Joe Trippi's Killer App

As in any political race, the Dean campaign began with a few people around a table, calculating the odds of success. For Dean, the first question was financial: how to raise the funds to compete against a popular sitting president with a bankroll bigger than a Powerball jackpot.

Trippi says they began with two conscious decisions: an ironclad pact to run the first four miles of the race -- till the end of the second quarter on June 30 -- at 100-yard-dash pace, "even if it killed us." And to build a campaign organization designed to beat Bush. Not Kerry, not Edwards. Bush. And that meant doing the math.

They had virtually no chance of matching the $200 million Bush is expected to raise through the usual route -- shaking down big donors for $1,000 checks. But what if they could persuade a few million people to give $100 each? "There's only one medium where, theoretically, 2 million Americans could get up off their chairs one day and decide, 'Damn it! I'm going to do it!'" Trippi says. "The Internet."

But building the organization along a decentralized, grassroots model was not simply a savvy way to tap donors far from traditional money sources, Trippi hastens to add. It was also a way to attract enough supporters so that the Democratic Party would have to take notice.

The campaign's strategy is one that nimble companies have been using for years: give staffers on the ground the authority to make decisions tailored to their markets without having to check back constantly with the home office. But it's a radical, and some would say risky, way to organize a campaign, where control is usually fanatically guarded. "Most campaigns have real top-down controls," says Carol Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, at George Washington University. "They're apoplectic about people not speaking for the campaign, afraid that somebody will say something that will reflect badly on the candidate."

But letting go of that control has benefits as well. By unleashing thousands of people to spread the word to friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens, a campaign could grow faster and more viscerally than through any other medium. It is, in short, precisely the kind of task the Internet was designed for, says David Weinberger, a mar-keting consultant and tech writer who recently signed on as an Internet adviser to the Dean campaign. "The old topology was that each point connected to a controlling center that was either selling you soap or selling you a candidate," he says. "With the Internet, the center is still broadcasting to the ends, but the ends are now connected to one another. Politics has always been about power, and the campaign is willing to be truly democratic in a way that is really different."

The staffers at Dean headquarters look as if they'd stepped out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue: good-looking twentysomethings in cargo shorts and flip-flops, with the occasional nose ring thrown in as a nod to diversity. Right now, a charming brunette in baggy khakis is wrestling with a gnarly problem. A caller wants to join a Dean group in Philadelphia but -- yikes! -- he isn't wired. "Craig," she whispers urgently to a guy with spiky blond hair and a tie-dyed T-shirt, "What do we do with people who don't have Internet?"

For all the rhetoric over Dean's Internet strategy, that is a big question: Can this message leap the digital divide? Mindful that the past election turned on confused seniors in Florida, Trippi's troops are attacking the problem in their customary style -- electronically. On "Dean Meetup Day," held on the first Wednesday night in August, 33,000 supporters met in res-taurants and cafés across the globe to ponder that very issue.

Meetup Inc., the Web site that allows people with common interests (Chihua-huas, Elvis, Harry Potter, for example) to find and meet each other locally, is the secret sauce in Trippi's campaign recipe. The membership list for the Meetup group "Dean in 2004" now claims 87,985 members in 562 cities, from Scottsbluff, Nebraska, to Allahabad, India. In its July meeting, the group wrote roughly 30,000 personal letters to Iowa residents, urging them to support Dean.

In August, they did the same for New Hampshire, and they brainstormed ideas for carrying the message to elders ("Wear Dean buttons to bingo night" a supporter in San Luis Obispo, California, suggested). It's what techies would call the "network effect," writ large. And while Trippi was the first presidential campaign manager to recognize its potential, it has now taken on a life of its own as members enlist other members and plan activities in their communities, far from campaign headquarters. "We built a hammer," says Scott Heiferman, CEO of the scrupulously nonpartisan Meetup, "and they built a house with it."