During the course of this cycle, it has often been hard to love
The New Republic. They have harped on Dean relentlessly, while giving Sen. Lieberman a free pass. Just over the last couple of days, they sent Gen. Clark home with two D's on Iraq and tried to give him a third, only to retract when the author of
the post in question actually deigned to
read the speech he had so punitively graded.
That's right, Spencer went off and posted without even reading the speech. Retractions are noble, but this guy gets paid for this, doesn't he?
But today's TNR article on Dean Campaign Manager and resident Web Guru Joe Trippi gives me hope. You will probably have to sign up for a trial subscription, but this article is of great interest to all of us who flourish in the blogosphere.
Trippi is also perhaps hard to love--I have it on good authority that he has a touch of the Mad Scientist in him. But that often goes hand-in-hand with true genius. Here's a passage from the article that gives you a sense of the scope of the net-based insurrection that Trippi has orchestrated:
A month passes, and it's more of the same: More e-mail addresses, more people at the Meetups, more money rolling in. Another month, and another, and it just keeps growing. Now it's late June, and Trippi is sure he's not on massive quantities of hallucinogenic drugs--or, if he is, the rest of the world is, too. He packs up the PowerPoint presentation and goes back to see the Democratic suits. "You saw me talk to you before," Trippi would say. "Let me explain this to you." And Trippi lays out the numbers. Back in February, he'd promised that 150,000 people would sign up on the website by the end of June. There are actually 159,000. Ears perk up. And then Trippi starts speaking the suits' language. "I just hand them a slip of paper that says 2.6 million dollars on it, or whatever it was that day. I'd say, 'That's how much money we've raised this quarter. We're ten days away from the end of quarter.'" And then he'd close the deal. "You know how you're going to know this [campaign] is true? Keep this. Whatever you read in the newspaper about what we do in this quarter, remember that it happened after this amount." And the suits just stare blankly at their slips of paper--$2.6 million, or $2.4 million, or $3.1 million--whatever it happens to be that day. And now they're not so sure. What if this guy is for real?
We all know the outcome of the quarter in question--$7.6 million raised, the vast majority of it in the final ten days of a three-month quarter. On Joe Trippi's watch, the internet has made waves that no one would have expected a year ago, shaking up a race that many outsiders considered a done deal for Washington insiders.
Now I don't relish burning bytes without some productive end, so I want to ask you, my fellow Kossaks, to weigh in on the future potential of internet-based organizing. What are the strengths and limitations of the current strategies being employed? Does the groundswell of "netroots" support for some candidates have implications for campaign organization, staffing and resource distribution in the future?
Bring your best thoughts.