Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s former campaign manager, has thrown his support behind one of the candidates seeking the chairmanship of the DNC — and it’s not Howard Dean.
“If our party is to win in the 21st century, we have to have a strategist who knows how to practice 21st century politics. That means expanding participation, embracing technology, and building an apparatus that can counter the Republican machine. Simon Rosenberg was among the first in politics to acknowledge the power of the movement we built with Dean for America and he wasn’t afraid to speak up about how we were fundamentally changing politics. He knows that in the age of the Internet, our politics must be interactive and participatory to engage citizens. He knows the Internet is not just an ATM for candidates and parties, but a tool for bringing in millions of Americans who want to be a part of the political process.
“For Simon, building a new progressive politics for our time is not just lip service, it is a passion backed up by his record. I’m backing Simon for chair because I know I can work with him to help build a modern, winning Democratic party.”
Trippi doesn’t actually have a vote in the process, but his support for Rosenberg is likely to generate quite a bit of attention. Trippi insisted in an MSNBC interview yesterday that this is “not about Howard” and he’s “not opposing him,” but he believes Rosenberg is “the best person for the job.”
This endorsement reminded me of a point I’ve been meaning to mention. Many of Dean’s supporters who want him to lead the DNC point to a few specific accomplishments of Dean’s presidential campaign that, they argue, would make him an excellent chair. Specifically, these proponents point to Dean’s ability to raise money and his success in online organizing.
Dean may have several worthwhile attributes, and may very well make an excellent party chair, but if these two points are important to you, Howard Dean isn’t your man, Joe Trippi is.
As Dean’s presidential campaign got underway, the candidate’s knowledge of and interest in the Internet was virtually non-existent. Five months after the campaign’s website went live, there was no picture of Dean on his site and the “donate online” button lead to a blank page. Online grassroots activists were largely ignored.
In the summer of 2002, a group of Dean supporters started an unofficial Dean blog to tout his candidacy. Even they realized, however, that the campaign seemed disinterested in the online community. On Dec. 20, 2002, for example, the unofficial Dean blog noted that “despite the strong support of the Internet political community, the Dean campaign has been strangely slow to get organized on the web.” The site added, “One has to wonder if the campaign is even aware of the netroot support?”
The same goes for fundraising. In the second quarter of 2003, when his website showed him on track for an $8 million quarter, Dean called Trippi because he assumed the site had been hacked and some joker had put up an absurdly-high number. The candidate ended up a prolific fundraiser, but not because he had creative ideas about how to raise money.
While I have plenty of troubles with Trippi, he does deserve credit for changing the way the Dean campaign operated and looked to the web for a base of grassroots and fundraising support. Dean, who didn’t even have an email address when he began running for president, benefited from Trippi’s strategy, but it wasn’t the candidate who came up with the idea.
Is it possible that Dean learned valuable lessons about online activism through the course of his campaign? Of course. In fact, I have no doubt that should Dean get the DNC post, he will implement a party strategy that utilizes the web.
But if we’re talking about attributes for the next chair of the DNC, Dean doesn’t necessarily deserve support because of his imaginative appreciation for the Internet. Dean may have been a willing convert, but he wasn’t a visionary.