FC Now reader Mitch Ratcliffe contends that the recent Fast Company feature on Howard Dean's campaign manager Joe Trippi misses the point about the Dean campaign phenomenon. Ratcliffe characterizes the feature as "emphasizing the management of Joe Trippi rather than the collective efforts of tens of thousands of people that have produced the results the magazine celebrates as a triumph of management." Further:
Staffers were allowed to make all sorts of decisions and that's good, but the real grassroots efforts evolved despite resource limitations that prevented even empowered staffers to make things happen. Instead, the staffers literally said, "We can't do this" as a campaign and passed responsibility to citizens, who went with their ideas on their own, often carefully isolated from the campaign. I doubt the majority of Dean supporters have the slightest idea who Joe Trippi is, as they went ahead and created tools and connections with their own energy. Trippi let go in a much bigger way than Fast Company suggests, and to his credit, but only because it worked. Without an active citizenry activated by the campaign there would be no article. So, I think this article, which talks about the Abercrombie & Fitch 20-somethings at headquarters is profoundly off the mark.
I'm with Ratcliffe in that it's not externally explicit to supporters or the public who Trippi is, but I don't think that's wholly the point. Sure, grassroots support would have emerged around Dean regardless of the campaign's recognition of such support, but it was a conscious leadership decision to harness such activity early and often. My take is that had the Dean campaign not embraced and in some ways centralized and blessed this grassroots support, the campaign -- or the fruits of the grassroots support -- would certainly not be where it is today.
Is this a chicken-egg question? What do you think?
Related Stories: | Topics:Work/Life, politics + government, Joe Trippi, Howard Dean, Mitch Ratcliffe, Fast Company Magazine, Abercrombie & Fitch Co. |
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Recent Comments | 2 Total
October 20, 2003 at 7:51pm by Mitch Ratcliffe
Heath -- I guess I should out myself as having been involved in the Dean campaign before going any further with this. My take, having been in the email loop of some of the projects the FC article talked about is that the center did almost nothing but served as a not-quite-a-conduit, call it a center of gravity, perhaps, to encourage many independent efforts that lent support to the campaign. Having done so, it was relatively easy to harvest campaign contributions from the community that catalyzed through the Net. Would the effort have been more successful financially if it were more carefully planned? I doubt it. Could it have been taken more complete advantage of to raise funds and transform the debate? Almost certainly, but Trippi and Co. have done a very good job -- I just don't want anyone over there resting on their laurels until they win the presidency for Governor Dean.
What I really wonder about is the potential for this self-organizing phenomenon if it were more explicitly pursued; when political energies can be harnessed purposefully through the Internet, we're talking about a sea change in the direction of democracy -- for the good or bad.
There has been, with the Dean campaign, for very good reasons relating to campaign finance laws, a good deal of distancing between the campaign and the grassroots. That was not a strategy as much as a response to legal reality. Had the campaign not been under the gun to avoid deep entanglements by allowing self-organizing projects to be "official" even in name, I wonder if it would have worked as well.
Part of the allure of the Dean campaign phenomenon has been its impossibility. Individuals have decided, "Screw it, we're going to pull this project off," while ignoring many other aspects of the campaign. If Dean Headquarters had ordered or even asked for much of the activity it benefitted from, it would have been ignored or laughed at. Governor Dean and Trippi have had the good sense and good fortunue to place themselves at the front of this train, but it is going to evolve into something else.
So, finally, I don't think it is a chicken or an egg just yet, rather it is the beginning of an evolution in politics resulting from densely networked citizenry finding that they can do almost anything, including break fund-raising records with small contributions. It's political protoplasm, this talking amongst the people. The acid test will come the day after the election and, if Dean wins, he decides to institutionalize the people's voices in his administration or not.
I raised this question of what happens after the first heavily Internet-influenced questions here and got a number of different responses. I don't concur that it is enough for people to be talking; transforming that debate into policy reflective of the will of the people and tempered by the will of the elected representative to makes something greater than the sum of the parts of the constituencies is the real challenge in politics or, for that matter, in a company.
October 20, 2003 at 8:22pm by Dale Davaz
The more interesting question to me is not where the credit is due--to Dean or Trippi or grassroots supporters--but whether the end result is fundamentally changing the way we do democracy. Interactive online blogs. Hometown meet-ups. Grassroots rallies. $80 donations by the millions. Whether or not Dean wins in 2004, isn't this new formula for campaigning proving successful enough to change elections for the forseeable future? And once this genie is out of the bottle, can it be put back?
Say what you want about Dean--thanks to this campaign, I see hundred-year-old political party machines rusting before my very eyes. The relatively few-but-powerful pockets of political wealth losing their influence with each passing week. It had to start with someone's campaign, and I'm personally fairly glad it started with Howard Dean's. But as the mainstream increasingly moves into the digital age, I'm not surprised at all that we're reaching for new tools to (as Dean himself would say) "take back America." The result--a political process that's arguably more engaging, participatory, and representative than any campaign that's come before. 18th-century democratic traditions and institutions are crashing head-on with a brand spanking new networked, hyperlinked, voter-centric "cluetrain" reality--and you get campaigns like Dean's.
That said, even those of us actively supporting Dean would quickly confess that we're still in the very earliest stages of figuring out how this new kind of networked democracy works. Here and there, we get a few things right. But very frequently, we get an awful lot wrong. It's to be expected, though--we're building politics for the 21st century completely by trial and error. And there's plenty of room for improvement around which to build version 2.0 or 3.0. I can easily imagine campaigns that are orders of magnitude more interactive--assimilating the voices of supporters just as easily as the voices of campaign management are disseminated. I can also easily imagine campaigns that are far smarter in their one-to-one approaches to winning online hearts and minds and votes.
But the foundation is being laid, and I think it's well worth our careful interest.
(plucked from my post to the IdahoForDean blog)