Trippi this morning at the Emerging Technology Tech-In:
The broadcast media let us down in the last years. (David Weinberger calls it the real echo chamber.)
The first revolution was in the 17hundreds and the Dean campaign is the beta version of Revolution 2.0. We are only at the beginning of this.
I was sitting between David Weinberger and Jon Lebkowsky who were life blogging and doing a much better job at that then me.
For a brief moment if you searched for Trippi at Google News, you would get a reference to Jon's blog. (Currently 9.30pm you still do, but just in case I did a screenshot.)
Some of my notes:
1) Surprise, it's money that matters. Nobody in the media was interested in how many people all over the country did come to the Dean Meetups already in Spring early Summer last year. Only when they were able to raise 3.7 million dollars within 6 days in small denominations. The media started to notice.
Wes Boyd from MoveOn.org said a similar thing later in the day. At political conferences two questions are asked. First what are your demographics and second how much money did you raise. Needless to say he was very happy to have the opportunity to talk at this tech event.
But it is doable. What is needed is 2 to 5 million Americans who give $100 each and the political landscape is a different one.
2) The Democrats didn't want to have a Jimmy Carter again, coming from nowhere and winning in the late 70s. Therefore the schedule for the primaries were changed, so now they are very tight together and the winner of the first two can ride on that success wave all the way to the endorsement. (I always thought that the whole procedure is strange, why not everyone vote on one day, or at least mix up the sequence every four years.)
3) After the endorsement of Al Gore the alarm bells went on. Everyone was realizing, that if nothing happens Dean will be the man, so collectively they ganged up on him in the last three weeks before Iowa and New Hampshire.
4) It is a lie that Trippi got millions of dollars. He got $165K and not the millions that they are writing about in the newspapers. There is a reason for this, they want to undermine the money flow to the Dean campaign. "I am not giving to Dean anymore, so that Trippi can fill his pockets ..."
5) Openness of blogs has it's downsides. He had a problem to communicate to the base, that they should not be complacent. If he would have written that in his blog, the other candidates would have picked it up and used as "Trippi isn't believing in his own campaign anymore."
6) There is still hope that the pendulum swings back in Wisconsin. There were never more people at a Dean Meetup then last Wednesday and new money did come in.
[begin pedestal rant]
Two things that drive me crazy. One, that US mainstream media doesn't fulfill it's role as the 4th power in the country, next to Legislative, the Executive and the Judicial. Why are they not scrutinizing what is going on here? What is the difference between the Pravda during the Soviet era and Fox News? You tell me.
Second, why is the Democratic Party so spineless and does not do any real opposition work? Why are they not standing up and calling Bush on his lies on his spending on his corporate handouts? But nothing, only after Dean stepped up, spoke out against the Iraq invasion and got the support by hundred of thousands of people the other candidates came around and are against the war in Iraq too.
[end pedestal rant]
The internet miracle can still happen this time around, let's see how Wisconsin votes.
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