"Witches," says Joe Trippi. "And it pisses me off because they have people all over the world." Trippi, the fiery campaign manager for Howard Dean, is talking about Meetup.com, the year-old Internet service created to facilitate gatherings of people who share common interests—everything from knitting to Wicca—that is now the primary grassroots organizing tool for Dean. Trippi obsessively tracks the latest Meetup figures, and he has just learned that the number of registered Dean supporters has surpassed 25,000, far more than the next largest Meetup group, witches, who trail Dean by 10,000 but whose stats still irk Trippi a little bit. "They get their numbers all revved up because they get lots of people in London and Paris or whatever."
When it comes to the Internet, no detail is too small for Trippi. Some campaign managers devote their energies to working the elite press or courting union leaders or wooing donors. But Trippi seems to spend an inordinate amount of his time checking Meetup numbers, posting to liberal blogs, sending text messages to supporters who have signed up for the Dean wireless network, and otherwise devising ways to use the Internet to build what Trippi envisions as "the largest grassroots organization in the history of this party." And his efforts might actually be paying off: While many predicted that Dean would fade away once the war was no longer a salient issue, there is little evidence that the former Vermont governor's supporters—originally drawn to Dean when he was forcefully speaking out against war in Iraq—are deserting him. In fact, the Internet might account for Dean's staying power.
For the Dean campaign, it all started with the Meetup phenomenon. Back in January, the campaign stumbled upon the Meetup website and noticed that 432 people were signed up for a Howard Dean Meetup group. "We didn't really know what it was," says Trippi. He watched from afar as Dean's Meetup numbers grew to more than 2,600 in February. In March, Dean showed up at a Meetup event in New York City. It was so crowded that hundreds of young supporters were pouring out onto the sidewalk waiting to get in. Soon the campaign began receiving mysterious donations with an extra cent added. They learned that the Meetup community intended to raise $1 million for Dean, and the extra cent was being used to identify the donations. It became known as the Meetup Million Dollar Challenge and has raised at least $300,000 for Dean so far (close to 10 percent of what Dean had raised overall, as of April). Almost overnight, Meetup had become the Dean campaign's most important organizing tool.
Other innovations—wireless communications, HowardDean.tv (a website that runs streaming video of Dean speeches and events), a network of rapid-response bloggers—have followed, and Trippi is now doing more with the Internet than any other presidential campaign. Aides to some of the other 2004 Democratic candidates regard Trippi, who was born in Silicon Valley and has spent the last few years working for high-tech companies, as a bit of an eccentric who wastes precious campaign time e-mailing obscure bloggers and hanging out with political oddballs at the monthly Dean Meetups. "Some of these Meetup events look like the bar scene from Star Wars," says an adviser to one Dean rival.
But Trippi believes others will one day understand the brilliance of his plan. Consider the Meetups: Once a month, thousands of self-organized Dean supporters across the country get together at coffee shops and bars to discuss their candidate and ways they can help his campaign. This ability to get people to meetings, Trippi says, bodes well for Dean in the Iowa caucuses. "What do you do in a caucus?" he asks. "You go to a meeting." And Trippi has plans beyond the caucuses and primaries. He speaks of using Meetup and other Web tools to build a million-person-strong network of small donors who could raise the cash needed to take on President Bush. "There's only one way you could ever get to a million people in this country," he says before pausing dramatically. "That's the Internet."
One of the most important online vehicles for the Dean campaign is blogs. Just as President Bush has wooed conservative talk-show hosts, holding a special day for them at the White House, Dean is the first candidate to treat relatively unknown bloggers as a critical opinion-making constituency. "We understand the blogging community and have been active in it," says Trippi. "A lot more people are seeing us on the blogs and other sites every day than on TV at this point in the campaign." Forget CW-shapers like David Broder. Trippi spends his time reaching out to people like Ezra Klein. Klein, who was an ardent Gary Hart supporter, is a student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with his own political blog. Ever since Hart decided not to run, Trippi has been trying to win over Klein and other Hart Internet activists. The Dean campaign immediately sent out a press release praising Hart after his announcement. "The fact that we really meant it matters to folks like Ezra Klein," says Trippi.
No liberal-leaning blogger seems to escape Trippi's attention. He recommends that I check out a blog called Daily Kos. "He's a Wesley Clark guy," says Trippi, adding hopefully, "I think his second choice is Dean." Last week, Dean even gave his first exclusive interview to a blogger, a rather well-done exchange via e-mail by the anonymous author of the blog LiberalOasis. The Dean campaign itself has an official blog that includes dispatches from the road, and Trippi also posts regularly to Dean2004.blogspot.com, an unofficial Dean blog that has become a hub of Internet organizing for the campaign.
Anyone who writes critically about Dean can expect his copy to be chewed up by this army of zealous Dean Internet scribes. When I wrote a piece recently that contained a few paragraphs about Dean, a member of the Dean2004 blog team filed an almost 2,000-word entry slicing my article up into sections with labels such as "true," "false," "inadvertently true," and "foolish." Not content with this, the Dean blogosphere recently established a rapid-reaction team called the Dean Defense Forces (DDF)—an e-mail list of hard-core Dean supporters who swiftly push back with e-mails, letters to the editor, blog entries, and phone calls against anyone spreading anti-Dean sentiments. "When he gets attacked, we'll respond," pledges the DDF's organizer, Matthew Singer, a 20-year-old college student in Montana who once blogged about Dean on his own site, Left in the West.
The DDF's first mission came last week when the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) penned a memo condemning Dean for pandering to the liberal base of the Democratic Party. Trippi immediately responded with an e-mail activating the Dean network, and instantly the DDF and hundreds of other Dean fedayeen flooded the DLC with e-mails and phone calls. The Dean campaign later proudly posted 871 pages of correspondence that were sent, most of which took exception to the DLC's characterization of Dean as left-wing and his supporters as "activist elites." Dean himself cannily seized on the spat with the Beltway think tank to emphasize his outsider credentials. He also dug up old DLC quotes praising his moderate record as governor and tapped centrists, such as Jim Jeffords and Representative Zoe Lofgren, to vouch for his New Democratic credentials. By the end of the week, Singer sent out an e-mail to the DDF army declaring, "[O]ur first real campaign was a success."
he last presidential campaign that was this evangelical about the power of the Internet to raise money and build a grassroots constituency of new voters was John McCain's. After McCain won New Hampshire in 2000, he raised millions of dollars and signed up tens of thousands of supporters through his website in just a few days. But, by then, it was too late to make a difference. Trippi has studied the McCain phenomenon closely. The Dean campaign claims it already has an internal list of contributors or volunteers twice the size of the 25,000 supporters on Meetup. "We're at fifty thousand today," Trippi says. "We're ten thousand more than McCain was after he won New Hampshire, and this is eight months before Iowa or New Hampshire. It's not like it's standing still. We keep growing every day."
On the campaign's unofficial blog, Trippi recently posted a long, inspirational missive to Dean's followers about a confluence of forces he dramatically calls "the perfect storm" that will carry Dean to victory. Previously, Trippi argues, the Internet was not yet mature enough for any campaign to maximize its potential. Even in 2000, voters weren't as comfortable as they are today using their credit cards online, and the blogosphere was still in its infancy. And the McCain campaign wasn't prepared to capitalize on the Internet windfall when it occurred. Now, capitalizing on such a windfall is the basis for Dean's entire strategy.
Not surprisingly, the other force Trippi sees as essential to the project is the Dean persona. It's a cliché to compare Dean to McCain, but so far he's the only candidate in the race around whom a mass personality cult has formed. (How many people do you think would log on to watch DickGephardt.tv?) For months, Dean has argued that his supporters are responding to his personality and style, not just his antiwar position. That's starting to look more and more true. Of the hundreds of e-mails the DDF sent to the DLC, very few mentioned the war. To the extent any of them dealt with issues, they defended Dean as a New Democrat-style centrist. But most were nonideological, simply praising Dean for his passion and ability to bring independents and nonvoters into politics. "The only successful DLC candidate, Bill Clinton, succeeded not because of his policies but because of personality," wrote one Dean backer. "Dean is [a] real possibility for attracting people who were turned off by Gore's wishy-washy personality," said another. "Americans elected Bush based on who he was as a person far more that what his positions were."
The cult of Dean doesn't seem to be going away. His followers download and listen to the Dean dance mix, a collection of Dean's one-liners set to techno music. They stay in touch with text messages beamed to their cell phones. They attend their monthly Meetup gatherings in growing numbers. They fill Dean events with more bodies than any of the other candidates' supporters (1,200 showed up at a Seattle speech recently). They launch coordinated attacks on Dean critics. And they blog and blog and blog about the power of Dean's message. Maybe it's all a big waste of time, but Trippi doesn't think so. "In the way TV changed politics and took it away from the grassroots," he says with fervor, "the Internet is going to give it back.
