I was disappointed to see Trippi leave the Dean campaign. While he may have done badly at the meat-and-potatoes aspects of running a campaign -- handling a budget, making up ads, spinning the print media -- he seemed to be the force behind the "revolutionary" (in the non-Che sense) aspects of the campaign. And this new strategy is a significant part of what interests me (and probably a lot of people) about the Dean campaign.
While I expected Neel to be a dull gray suit, he seems to be making the right noises. By this I mean that if you take "his" actions literally, he's doing the right things, and if you take them as pure pretense, he knows what things look "right". Either way, I think it says good things; saying this up-front lets me avoid copious scare-quotes in the next paragraph, which you can insert anywhere you feel appropriate.
He's posting on the blog regularly, and seems to be both soliciting and processing suggestions made in the comments. This posting maintains the campaign's grassroots feel, which could have devolved into a "cabal and plebes" dynamic. The posts strike about the right level of informality, and a decent balance between propaganda and information. They also seem directed at answering "what the heck happened?" and "where do we go from here?" about as openly as possible in a public forum. I was particularly pleased that today, after the usual fluffy preface, the first bullet in his post was that the campaign had started paying staff again. He could have mentioned ad buys first, but instead chose to indicate that the campaign was caring for its people first.
The true test, of course, the one that matters, is whether or not Mr. Neel can turn the campaign around financially, and keep it viable long enough for the current Kerry surge to stop. We should know the answer in a couple of weeks, but so far, Neel seems to be a decent (or at least smart) individual.