully, below. He's right. My dig was too cute by half, and not fair at all. Mea culpa. My reservations about the notion of "transformational" campaigns stand, though.) It seems it wasn't the candidate that mattered, it was the campaign Joe created that was important. I was always puzzled by the aura of empowerment that surrounded the Dean campaign. What, exactly, were Joe's acolytes empowered to do? To turn out at rallies and meet-ups? To man lit tables or canvass precincts? To give cash, and to give again and again?

Which of the "modern campaigns and transactional campaigns" Joe seems to disdain didn't allow, didn't, indeed, encourage, their supporters to do all of the above?

There was the blog, of course, and Trippi's use of campaign blogging to promote that feeling of individual empowerment was, admittedly, innovative. But transformational? It was a more efficient technology, in many ways, than the printed newsletters, online bulletin boards and email lists that had become fixtures of campaign communications over the years. It was certainly an effective way to bring new people into the campaign, people who might never have made the trek all the way to a campaign office or bothered to fill out the volunteer info on a contribution envelope. In the end, thought, the people were brought in for all the same old purposes - to stimulate, through their labor, their money or a combination of the two, support for a candidate.

One of the regrettable things about the way the 2004 Iowa campaign ended, with the fabled "Dean scream" and the media frenzy that ensued, is that it's served to hide the fact that before Howard Dean ever walked onto the stage that night, Joe Trippi's "transformational" campaign had failed in a fairly dramatic way. Despite burning cash at historical rates and putting legions of watch-capped warriors on the sidewalks of Iowa, Howard Dean himself proved to be a hard product to sell, and way-new politics and tales of personal empowerment just didn't matter to people who looked him over closely and decided that he just wasn't their best choice.

It may be all about the campaign for Joe, but for voters the campaign is all about the candidate. I'm glad so many people found their way into political activism, at any level, through the efforts of Dean For America. I'm especially encouraged by the number of those folks who seem to have remained engaged at some level. In many ways, the effort Trippi led at DFA was part, I think, of our victories in 2006, and will contribute to greater victories in 2008.

Candidates benefit from well managed campaigns and enthusiastic volunteers and donors, but in the end, elections are still choices between candidates and the the voters' judgment of who will best represent and serve them. Campaigns, in the eyes of the electorate, are about the candidates. That's a truth that hasn't been transformed.