Answers to the Trippi money questions
: Ed Cone asks Joe Trippi him about Trippi’s compensation in the Dean campagin. “Talk to us about the whole Joe Trippi getting rich thing,” Ed says. Good reporting on Ed’s part.
Trippi talks about how a fundraising dinner works: You spend $350k on a room to get $1 million and it’s considered a success.
He talks about spending $100,000 in Austin, Texas, to buy media and get attention and raise funds in Bush’s backyard. It’s an investment, he says — better than “eating steak and potatoes at some big gala.
“On the get-rich quick scheme. I don’t know what bothers me more, the implication that I’m a thief or that I’m a really bad thief…. I made about $165,000 on the Dean camapign, personally…. That’s a lot of money. But that’s not $7.5 or $7.2 million.”
He says the LA Times story was an attack:
“How do you stop the movement dead in its track? Well, you convince people it’s a Trippi get-rich-quick scheme.”
He says he never had the authority for budget and spending — a very important fact. That does deal with potential conflict of interest.
He says if he were a bad thief, he would have gotten a lot more spent on TV.
“This isn’t just trying to knock me down. This is trying to knock the whole thing down. They’re trying to get people to buy into this notion that it was all some get-rich-quick scheme and it wasn’t.”
There’s news from eTech.
This should have been reported better before.
