Originally posted at joetrippi.com
First of all I want to say that there is another book out there that I urge people to read. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga's Taking On The System. Markos and Jerome Armstrong along with so many others were there at the beginning, and Markos' book is a must read if you want to understand how the Digital Era is changing the rules.
Buy the book on Amazon Here.
I wrote this Author’s Note back in May along with a new 15,000 word afterword on the 2008 campaign. I put my heart and soul into progressive Democratic politics for over 30 years. And its a joy, even to be sitting on the sidelines today, to see people mattering in the process today in ways I could never have imagined when I was a $15 dollar a day organizer for Ted Kennedy in the snow of Iowa in 1979. I hope that comes through in this Author’s Note:
Author’s Note
It’s the spring of 2008, and I’m sitting here sick to my stomach. I’m envious and I’m exhausted and I’m in the last place a lifelong pol ever wants to find himself – on the sidelines, run out of the 2008 race for president by a campaign that took my book and read it back to me "with meaning."
Let’s just say Barack Obama got it.
I don’t know exactly how things will play out between now and November. But in a lot of ways I don’t think it matters. Maybe politics, like history, is a story eventually told by the winners, but in the annals of campaigning, what Barack Obama and his campaign staff were able to achieve in 2008 qualifies as yet another quantum leap in campaigning, in the use of the Internet, and in our democratic history – no matter what the final numbers say.
And as the strategist who first came up with and used many of the theories and ideas and technologies that the Obama camp used to further transform American politics on the eve of the 2008 election, I am proud and thrilled and, yes, more than a little jealous, like a biplane aviator watching astronauts walking toward the launch pad. Because at this moment, in the summer of 2008, Barack Obama and his campaign look to all the world to be performing the political equivalent of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth. Theirs has been only the second bottom-up campaign in modern history, the second presidential campaign to get it. And it might just go all the way to the White House, with the American people providing the rocket fuel. There are few doubters left, this time, or maybe the next, the new way will get us there.
If Obama for America is the Apollo 11 of a new kind of politics, then what you are about to read in this book – the story of Dean for America, Howard Dean’s campaign of 2004, and those inspiring pioneers who worked with me on it – is like the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk. This is the story of the beginning of it all: of the first intrepid, seat-of-the-pants, spit-and-chewing-gum attempt to build a contraption that would eventually plug people back into their democracy, so that, sooner than any of us could have dreamed, we would fly.
Joe Trippi
Wittman, Maryland
May 2008
Dedicated to the six hundred thousand people of Dean for America who relit the flame of participatory democracy.