Trippi And Edwards, Together Again For The First Time
Thu, 04/19/2007 - 2:12pm
Joe Trippi has joined the John Edwards campaign. Rejoice, activists in search of a people-powered candidate: the Man Who Forged The Netroots With His Bare Hands has chosen a candidate. His insight can only be a boon to Edwards.
I wondered for some time who Trippi would eventually end up with (not thinking, in any way, that he would stay out of it). His choice makes sense. Trippi's path has included not only Howard Dean but also Gary Hart and Dick Gephardt, who remind me quite a bit of Edwards, now that I think about it. Especially Gephardt.
It is what it is. I think this is a development that will do good things for the Edwards campaign, bringing their side of the debate into sharp, technologically-mobilized focus. Edwards was already doing very well on the Internet, and Trippi's work could raise that bar even higher.
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This Made Me Grumpy At First
By SpudZeppelin
Fri, 04/20/2007 - 5:19pm
Not that it takes much to make me grumpy, mind you, but the meltdown of the Dean campaign certainly did little to endear Trippi to me. However, I feel much better after reading this post on David Weinberger's blog, where he sings Trippi's praises. Now, just remember the lessons of Trippi's book: keep an eye on his blood sugar, TV ad expenditures, and how many identically-dressed volunteers you pour into a rural state.
For those of you unfamiliar with him, David Weinberger was the (largely) unsung genius behind the internet-engagement efforts of the early Dean campaign in 2003. He's also a co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, probably the single best book about the transformative effects of internet communications. Apparently, David, like a number of us former Deaniacs, has been pushing Edwards.
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Just Another Supposed Former Mi Casita Junkie
Send Relief and Carbs to www.spudzeppelin.com
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Aw, come on
By Josh Berthume
Sun, 04/22/2007 - 4:24pm
Doesn't this present you with the opportunity to wear a neon orange hat again?
I Didn't Go the First Time
By SpudZeppelin
Sun, 04/22/2007 - 10:37pm
But I didn't go to Iowa! I wanted to, but in retrospect I'm glad I didn't; in fact, in hindsight we would have been better off if about 2/3 of the people who did go had stayed home... unleashing 3,000+ volunteers in orange ski-mask "uniforms" and calling them "perfect storm troopers" probably was not the way to curry favor with the people of Iowa. Combined with the massive TV "blitz" the whole thing smacked more of a strategy for invading Poland than winning the Iowa Caucus.
In fact, I'm just not sure how the entire Weinberger-Trippi school of thought really fits with the Edwards campaign at this point. Flash mobs for the geeky, eccentric former Governor of Vermont are one thing, but flash mobs for a handsome, buttoned-down lawyer from the Carolinas are a bit of a stretch; it's like trying to write a crossover episode where "Heroes" meets "Matlock," or trying to get Paul Newman onto MySpace.
I'm not even sure the online side of the Edwards campaign *is* working at this point, based on what I've observed; the campaign itself is clearly successful, with a lead in Iowa Caucus poll numbers at this point. However, an Edwards event (organized through OneCorps) I attended here in Boise a couple weeks ago (conveniently two blocks from my house, in fact!) only drew half a dozen people, while an Obama event (also planned online) the same week drew several hundred and garnered local media attention.
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Just Another Supposed Former Mi Casita Junkie
Send Relief and Carbs to www.spudzeppelin.com
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Interesting News, Indeed
By Patrick M McLeod
Mon, 04/23/2007 - 5:30pm
...it's like trying to write a crossover episode where "Heroes" meets "Matlock,"...
HA!
I know that lots of column-space and bandwidth has been utilized elsewhere to write about what happened in Iowa in 2004, but I've always felt there was an unfortunate parallel between the Dean campaign's Iowa collapse and the collapse of the "Fast Company" internet plays of the mid to late 1990s. There were lots of good intentions in both situations, lots of lofty planning, an over-reliance on technology, lots of goals to meet, but somewhere along the way folks didn't take care of the basic details (or, in the case of the internet companies, a lot of folks fudged the details) and it all went kablooey.
This is only our second Presidential election with an organized, mobilized online presence for the candidates. Heck, you might argue that this is really the first full Presidential election cycle where this is present given how nearly everyone else in the field rode the Dean campaign's coattails in '04.
It looks like to me that the 2008 campaigns are "fighting the last war" in terms of the tools they employ. Nearly everyone has a blog, an email list, some kind of Meetup-esque tool, and the all-important online donations. It's been three years since we were taking stock of the 2004 primaries and caucuses, and it doesn't appear that those three years have led to much in the way of innovations in online campaign tools.
I bet that Trippi will help the Edwards campaign's online presence; I would only start to worry if we see more of the same mediocre and pricey ads coming from whatever the '08 version of Trippi & McMahon might be similar to what we saw in '04.
Mi Casita's good, but it's really all about the Galaviz. Casa Galaviz, that is!