Trippi speaks
: This will be the most covered event since Janet Jackson’s performance. Latops, cameras, clicking keyboards everywhere.
: “Broadcast journalism has failed us miserably,” he says. There is not adequate coverage of the Patriot Act or the Digitital Millenium Copyright act except on the net.
: “The system is broke, rotted, corrupted….”
The Dean anger continues…
: Rheingold is posting like mad. Jay Rosen is taking notes on a yellow pad. He thinks first, blogs later. Dave Weinberger is also blogging like mad.
: Trippi says he’s amazed that “the press who could frankly never figure out what the Dean campaign was now somehow feel qualified to define whether it was a success or not.”
(Well, losing elections is one measure. A campaign is still a campaign. It’s about winning….)
: There is only one tool, one medium that allows the American people to take their government back, he says, and that is the Internet.
: “This was not a dotcom crash. The Howard Dean campaign was a dotcom miracle.” Agreed.
: “This is about understanding that no one is going to change America for you. You have to change America for yourself.”
The anger continues…
: Trippi credits Jerome Armstrong’s blog at MyDD for introducing him to the idea of MeetUp.com
: “MoveOn.org is the real pioneer of the movement.”
: “The political press in this country has no clue what the Internet is… They put it in their old context…. The Internet community doesn’t really in many ways understand the hard, cold realities of American politics. And that’s the clash that’s happening right now…”
In politics, is there an Internet community? Don’t think so. It’s a tool for all communities.
: The Scream: “It wasn’t news. It was entertainment.. It was the heat-seeking missle getting its target…. That really was damaging, not what the governor did, but the media’s portrayal of it… Now they’re all apologizing.”
Sorry, it was news. The people talked about it. The people determine what news is. And among everyone I know, the Scream was news. And, yes, it was the excuse many were looking for not to vote for him. This is a “hard, cold reality” of politics; people also judge character and personality.
: If Howard Dean had retired as governor, “where would the Democratic party be, where would our Democracy be today?… It’s because of the blogs.” He argues, strenuously, that the Dean revolution changed the election. I think we’ll find he’s right. Too soon to know.
: “This isn’t going to stop. Broadcast politics is on the wane. The media juimped the shark first time on the war. They jumped the shark on the Dean campaign.”
: “I think our democracy’s really threatened right now in ways the American people haven’t really grasped right now.”
Again, the anger, with a dash of paranoia.
: He takes the Democrats to task for taking more big contributions than the Republicans. It’s a betrayal of the Democratic party’s roots, he says. The Dean campaign “turned that on its head.”
: He calls 1776 “revolution 1.0.”
: I love this thing, the Internet, weblog, citizens’ revolution. But the hubris is thick. Too thick, I think.
: What I’d really like to hear from Trippi is What We Could Have Done Better. Maybe it’s too soon for that.
: I’m flashing that all this blogging is just like the “instant analysis” broadcast pundits used to give us (until it got cooties). The difference is that this is even more instant — it’s another sound track — and it’s coming from all corners.
: “Al Gore’s endorsement is not bad. I don’t buy that… What happened is that alarm bells went off in every newsroom in the country and in every other campaign in the country…. That alarm said kill Howard Dean this second. Cau’s of we don’t kill this son of a b right now, he’s going to be the nominee of the party.”
My spin alarm is going off. Whoop. Whoop.
Could it be that voters don’t like Gore? I voted for the guy and I don’t like him.
: He tells a tear-jerker story about a woman who “sold my bike for democracy.” She got $79 and sent it to the Howard Dean campaign. Insert joke about 15 percent commission here…
: He says that what they built must survive. Right. Amen. Now tell me how.
: Hmmmm. I wonder if the lazy, too-easy analysis of the press is not in tearing down the Dean Internet revolution — and Dean — but in prematurely building them up. Just wondering….
: “This campaign was the first campaign really owned by the American people. Now we have to build a movement owned by them.”
Movements are, by definition, owned by the people.
These tools are not owned by one movement or one campaign. They will be used by anyone; that is their power.
I love what Dean created. But it’s not proprietary to any ideology. And I do have problems with the chronic anger, defensiveness, and hubris.
: Just went to the BlogForAmerica comments and thought I’d see someone blogging Trippi in there. Nope.
: Much of the audience gives Trippi a standing O.
: Ed Cone now asks questions.
: Broadcast media is Trippi’s big, bad guy.
: See the post above on campaign finances.
: Trippi wonders what would have happened if a campaign had run 365 grass roots candidates for Congress. He sputters: “Not in competition with the party…” But wherever there’s a Democrat, this would have been competition. “It might have been dangerous,” Trippi acknowledges. Well, yeah. That would have been taking over the party, indeed.
: Trippi says he miscalculated on Clark and thought he wasn’t going to run; it affected his spending. He wishes he could take that one back. “I guessed wrong.”
: On becoming the frontrunner: “There was a, pardon the expression, holy shit moment.”
He says when he became frontrunner, people were less motivated to give money. And they didn’t know how to communicate “we need your help now more than ever.”
: A guy says he ran an Internet campaign for Congress in 1992 and he learned that net politics aren’t local, they are global. He asks when it will get local.
Trippi says he’s not sure the net is mature enough for that yet.
“The Internet community in Iowa is, for all intent and purposes — I don’t want to offend anyone — nonexistent.”
So how did the Internet, then, revolutionize the party as Trippi said above? Because influencers influenced influencers. And because it created buzz.
: Again, he repeats, “the failure is broadcast politics.” Trippi, like Dave Winer, makes this the Internet vs. TV. I don’t buy that. TV will always be there, along with newspapers. The Internet adds so much. It can’t win that war. It shouldn’t try.
: Dan Gillmor asks what it will take to get a different kind of journalism with different power and authority. Trippi cites, as we all do, the Trent Lott affair when he says that is beginning.
Trippi says Dean was the hottest thing on the INternet but he couldn’t get the press to cover that story, to go to a MeetUp with a camera.
They didn’t write about it until the story became money. “It’s the money, stupid.”
: Dan Sifry’s brother asked, “Who owns BlogForAmerica.com? Who knows the list?”
Important question gets applause.
Trippi: “I don’t know.”
He says there is an issue to controlling the names and addresses, otherwise so many parts of the campaign will contact people that it will turn into spam.
Ed asks him to guess what happens to the blog.
Trippi says he’s going to do something. (I heard at breakfast that he has a domain for it.)
He says he has “deep apprehensions” about it going to the Democratic party.
:Next up: The Institute for Politics Demoracy and the Internet presents a study of “online poltiical citizens.”
