I've discussed the parable of the New Economy to the Dean campaign over beers with a friend of mine a couple of nights this week.
There are many valuable lessons to be learned for all involved from the early rounds of the Dean campaign. Here are a few I would take away from it:
1. Failure does not mean the tools are useless. Enron's information markets were and are completely incredible. Akamai Technologies brought revolutionary regional caching technology to the internet yet they went years without a profit and had to trim staff down to famine levels. The implementation of those markets (manipulation and extortion) were the things that brought them down, not the tools.
A failed strategy (we can bicker for days over "was it Trippi?" or "was it Dean?" but I don't think the early results can be called anything other than a failure) is what has temporarily tarnished the Dean Machine. The tools used should not be discarded; in fact I would go so far as to say that the they could provide the Democratic Party with a new set of tools to reinvent their sorely wasted and atrophied grassroots programs.
2. Upfront burn doesn't guarantee you squat. The strategy with an endless number of dot coms was to blow craploads of their venture capital on the most crass forms of material display: Splashy business casual parties for IPO, tacky product launch parties, utterly disposable swag, and expensive new office space with landscaping and lots of glass. Nearly all of those companies are now nothing but a bad taste in many an investor's mouth.
The Dean campaign's early strategy looks strikingly similar. Instead of plowing money into expanding staff to work as state and regional organizers and to do the grunt work of the ground campaign, money poured into advertising in Iowa and New Hampshire. The idea was very much in the same intellectual spirit as those dot coms: Hit them early, hit them hard, hit them often, and your product will achieve dominance. So far it has worked slightly better (no one is bankrupt...yet) but still not the best.
3. Conflict of interests can ruin more than a business (or political campaign); they can corrupt belief. Whether you are talking Dennis Kozlowski, Ken Lay, or Sam Waksal, recent history shows us that the New Economy suffered greatly from insider handoffs of hot IPOs to preferred clients and the distribution of stock options and their subsequent sale by executives while telling their employees to keep buying.
I am not making any criminal connection between the robbers of the New Economy and Joe Trippi and Steve McMahon, merely making the connection that in this case the conflict of interest between the Dean Campaign Manager directing business to an advertising agency in which he was a partner is simply not acceptable. So much of the Dean campaign's and Trippi's message was and is grounded in overthrowing the idea of politics as usual; to have one of the more prevalent examples of "politics as usual" occuring at the very heart of the campaign's executive management is at the very least unethical and blindingly stupid on Trippi's part and at the worst malicious conduct.
4. If you want to survive as a new company, you have to get your product to market and produce a product for which there is demand and the resources to satisfy that demand by purchasing the product. How many biotech companies came and went because they only had R&D and nothing close to coming to market? How many telecom gear companies came and went because their products were too beta and they could never get them into stable production?
The strategy with the Dean campaign was much the same way in the early going. Employing meetup.com, online donations, online blog communities, and a grassroots ground campaign based on Ganz's union organizing techniques held and still holds tremendous promise. But the idea never seems to "get to the market" in my opinion. It seems to me that the logical path this deployment would utilize would be to seed the ground campaign with digital tools of organization then expand the ground campaign with the digital tools (meetup, blogs, donations) beyond the boundaries of the digital world. Perhaps I am simply jaded and uninformed on this particular point of the campaign, but it certainly seems to me that the digital revolution for Dean turned into more of a digital prison for his wider national campaign in terms of hindering the ground campaign from expanding in more states. The over-reliance on digital tools stymied the Dean campaign's most important asset: Expanding the face-to-face grassroots campaign.
5. Train people for the tasks at hand and nest these within the bigger picture. Find people who have the skill sets necessary for your company to succeed. In the telecom world I can't tell you how many people I met with degrees in fields unrelated to their positions and WITHOUT THE training to succeed in their positions. Not having degrees in your field of employment isn't so much of an issue (hell, I run a linux cluster, perform security audits, and I'm a political scientist) IF you have the training to succeed. In political campaigns this is not so much of an issue because there isn't that much of a technical dimension to sharing your story and promoting your candidate with other citizens.
Where I think this parable rings true for the Dean campaign is the apparent lack of preparedness for the Iowa caucuses. Pretty much everyone saw the Dubuque caucus on C-SPAN (well, pretty much everyone I know who is involved in politics) and saw the ineffectual Dean campaign at that position. Looking through the Iowa BloggerStorm and looking though some other blog "views from the ground," one constant theme occured over and over again: Dean's Iowa ground campaign was not properly trained and prepared for caucus situations. Of course there were exceptions, but this did seem to be the rule for the Iowa caucuses. Throwing people who were probably political novices for the most part into a caucusing situation without proper training (like some kind of model-walk-through done a couple of times in preparation for the real deal) was a disaster. I tend to believe that this apparent lack of proper training was more damaging to the Dean campaign's GOTV efforts than poor advertisements and negative campaigning.
Well, there you have it. Pretty long and pretty sad, too. There are valuable lessons to be learned in the Dean campaign's stories from Iowa and New Hampshire; not only for the Democratic Party and the current campaigns (including Dr. Dean's), but for future candidates.