I just re-read David Weinberger's
quotes from the Trippi speech last week, because something felt funny the first time I read it, and this time I found it, where Trippi says:
We did a pretty damn good job of it. Given the Party rules, we should never have been able to get to where we were 3 weeks before Iowa: Ahead in the polls, etc. We did it without the Party. The American people did, using the tools provided by the Internet.
The Dean campaign has been proof-of-concept for a number of novel political tools and tactics, and for that, their place in history is assured. However, Trippi comes _this close_ to blaming the voters.
"The American people" had little to do with the Dean campaign for the first year of its existence, as is normal. All campaigns are run by a small group of believers and pros until the elections start. The moment the voters arrived, however, they transformed the campaign from frontrunner to a 0-9 also-ran in the space of 16 days. Whenever the voters have been asked they said they don't much care for Dean. To invoke the American people without noting their rejection of Dean seems disingenuous at best.
This two-faced view of the voters -- sacred in the abstract, inconvenient in the concrete -- has characterized the Dean campaign since the disastrous Iowa speech, where Dean seemed unable to take in the loss. Any speech he gave should have included a recognition that, given the choice, the citizens in Iowa had placed him third, and a renewed commitment to connecting with voters in the future. Instead, they got a big fuck you in the form of a list all the states where Dean (wrongly) asserted he was going to win, states that he obviously felt didn't suffer from whatever had caused the Iowans to fail to seal his position as frontrunner.
Blaming the voters is now the hallmark of the Dean campaign. This is a grand tradition, of course -- a bad carpenter blames his tools; a bad programmer blames his users. Dean is in Wisconsin, telling voters to pay no attention to the previous results -- those people in Tennesee and Missouri and Virginia et al are all sheep. His campaign has become a caricature of the style of politics he has often criticized, continuing because he has the money to support it, despite a string of failures in which he's come in 4th or worse more often than he's come in second. This is almost the definition of special interest politics -- the success of his fund-raising tools shields him from having to listen to the people whose support would have given legitimacy to the idea of populist politics.
We need to learn from what the Dean campaign did right, but any analysis that tells the story of the campaign without mentioning its rejection by the people who really matter is a hair's breadth from suggesting that voters suffer from "false consciousness", the grownup version of "I know you are but what am I?" Once you are willing to glorify the American people while ignoring their clear and repeated judgment, you've basically spat on the democratic ideal.
There is good news here: We are seeing the last internet campaign. The advantage of having the Dean story play so big is that everyone was watching. None of this was lost on Karl Rove, or on Terry McAuliffe. Given what Dean was able to do with internet tools, they will become a key part of the fall campaign, and so completely integral by by 2008 that they won't rate more than a mention, much less a cover story in the NY Times magazine.
Those of us watching Dean thinking "This is it -- the campaign we've been waiting for" were, in a way, correct. This is it, or rather that was it, before Dean decided that he could run a populist campaign without the support of the populous. The big surprise, to me and to many of us, is how little it mattered. Though Trippi said "It's all about money", they blew through $40M to surprisingly little effect.
So there is a second piece of good news for democracy here, but it's not the good news Trippi would have you believe. The good news is this: a campaign can use internet tools to help create extraordinary successes in fund raising and generating name recognition and getting good poll numbers, can even have its candidate anointed frontrunner before the first vote is cast, and all of that, taken together, is still not enough to get people to vote for a someone they don't like.
1. JayT on February 15, 2004 12:58 AM writes...
How they say?...
Bahd-a-bing..bahd-a-boooom!
"Exit, stage left"
Permalink to Comment- Snagglepuss the cat, lookin' o'er shoulder fer that pesky CowTown sniper
2. Benjamin Ragheb on February 15, 2004 1:36 AM writes...
The American people --- or at least the Iowa people --- had plenty to do with the campaign. Those poll numbers were samples of the votes of the people, and they were accurate right up to the Iowa caucus (i.e., they started dropping before caucus night). Dean's popularity wasn't imagined. He would have won if the caucus was held a week or two earlier. (Of course, the push-polling and 4 a.m. telephone calls would have started earlier, too.)
Permalink to Comment3. Cranial on February 15, 2004 6:04 AM writes...
He may have won it he hadn't degraded a poor Mr. Unger who was just looking to inject some sensibility into the campaign.
He may have won if his "supporters" had supported him instead of staying home listining to MP3's and playing with their IPods. Now they all bleat, "its the medias fault," BS blame yourselves for not backing up all the talk.
Permalink to Comment4. Seth Finkelstein on February 15, 2004 8:49 AM writes...
As the old quotes runs:
"The voters have spoken, the bastards..."
Permalink to Comment5. adamsj on February 15, 2004 9:54 AM writes...
"Trippi comes this close to blaming the voters."
By giving them credit for getting his campaign going? That's an idiosyncratic reading of:
"We did it without the Party. The American people did, using the tools provided by the Internet."
I didn't hear voter-blaming in Trippi's speech. Media-bashing, yes, but no voter-blaming.
(There was also a good dose of dumping on Democratic Party leadership, organization and rules, one of the more convincing parts of Trippi's speech.)
Trippi had a point in saying that the media went after Dean. He rang true in giving institutional reasons for bias, less so in suggesting it was fear of the nature of the campaign.
Whatever the real causes are, what Trippi didn't explain was his failure to predict the media onslaught (which he made sound inevitable), take it into account, and find a way to counter it.
Permalink to Comment6. ~bc on February 15, 2004 12:39 PM writes...
Iowa speech is a big F-You to voters? Are your kidding? How is rallying your troops to carry on in the next states... a big F-You? The biggest problem Dean has had was that people who state their opinions on a big stage haven't paid attention to the words coming out of his mouth... and that's a huge disadvantage to America, since we for the most part allow the talking heads on TV and in a lesser part, in print and opinion leaders on the web... to make our decisions for us. Too bad the decision makers are asleep at the wheel this year.
Permalink to Comment7. samuel on February 15, 2004 4:23 PM writes...
This article is a big F-You to voters! It is simply written to bash Dean and it tries to use voters for its own purposes. The author has to learn how to respect people. Him and his article is simply despicable.
Permalink to Comment8. Christopher Coulter on February 15, 2004 6:21 PM writes...
Eh? It's just a classic dot.com bubbleish style scam. Hype, hype. Get VC (voter) monies on board, claim vast ownership of pre-existing land tracts without being specific, more hype, insiders with hands in the till; conflicts of interest as policy, "irrational exuberance", press hype, cash out, crash, blame everything and anyone excepting thyself, declare that the movement is still valid, just you (media, voters, consumers) were to stupid to realize it yet. Claim you are (and were) ahead of your time. Appoint thyself pundit king. Write books, start a blog, write glibbish vague future pieces, create a consultancy, belly hop from conference to conference. Collect speaking fees. Preach to the choir for fun and profit.
And we are NOT a Democracy, but a Republic. I worry about movements, that make all of past history irrelevant to their "emergence".
"A Republic is representative government ruled by law (the Constitution). A democracy is direct government ruled by the majority (mob rule). A Republic recognizes the inalienable rights of individuals while democracies are only concerned with group wants or needs (the public good)."
"It had been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity." - Alexander Hamilton, June 21, 1788
"...democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." - James Madison
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." - Benjamin Franklin
"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." - John Adams
"Pure democracy cannot subsist long nor be carried far into the departments of state, it is very subject to caprice and the madness of popular rage." - John Witherspoon, Signer of the Declaration
Permalink to Comment9. Eric on February 15, 2004 10:49 PM writes...
Clay, you're a hack. I'll say it once and I'll say it again, you have nothing original to say.
Permalink to Comment10. standa on February 16, 2004 2:01 AM writes...
Sorry but your article was a piece of trash
The "failing" of Howard Dean had nothing to do with over-reliance on the internet, a so-called bubble or any of that crap.
Repeat after me, 10 times slowly.
It's the media Stupid.
Dave Winer nailed it
Howard Dean is not a soap bar
http://davenet.scripting.com/2004/02/07/howardDeanIsNotASoapBar
Sat, Feb 7, 2004; by Dave Winer.
The Dean campaign taught us that you can't use the Internet to launch into a successful television campaign to win primaries. By raising money to run ads you play into the gatekeepers, who for obvious financial reasons, have a lot at stake in the money continuing to flow through their bank accounts. At some point he wouldn't need them. If Dean didn't get it, they did. So they proved that in 2004 at least, they still get a veto on who runs for President.
To Blitzer, Sawyer and Russert, to Viacom, GE, Time-Warner and Disney, Kerry seems safe, but Dean is dangerous, he routes around them, he goes direct. To accept his candidacy would be to accept the end of television-dominated politics. They aren't going to let this happen, any more than the record and movie companies are going to roll over for P2P distribution.
But there more to story...
Corporate America decided that Dean must be savaged, and its media sector made it happen.
THE AWESOME DESTRUCTIVE POWER OF THE CORPORATE POWER MEDIA
Permalink to Commenthttp://www.blackcommentator.com/75/75_cover_dean_media_pf.html
11. Slithy Tove on February 16, 2004 4:24 AM writes...
The comments by Dean supporters illustrate perfectly what Clay has been saying.
Permalink to Comment12. adamsj on February 16, 2004 8:32 AM writes...
No, actually, one person's silly comments on a theory don't justify the theory.
In particular, Clay's assertion that "Blaming the voters is now the hallmark of the Dean campaign" is based on one rather odd reading of one Joe Trippi remark, and on the otherwise unremarkable fact that "Dean is in Wisconsin, telling voters to pay no attention to the previous results", which is then interpreted as "those people in Tennesee and Missouri and Virginia et al are all sheep".
If you were a serious candidate who believed in what you were doing, and you were getting pasted the early primaries, would you just fold up your tent and go home?
If so, maybe you weren't a serious candidate.
In other words, this is crap argumentation on Clay's part. Most of his other analysis of the Dean collapse is insightful and more than worth reading. This piece is not so hot.
I'm not sure he's wrong in every particular, mind you, just that, in this case, his reasoning sucks.
Permalink to Comment13. Phil Wolff on February 17, 2004 8:23 AM writes...
Said at etech: "Good advertising is the fastest way to kill a bad product."
Permalink to Comment14. Clay Shirky on February 17, 2004 12:21 PM writes...
_If you were a serious candidate who believed in what you were doing, and you were getting pasted the early primaries, would you just fold up your tent and go home?_
Yes, because if you were a serious candidate, you would also be a serious politician, who could count votes. Gephardt and Graham dropped out; Sharpton and Kucinich stayed in. Dean is in the latter camp, the people who stayed in but are not serious candidates.
Permalink to Comment15. Katherine on February 17, 2004 3:47 PM writes...
Edwards has also stayed in. Though he has more wins (one) than Dean, he has fewer delegates. Is Edwards a serious candidate?
Both Edwards and Dean have stayed in because Kerry has less than one-quarter of the delegates he needs to clinch the nomination. A large majority of the population -- California and New York, for starters -- has not yet had the opportunity to vote. Why should voters in Iowa (population 2.9 million) get to decide who California (population 35.4 million) can vote for?
Permalink to Comment