The Stupid Campaign

Head Deaniac Joe Trippi resigns from the Dean campaign:

The Governor has asked Roy Neel to come in as CEO of the campaign.

I have resigned as campaign manager.

I’ve always believed that the most important thing was to change our country and our politics.

and bloggers scratch their heads and point fingers in an attempt to assign the blame to the once-promising campaign’s meltdown. Jeff Jarvis started the whole conversation days back when he speculated after Iowa that the “social software” upon which the Dean campaign was built was surrounding the candidate with an echo chamber that filtered out reality. Clay Shirky points out a pitfall of on-line activism wherein people confuse time spent playing computer with effective political action, Dave Weinberger blames it all on Dean’s personality, and Jarvis comes around to the fact that the Dean campaign was more about the campaign than about Dean himself and whatever he may actually stand for.

All of these guys have their points, but I don’t think any of them has actually nailed the problem, and I say this as somebody who’s used the Internet and a variety of software tools to organize political volunteers for several years, starting in 1995.

Shirky’s right that when you enable people to discuss, debate, and affirm political ideas on-line, they tend to lose the distinction between their on-line world and the actual domain of politics, which is about electing candidates and passing bills, not just about joining a group and developing a sense of belonging to a cause larger than oneself, no matter how gratifying that all may be. I’ve seen this happen before, and several of the lobbyists I used to work with refused to take part in on-line discussion groups for this very reason: they’d rather spend the time in the Capital talking to lawmakers and their staffers than engaging in non-productive e-mail discussions. Anybody with any exposure to the Net knows that it can be a huge time sink. But that’s just scratching the surface.

There’s something about “movement-oriented” on-line discourse that tends to drive groups toward the fringes. On-line discussion groups are invariably shouting matches where the point of view with the most insistent and most obsessed advocates tends to steamroll the moderate center.

Trippi evidently has a bit of the Paul O’Neil desire to rule in hell rather than serve in heaven, and he always thought he was the star of the Dean campaign instead of the stubby governor himself. At the end of the day, he wasn’t content to apply his talents to the campaign where the candidate thought he could do the most good, a position that requires equal and large doses of arrogance and hypocrisy. How can you promote someone to lead a nation if you aren’t even willing to accept this judgment about something as small as one man’s role in a campaign?

Most of the Deaniacs are clearly disturbed that Trippi’s gone, as you can see from the comments to the first post above, but some, like this commenter, are happy:

What did you do with our $40 million dollars, Joe? We got our asses handed to us in Iowa and NH, and we can’t make payroll. I’m VERY angry at you – the LAST thing this campaign needs is fiscal irresponsibility buried under feel-good hot air. There’s the door, you know the rest.

It’s awfully bizarre that Dean turns to a Beltway lobbyist to run the campaign that started on the Internet as an outsider’s bid for the White House, but that’s who Neel is. And Neel’s not just any Beltway Lobbyist, he’s the head lobbyist for the telephone companies regularly demonized by Weinberger, Searls, Isenberg and the other Cluetrainians. So the telcos have eaten the Internet, the Smart Network has stamped out the Stupid Network, representative democracy has beaten Emergent Democracy and Joi Ito doesn’t even acknowledge what’s happening.

So what is happening? Briefly put, Dean’s problem is the Deaniacs. The Internet-driven campaign has enabled him to amass a large following, but they’re primarily unbalanced people, fanatical followers, extremists, and wackos. In my experience with Internet-enabled activism, these are the kind of people most attracted to online chat and email wars, so an organization that’s going to use these tools to recruit has to prune the weirdos before they run off the mainstream people you need to get in order to reach out to the undecided mainstream people whose support you really need in the voting booth. Others have written that the orange-hatted, tattooed, and body-pierced volunteers who flew into Iowa alienated the actual voters, and that’s real.

When your core group of volunteers is weirdo, you pretty well guarantee that only wierdos will join the campaign later on, because normal people don’t want to hang out with a bunch of lost pups looking for a father figure or a messianic jihad. And when your volunteers are as large in numbers as they are loose in marbles, the constant contact the candidate has with them can’t help but rub off in the kind of mania Dean displayed in the “I have a scream” speech. And volunteers are the life-blood the campaign, doing all the indispensable phone calling, door knocking, and talking to voters one by one. Without a core group of people both dedicated and sane, a campaign can’t go anywhere. So the Kerry approach, which was traditional politics with a little technology, ramps up slower than a techno-razzle campaign, but it’s got quality control that ensures that it won’t eat itself in the long run.

So politics, even in the age of the Internet, is still about people, not about technology, gimmickry, or gadgets, and most of the people are moderate, deliberate, and fairly sensible. Dean learned this the hard way, and the only thing that can save his campaign now is the fact that few people are paying attention to what’s happening in Burlington or on the Stupid Network.

A telling fact in all this was Dean and Trippi’s failure to believe their own campaign rhetoric. They said the campaign was energizing new voters and bringing in new volunteers to work the campaign, but they obviously didn’t provide them with the kind of training and direction that’s appropriate for political neophytes. So when the volunteers said they had 40,000 committed votes in Iowa, based on whatever tea leaves the kids were reading or smoking, Dean believed them, didn’t probe, didn’t question, and when the late polls came in and said “nope, don’t think so”, he melted down. And when this happened twice, he freaked out and jumped in bed with the first Washington Telco lobbyist he found.

Yes, it’s very funny to watch these people learning the rookie lessons of Internet activism on the national stage, and my ribs hurt from the laughing.

UPDATE: Head Lemur points out that this is the way committees and other organizations work.

UPDATE: For a backup of my claims about Deaniac weirdness, see this post, Deaniacs in Action.