Joe Trippi’s Long Strange Trip

I recently began reading Joe Trippi’s political memoir The Revolution Will Not Be Televised:  Democracy, the Internet and the Overthrow of Everything.   So far it is a satisfying read.  Trippi’s style lives somewhere between the hyperbole of Hunter S. Thompson and the judgmental posturing of an editorial from a small town newspaper.  Trippi is obviously a gifted storyteller and in reading the book,  I can imagine what it would be like listening to him telling stories late at night in the back of a campaign bus speeding through the endless fields of the Mid-West on a cold January night.

The book is a collection of anecdotes from his Trippi’s colorful career as a political campaign strategist.  These stories range from the sober to the profane and span nearly forty years of work for Democratic party candidates at all levels of the American political system– from the hyper local to the national.

Trippi is probably most famous for his early expert handling of the insurgent candidacy of former Vermont Governor Howard Dean during the 2004 Democratic Presidential primaries.  The book works most of its plot around that campaign with generous asides from Trippi’s previous campaigns.  In fact, the memoir begins with a fairly shocking encounter between Trippi and his candidate after a contentious meeting with the Governor’s senior campaign staff as the Governor emerged as the surprise (and very short-lived) front-runner after the 2004 Iowa Caucus’.

Trippi’s public reputation is built around his pioneering use of the internet and other technological strategies in that campaign.  Trippi is wise to center his memoir around the successes of that campaign because they frame his two self stated passions:  politics and technology.

As a self styled Mid 70′s scruffy computer nerd and agitator, Trippi’s early experiences on the outskirts of Silicon Valley put him in the rarefied company of tech revolutionaries like Steve Jobs and Gary Kildall (the man famous for not selling DOS to IBM), but Trippi was from San Jose and not Palo Alto and that defines much of why he ended up on campaign buses and not in corporate boardrooms.

A child of divorce, Trippi grew up poor in LA but relocated to San Jose as a teenager to live with his father–an Italian immigrant and florist.  It was in San Jose that Trippi began his career helping long shot idealistic candidates try to win elections in a system that was becomming in his view more corrupt and less appealing to the average voter.  His first campaign in San Jose for Iola Williams begins a long career for Trippi which is most notable  for how many losers Trippi worked for  over that years.

In fact, losing is the most consistent theme of Trippi’s career.
Since working for Iola Williams in 1974, here is a partial list of candidates that Trippi hoped to get elected to office:

• Iola Williams
• Ted Kennedy (President)
• Tom Bradley (Governor)
• Walter Mondale (President)
• Gary Hart (President)
• Dick Gephardt (President)
• Bob Turke (Senate)
• Howard Dean (President)
• John Edwards (President)

To be fair, Trippi has also worked for many candidates that have won and one of this memoir’s biggest assets is its illustration of how difficult it is to actually get elected to any office in this country.  Trippi’s biggest and most public failure to date (John Edwards not withstanding) as Dean’s Campaign Manager he (and others) also consider to be his biggest success.  In fact he labels the Dean campaign’s use of technology a “miracle” in the book.  He looks at the Dean campaign’s pioneering use of blogs, meet-ups and 800 numbers as a model on how to reconnect ordinary Americans to a political process hijacked by television, money and special interests.  He believes, and cites as evidence, the Dean’s campaign success at both fund-raising and grassroots voter drives are the future for progressive candidates running for office. He also believes that using technology to harness latent voter desire’s to be a part of something bigger than themselves and to be part of a change mechanism offers a new kind of politics that empowers rather than alienates voters.

Like the candidates Trippi supports–idealistic, quixotic and perhaps a little looney–the idea that a technologically empowered electorate can somehow undue the years of disaffection and cynicism attached to the American electoral process is noble.  That nobleness of purpose has us hanging on Trippi’s anecdotes and it is the heart of this memoir.  We want Trippi’s candidates to win, even though we know that in the end despite all of the nobleness of cause and the sweat of countless campaign workers, its the process that usually wins. Not the candidates–and certainly not the voters.