For those of you unable to listen to the
podcast of this interview, here's a transcript I typed up due to the fact that I have entirely too much time on my hands.
The conversation sort of veers away from Kos in the second half and towards a larger discussion of the role blogs played in the Dean coverage, but at no point does Trippi seem to be aware or care about the fact that the WSJ story is a way of deflecting attention from Armstrong Williams. In fact, Armstrong Williams is not mentioned ONCE in the 15 minutes of this interview. WTF.
I typed this up at high speed while watching the football game, so there are going to be typos, and it's not going to be perfect. If you are dissatisfied with this diary, you can contact me for a full refund.
[mic checking snipped]
WINER: There's something -- there's news out today in the Wall Street Journal about stuff that happened in the Dean campaign, right?
TRIPPI: Right.
WINER: So tell the folks at home about that. Not about what was reported, but what happened.
TRIPPI: This is this whole thing that Zephyr Teachout was quoted in the Wall Street Journal talking about how the Dean campaign was hiring bloggers in the hopes that they'd be saying positive things about them. It's really interesting, because I think -- it's two groups of people -- Jerome Armstrong and Markos, on --
WINER: And who's Jerome Armstrong?
TRIPPI: A blogger from MyDD.
WINER: What's IDD?
TRIPPI: MyDD. Which is his blog -- MyDD dot com.
WINER: Is it still running? Is that blog still running?
TRIPPI: Oh yeah. It's a big Dean for Chairman blog right now.
WINER: Oh, I see, they're supporting Dean for chairman of the Democratic Party, right?
TRIPPI: Yeah. And Markos Zuniga, who is the Daily Kos dot com, I think right now is for Simon Roseberg, but at the time he was blogging, he was for Dean.
WINER: And that's who you're for too? You're for Simon.
TRIPPI: Simon, yeah. But anyway, it's interesting because having made the decision to hire those guys --
WINER: You made that decision.
TRIPPI: Right. I made it and I know why I made it --
WINER: So why'd you make it?
TRIPPI: Actually, the guy who almost didn't get hired was Jerome. Because Jerome and I had been talking since April of 2002, conversing on the MyDD blog, holding conversations and discussions about Dean and the party, and he was such a prolific pro-Dean blogger, probably one of the leading voices in the blogosphere so early on that I almost didn't hire him because we had talked about it -- we had both talked about it and decided that if we did hire him as a consultant he was going to cease blogging during the period that he consulted for the Dean campaign, and I was sort of freaked out that -- I wanted this guy's ideas, he was one of the guys that had suggested Meetup and things like that. There were a lot of great ideas that he had. I wanted those, I wanted more of his time, but at the same time I would be silencing one of the strongest voices in the blogosphere by hiring --
WINER: So what happened? Did you hire him?
TRIPPI: I decided to hire him anyway and take that hit.
WINER: [unintelligable]
TRIPPI: Oh yeah, it did. It was actually, for a good couple of weeks, sort of beside myself that I'd made a mistake by taking the strongest voice we had out there off the charts.
WINER: Did he disclose that he was taking money from the campaign?
TRIPPI: Yeah. And Markos, I had the same sort of concern with him -- not concern, but -- Markos had been basically pro Dean, then had gone with Wes Clark, then when Wes Clark campaign had that shakeup he had decided, well, Clark wasn't for him and he was for Dean. All this on his own, without any pay, this is what he thought, what he really believed. So I'm going to take a guy who is blogging every day and saying positive things about the Dean campaign, not for the blogging, but for his understanding of the blogosphere and who else we should talk to out there and what that's going to do is put a big disclaimer up on his site that says "I work for Howard Dean." Well, I know the blogosphere well enough to know that if there's something on somebody's site that says "I work for Howard Dean" and then every day it says "Oh, by the way, I think Howard Dean's great," you don't get as much credibility as somebody --
WINER: No, that's common sense.
TRIPPI: Right. Yeah.
WINER: I mean, "Of course, he likes Howard Dean, he works --"
TRIPPI: Right. It's like me going on CNN with it saying underneath "Joe Trippi, Dean campaign manager" -- you know, boy, is anybody shocked that I'm up on the TV saying Howard Dean's great? So I didn't think there was any great -- I saw it more as a downside about their blogging, sort of the hits we take on credibility and efficacy, than what the Wall Street Journal suggested. So --
WINER: The Wall Street Journal suggested that the Democrats had been equally --
TRIPPI: Total bull. It's just never -- I mean, that never --
WINER: Because the key difference was that it was disclosed. Right?
TRIPPI: Well, one, disclosed, or two, didn't -- stopped writing completely, in Jerome's case.
WINER: Oh, I see. Jerome stopped, so any potential conflict or disclosure --
TRIPPI: Right. I mean, not only that, it hurt -- you know.
[Dogs barking in background, short digression about dogs snipped]
TRIPPI: But I think the thing that -- now, I'm not gonna -- with Markos, the other thing I've gotta say is what was really going through -- a piece of it was going through my mind and I can understand how Zephyr read this -- is I'm sitting there saying to myself, "This guy gave me a lot of understanding and helped me understand a lot more about who the folks were in the blogosphere that we wanted to do guest blogs for Dean or things like that. And then he goes off and does Clark on me -- well, not on me, but he did it. And then Clark blows himself up a little bit and Markos comes off of him. Well, the last thing I wanted was somebody with that ability and insight at this point to go run off and do John Kerry or John Edwards or even go back to Clark. We wanted the insight, we wanted to keep him away from everybody else, so yeah. We wanted to hire him. But again, fully disclosing who he was working for, everybody knew that. The Wall Street Journal actually has several quotes from Markos during the campaign saying Markos, a blogger who works for Howard Dean. I mean, if they actually go back and look at their archives, they'll find that they actually quoted these guys as Howard Dean consultants in their own paper.
WINER: Now, during the Dean campaign, did you support any bloggers who were not on the Dean payroll?
TRIPPI: Oh yeah --
WINER: I mean, I remember noticing that the first press tour, they had bloggers on the Dean thing, everybody who was quoted was an advocate for Dean. Which struck me -- I mean, it didn't strike me, it's wrong. I mean, you certainly didn't have a prerequisite that the reporters on the press bus have to be supporters on your candidate. I mean, it's like --it's kind like, I was invited to cover the Democratic National Convention but I was not allowed to cover the Republican Convention. I was not allowed to cover the inaugartion. And I was not allowed to cover Howard Dean. I mean --
TRIPPI: Not allowed?
WINER: Well, I mean, I wasn't allowed press credentials.
TRIPPI: From our press department or what?
WINER: Yeah. The same kind of thing that --
TRIPPI: Oh man. You were going through normal channels. (laughing)
WINER: Well, sure I was going through normal channels. And you see, that's the story, right? Normal channels were applying a different set of criteria. Bloggers had to be rah-rah, go Howard Dean --
TRIPPI: No no -- on the Sleepless Summer tour, that's not what happened.
WINER: My point is that I'm just trying to add something to the discussion. In the summer of 2003, the idea that a blogger could be expected, or could even want to be treated just like a reporter was considered pretty radical. I mean, that's what I wanted. I didn't want to stand up -- I didn't support Dean. I've never supported Dean.
TRIPPI: Right -- well, we didn't have a --
WINER: And I still wanted to have access. I still wanted to have --
TRIPPI: On the Sleepless Summer tour, we were letting any blogger that wanted to travel with us go.
WINER: Really.
TRIPPI: But I don't know that at that point, we --
[CROSSTALK]
WINER: Let me just say this. The times, the New York Times, interviewed -- go back through the archive, it'd be interesting to see -- but I believe the New York Times interviewed people who were on the Dean advisory board -- like David Wineberger, who was the tech advisor to the Dean campaign without saying that he was basically, you know, not exactly an employee, but although for all I know maybe they were getting money.
TRIPPI: I don't think David -- no, I don't believe --
WINER: The whole thing was a mess.
TRIPPI: Well, the whole thing may be a mess but --
WINER: It was a mess. That now, I think they're trying to straighten out.
TRIPPI: It's not about straightening out. The fact is, the Dean campaign was doing something that no campaign had ever done before. No other campaign had ever let -- invited any bloggers onto their airplane. Onto the big 737 with the national press corp. During the Sleepless Summer tour, that was the first time it had ever happened. I'm not saying we did it right. I'm just saying, hey, we didn't know how to do it right. And a lot of those issues that are being discussed now --
WINER: My point is a little more subtle. Is that when the Wall Street Journal --
TRIPPI (jokingly): There's nothing ever subtle about you.
WINER: Yeah yeah. I do get subtle, you just don't listen when I'm subtle.
TRIPPI: Oh, okay, okay (laughs)
WINER: But, the Wall Street Journal is acting as if today, the common practice of 2005, was the common practice of 2003.
TRIPPI: That's what I mean.
WINER: It absolutely was not.
TRIPPI: It couldn't be. There were no rules. Or, not rules, but --
WINER: You have to go pick your son up at the airport, but I hope -- we're going to continue this. We're both going to this integrity conference at Harvard.
TRIPPI: Right.
WINER: And I hope to talk with you about this. I've been doing a series of podcasts about this because I know I'm not going to get as much time to speak there as I want to. So I'm sort of putting together all my thoughts in a series of podcasts. But we have to talk -- I think we have to try to set down, what does credibility mean regardless of whether you are a professional or an amateur? Right?
TRIPPI: I just want to make one point. The thing that really bugs me about what's going on today is everybody's talking about how things relate in terms of how the house judgment should be made, or how this should work, like this has been going on forever.
WINER: That's my point.
TRIPPI: It's like, you know, ok, I could sit right here and go like, "You know what really ticks me off? How come John McCain in 2000 didn't have any bloggers on his bus?" I mean, come on. Or, like, "Why didn't they credential them like the real press?" That's what I'm trying to say --
WINER: Or, why Republicans don't let Democratic leaning bloggers --
TRIPPI: So the Dean campaign goes out, we try to do things differently, we do the best we can, but of course we're going to make mistakes on how we credential people, or how we got the word out that you could be on the plane if you wanted to be on the plane.
TRIPPI: I'm just saying, for the Wall Street Journal to suddenly come out of the woodwork today and go "Whoa, what were the ethics involved here?" Hey, the one thing I'll tell you, from all the bloggers, from Ezra Klein, who was a Hart blogger, then came out and worked for Dean a little bit, worked for Clark for awhile -- they were the most --
WINER: What's a heart blogger?
TRIPPI: Gary Hart. He was blogging for Gary Hart.
WINER: Gary Hart. Then he was --
TRIPPI: Right. He had that great blog, man. It scared the daylights out of me. It was probably the best blog out there, kinda ticked me off. I mean, from a crass political junkie standpoint, not an artistic standpoint. But the point is that my -- I can't think of a single blogger -- bloggers are so damn independent in their thinking and the way -- well, at least the ones I ran into --
WINER: Right. You have to qualify that, because bloggers come in all shapes and sizes.
TRIPPI: Right. But I'm just saying, the ones that I ran into during the political cycle, there was no way to -- I couldn't have paid David Winer enough money to say -- to put words in your mouth.
WINER: You haven't paid me any money.
TRIPPI: Right, right.
WINER: Right now, or ever.
TRIPPI: No, ever. Which is probably why I'm getting trashed by you in so many of your blogs. It's just unbelievable.
WINER: You haven't been getting trashed by me -- why do you think I'm trashing you? Me? Oh, come on.
TRIPPI (laughing): Look, I do have to run and get my son at the airport, so we'll continue this later on.