The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

By Joe Trippi, AlterNet. Posted July 12, 2004.

This excerpt is the introduction from Joe Trippi's new book, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, published by Harper Collins, 2004.

December 2003 – My Guy is about to crash and burn in an Iowa cornfield.

I can feel it. I have a sense about these things, especially in Iowa. I have a kind of clairvoyance in Iowa. I can smell death in Iowa.

While the candidate smiles and some of the staffers daydream about White House posts, our campaign has grown sick with all the symptoms of the old politics: infighting and petty jealousy among the campaign staff, gaffes by the candidate, cannibalistic ads by the other Democratic contenders – all of it beneath the steady eyes of the scavenger political press, always on the lookout for stray hunks of flesh. No, we're going down.

And the worst part is this: There is nothing more I can do. After months of scraping and cajoling and pleading just to get the plane down the runway, now that we're finally aloft – and the rest of the crew is celebrating – I look out the window and the wings are coming off.

And I'm the only one who sees it. I desperately want out.

Every fiber of my being is telling me to get out. But I can't. For the better part of a year, I have been the one person inside Howard Dean's presidential campaign saying that we could actually win. Back when I signed on as campaign manager, back when we had seven people on staff, $100,000 in the bank, and only four hundred thirty-two known supporters, back when you answered the phones yourself or they just kept ringing, back when Howard Dean was little more than an asterisk, the last name on a long list of Democratic presidential candidates, I was the one looking people in the eye and telling them: Look, we're gonna win this frickin' thing.

Now, here it is the end of 2003, and we're actually on top, ahead in the polls, in the process of raking in more than $50 million, $15.8 million in this fund-raising quarter alone – a record – most of it from small donations of $100 or less. And whose fund-raising record are we beating? Our own! From the quarter before. We have an army of almost 600,000 fired-up supporters, not just a bunch of chicken-dinner donors, but activists, believers, people who have never been politically involved before and who are now living and breathing this campaign. Through them, we have tapped into a whole new vein of democracy and proven the Internet as a vibrant political tool. Now everyone is paying attention. The labor unions are beginning to endorse us. Al Gore has endorsed us. The media that we had to beg for coverage a few months ago has all but crowned Howard Dean as the Democratic nominee. We got the covers of Time and Newsweek. We are the story. And finally the other people in the campaign are beginning to mumble what I've been screaming for a year: Hey, we 're gonna win this frickin' thing.

Only I don't believe it anymore.

The Iowa caucuses are a little more than a month away and we are bleeding. Our momentum is gone. Our message is getting lost. We're spending all our time and energy deflecting attacks from other campaigns. Our guy has become an unmitigated disaster on the road. The unscripted candor that served him when he was the longest shot is now being played like a sort of political Tourette's. The press continually mangles the context of what he says, amping up his words in their own cynical version of "Twist and Shout.' We've got no adults with him on the road – no seasoned political people – and so, naturally, he's gaffing his way across Iowa. The young Dean staffers – all energy and idealism – have no idea what's about to happen. For most of them, this is their first presidential and they don't realize that the only thing longer than the hours are the odds of winning. Some of them – the really crazy ones – have caught the bug and might work a second presidential. There could even be the odd addict or death-wisher among them who might someday forget how hard this was and work a third.

This is my seventh.

And I can see it coming apart. I can see that we've gone to the lead too soon, that the other candidates are bearing down on us. I know what hell there is to pay when an insurgent catches the mainstream party leaders off guard. I can practically hear the guns swinging around, the sights settling on our back. I've worked too many caucuses in Iowa to not immediately recognize the signs of this thing: the squabbling, the spending, the negative ads, the constant press scrutiny. I can see all of it beginning to take its toll.

Most of all, I can see that we just weren't ready. Not for this.

Before Howard Dean launched his presidential campaign, he made the dubious decision to seal many of his records as governor of Vermont for a decade – saying that he didn't want "anything embarrassing appearing in the papers at a critical time in any future endeavor.' Well, it's a critical time now, and his decision has come back to bite us in the ass, this candidate who promised a new, open style of democracy hiding more than eleven years' worth of memos and files from the only major office he's ever held.

So here we are, in early December 2003, and the senior staff has decided to meet with the governor to plead our case for releasing the records. About fifteen of us have gathered in the long conference room on the third floor of a state office building in South Burlington, Vermont – where this rebel campaign had its unlikely rise. We explain that everything is about to hit critical mass, and that we are under a new kind of pressure here. He is now the frontrunner – everything he does and says will attract new scrutiny – and he can't say out of one side of his mouth that he wants to clean up politics, while out of the other side say that his own records are off-limits for a frickin' decade.

Joe Trippi, former campaign manager for Howard Dean, has worked on over 100 political campaigns for Democrats, including seven presidential races. In addition to his work in politics, Trippi worked with a number of high-tech companies in the 1990's.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Election 2004! Sign up now »