Darius Shahinfar running in the open NY-21 congressional district has brought on Joe Trippi & Associates to his team.  The details were released moments ago.

And if you have never had a chance to learn about Darius, after the break is a video clip of him on Iraq and supporting the

Responsible Plan to End the War.

{h/t Iowa Independent's Douglas Burns]

You know who Joe Trippi is.  Who is Rob Hubler?  

In his own words:

I am the candidate for Congress who is going to retire Congressman Steve King.

In my words:  Rob Hubler is the candidate who will relieve Iowans from the deep embarrassment of being represented by a human gaffe machine.  Steve King is like the accursed victim in a fairy tale:  when he opens his mouth, snakes and toads fall out.

First things first - if you have not read The Revolution Will Not Be Televised by Joe Trippi, you need to do it, pronto.  I mean, this book should be required reading for anyone who wants to know anything about how politics are going to work in the 21st Century, at least as far as Democrats are concerned.

In 2004, Governor Howard Dean made his Presidential run.  I hardly have to remind anyone here of the heights his campaign reached, or of his dramatic fall.  What is important and has to be understood is, his campaign did not die in Iowa.  It went on a hiatus, and then reincarnated in '06, when we took control of Congress, and again in 2008, as the Barack Obama campaign.  The Obama version of the campaign was bigger, stronger, and infinitely more successful, but for all intents and purposes it is largely the same phenomenon (that the MSM has not caught onto this is, quite frankly, baffling - or at least it would be, if I still had any faith in the MSM's ability to do their jobs).  Again, I think this hardly qualifies as news to anyone on this site.

Article originally published here on OpEdNEws.com

This 2008 presidential race has not just been about who would become the Democratic presidential candidate. It has also been all about the future leadership and control of the democratic party.  

Obama's win means a major change in the leadership of the Democratic party, policy, direction and people.   I've interviewed Ed Rendell, Joe Trippi, Ned Lamont, Markos "dailykos" Moulitsas, Patrick Murphy (D-PA), Katrina vanden Heuvel, Christy "firedoglake" Hardin Smith, and more to see the future of the Democratic party.

Be the Voice of Change

There’s been a lot of talk about change during this election cycle.  

After 8 years of the failed policies of George Bush, America is ready for change. The question is: What kind of change are Democrats going to settle for?

In the 2008 election cycle, voters have a choice to send the same old type of politician to Washington DC or support real change.

I’m ready for real change, that’s why I support Kevin Miskell.  

Kevin is a fifth generation family farmer and former Vice President of Iowa Farmers Union who has the progressive vision that America needs today. For the past two decades he has fought to save the family farm, promote sustainable agriculture and protect the environment.

Support real change by sending a true progressive to Congress in 2008. Support Kevin Miskell with a contribution of $20.08 right now.

http://actblue.com/...

Well, this makes an Edwards guy like me sad all over again.  Trippi explains his view on what could have been

I should have told him emphatically that he should stay in. My regret that I did not do so-that I let John Edwards down-grows with every day that the fight between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama continues.

Yep this fight that we saw coming before Super Tuesday

Senator Edwards . . . isn't one to pull a bunch of people into a room and take a vote. He asks you individually what you think, and you basically get one shot to make your argument. I got my chance. And for the first time in thirty years of political work, I didn't go with my gut.

The full article

Yesterday, I participate in a forum at my school at the University of Florida and I had a chance to ask Bob Graham a few questions afterwards. First, we had two knowledgeable participants: the former strategist for John Edwards, Joe Trippi, and Matt Bai, a journalist for the New York Times. The conversation centered on the role of the internet in this election cycle. Joe Trippi talked glowingly about the Dean’s revolution and was in awe at the Obama campaign.

In a conversation with Greg Sargent at TPM, Joe Trippi commented on Hillary Clinton's proposal to create the position of a "Poverty Czar", an addition to her cabinet.  

According to Joe:

"That would absolutely be something Edwards would welcome," Trippi says. "As someone close to him, a cabinet level position on poverty is something he would support 100 percent."

I sincerely hope Joe is kidding.

This past month, Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig and Joe Trippi, former campaign manager for Howard Dean and senior advisor to John Edwards in their runs for the White House, teamed up to form "Change Congress," a national movement to help end corruption in the United States Congress (www.change-congress.org).  The organization is advocating for several important measures that will help reform Washington, asks all candidates to pledge to undertake these reforms, and encourages citizens to promote these important issues by agreeing to a similar pledge.

(Crossposted at Veritosity.com)

NOTE: For an explanation of what Blogrolling for Change is and how to get involved, click here.

When I was a senior in high school, The Nation had a contest where they asked high school and college students across the country what the most important issue facing young people was. In writing my response I deliberately chose to misread the question - rather than telling The Nation what I thought young people cared about the most, I decided to tell them what I thought the most important issue was, period. The answer? Undue corporate power and influence, particularly when it comes to the American political process.

In a new generation of politics, Barack Obama shows us that the revolution will not be televised.

Our campaigns for Congress in South Florida are not just for their districts, important as they are. They are for Florida and the United States and the wider world, and we’re getting confirmation of this day by day.

Monday’s news: Joe Trippi joining the Joe Garcia campaign as senior media adviser. This is a development with national punch. We now have one of the top campaign people in the United States. I like to think of Joe Garcia as inhabiting the same rank: campaign thinker of national impact, due to his work with NDN directing its Hispanic Strategy Center, so this is a pairing that should be a multiplier of effectiveness.
MORE under the fold. Cross-posted on www.miami-dade-dems.blogspot.com and Florida Progressive Coalition blog.

No matter what the end result of this campaign is I think it is clear that Barack Obama's campaign will have transformed the way political campaigning is done forever. Obama has done this by combining the internet organizing revolutionized by Joe Trippi the Howard Dean campaign and the community organizing tactics of Saul Alinsky that he learned on the South Side of Chicago.

The latest cover story of the Rolling Stone magazine covers this phenomena. In this essay I am going to examine that article, The Machinery of Hope.

Joe Trippi's diary yesterday, Rebooting Democracy, drew a lot of attention.  Quite a few of the comments were on the order of "Hey Joe!  Joe! Read this."  And Joe wasn't to be found.  One thoughtful reply from Sawgrass727 pointed out that Trippi had only ever commented in dKos once, to a diary he posted before, and that by doing a "hit-and-run" diary, however informative, he wasn't exactly participating in the grass-roots community of thinkers that's going on here.  

I confess I succumbed to the idea of having Joe Trippi's ear for a moment, because I think that if we're talking about "Rebooting Democracy," there's a more ambitious (and yet achievable) agenda to be laid in front of the American voter.  In particular I wanted him to think about redistricting as a campaign issue, and I wanted him to know that internet voting is a very, very bad idea.

During his closing speech in Houston, I noticed that Obama followed Joe Trippi's suggestion for his "fired up and ready to go" chant.

Recall back in November in Iowa, Joe Trippi was caught chanting Obama's cheer. As ridiculous conspiracy theories emerged that he was a Manchurian Obama supporter, Noam Scheiber quoted him critiquing Obama's closing.

Everyone in that audience is thinking he's that voice. And he doesn't explicitly turn it. And I don't know if that's about what they think he's doing, if it's the messiah thing. The kind of thing where he says there's one voice that can change the world, they all think it's him, and that he's not talking about them. But what he needs to do--the reason this thing isn't taking off--is because he isn't able to get them at that moment to say it, up here [points to his head], "He's talking about me."

Watching the MSNBC Decision '08 crew unpack last night’s voting results, it was hard not to notice panelists Joe Scarborough and Patrick Buchannan rising up in their seats, fidgeting with glee, at the successes achieved by the Clinton campaign’s "fair use" of good ol' Atwater/Rove-style politics.  Showing their Republican colors, these two were obviously delighted by how big a dent all the "soft" bigotry recently aimed at Obama managed to make.  

On May 17th, 2003, Joe Trippi posted a blog entry at the unofficial Dean Nation weblog entitled simply, The Perfect Storm. In that post, since reprinted many times elsewhere, he wrote like the prophet he is:

Last week I attended a panel discussion called "The Uncharted Political Terrain of Campaign '08 with Trippi, Walter." The title is pretty vague, but it was basically a discussion of the use of a new type of politics that has risen in the '08 U.S. Presidential election (and an interesting although seemingly tangential presentation on voting trends within the Hispanic community). The panel was a fairly impressive group, including Joe Trippi, recently off the Edwards campaign; Amy Walter, editor-in-chief of Hotline (a National Journal publication); Simon Rosenberg, founder and president of NDN; and Andres Ramierez, VP of Hispanic Programs at NDN. It was moderated by Peter Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute.

I'd like to focus on one important aspect of the discussion, bottom-up versus top-down campaigning.