\n\n Unique among presidential campaign managers, Trippi enjoyed a dual
\n role. He was the head of Dean’s campaign and a partner in Trippi,
\n McMahon & Squier,
\n or TMS, the Alexandria, Va., firm that handles Dean’s media buying
\n and has been associated with his political career since 1992.<\/p>\n
Trippi has said repeatedly that he received no salary for his yearlong
\n role in Dean’s campaign. But that is not to say he left Dean’s campaign
\n empty-handed. Under an arrangement that is traditional in political
\n campaigns, Trippi’s firm receives commissions each time Dean’s campaign
\n buys a radio
\n or TV ad. Through the end of January, according to a person close to
\n the campaign, these commissions had added up to about $700,000 for TMS.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Who knew? More to the point, why DIDN’T we know? Turns out some of his other advice was faulty as well. Misinterpreting
\n the historical truism that presidential primaries are won on the ground,
\n with intensive local grass-roots organizing, canvassing and get-out-the-vote
\n drives on primary day, he forgot that the key word in that rule is "local".<\/p>\n
In Iowa and New Hampshire Trippi brought in a small army of young volunteers,
\n many of barely voting age (or less), snatching them from in front of computer
\n screens across the land. They were like on some gigantic Senior Class
\n Road Trip, crashing in supporters living rooms and vans, eating junk
\n food on the fly, and playing the role of real political partisans, Unfortunately
\n these naive neophytes were worse than useless; they cluttered up the
\n landscape and scared the Bejeezus out of the small-state farmers and families
\n in Iowa and New Hampshire, who saw them as an invading army of weird geeks
\n who seemed to have run away from home to join a circus.<\/p>\n
And they were clueless. On several occasions, driving around small
\n cities and towns in New Hampshire, the Dowbrigade and his stalwart cohort
\n got lost, rushing to make a press conference, town meeting or other campaign
\n event. We knew we were close; there were knots of sign-carrying supporters
\n scattered on street corners working on their Campaign Cheers and throwing
\n snowballs at each other.<\/p>\n
So we would stop and cheerfully ask a group teenaged of Dean supporters,
\n "Where is the event?" They would look around as if searching for a crossing
\n guard, and answer "Gee, I don’t know!" One time several of these schemes
\n even asked me, "What event?" Another time, looking for a major event
\n at a municipal auditorium which turned out to be just two blocks from the
\n corner we were at, our inquiries were met by a blank stare and the disclaimer,
\n "We’re not from around here"<\/p>\n
Trippi seemed to have missed the fact that local grassroots support
\n needs to be, well, local, and that people might resent hordes of numbnut
\n outsiders partying on their street corners in the name of a man who would
\n be President. <\/p>\n
It wasn’t the Internet that sank Dean. It was a combination of
\n poor advice, sloppy execution and being played like a pansy by a Big Media
\n Machine looking only for fresh meat to oil the cogs and gears of it’s American
\n Gladiator-like production of what has become our perennial political made-for-TV
\n mini-series.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Internet pundits have been questioning the Dean media strategy for some time. It just seemed that they were sucking up millions from the ‘net and shoveling it directly into the coffers of the Big Three TV networks for scads … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1443],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-esl-links"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2076\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}