Power Trippi: Howard Dean's candidacy showcased the best--and worst--of Internet campaigning.

• Author: Klein, Ezra
• Position: On Political Books - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - Book Review

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised By Joe Trippi Harper Collins, $26.95

My first blog, unimaginatively titled "Ezra Klein," occupied an under-traveled stretch of the Web. At best, my musings on politics, a diversion from my day job on Gary Hart's pre-presidential campaign during the early months of 2003, boasted around 50 readers a day. One afternoon that May, I found out that "pre" was as far as Hart's road went; visitors to "Ezra Klein" were soon treated to a longwinded account of my disappointment and confusion as I tried to figure out what I would do next.

That was the night I first heard from Joe Trippi, campaign manager of an obscure Vermont governor's dark-horse campaign for the presidency. It turned out Trippi was one of my readers, and to my surprise, he was quick to offer sympathy and understanding. As our correspondence continued, my initial, tentative support gave way to full-blown enthusiasm. Though I was a little uncomfortable with Dean's lack of national security experience--which even then looked to be a key credential for the 2004 race--Trippi slowly drew me in. Each time I opened my email or checked my messages and found a Dean campaign official inside, my interest intensified. Soon I was selling Howard Dean online, then organizing for him around my Southern California hometown. Finally, I accepted Trippi's invitation to spend the summer in Vermont, working for the campaign.

I had barely noticed, but Trippi had turned me from a nominal supporter of his candidate into a diehard Deaniac. As any political pro will tell you, this is an important evolution; the former may mark the ballot, but the latter converts his friends, opens his wallet and stuffs the envelopes. And it was a conversion that Dean's campaign, through its emphasis on participation and innovative use of the Internet to make that participation possible, worked on tens of thousands of people more or less like me. By the end of the year, these ground troops--volunteers, bloggers, MoveOn.org members, and Meetup.com enthusiasts--would provide enough energy and cash to turn Dean from a dark horse into the odds-on favorite for the Democratic nomination.

That was before the primaries actually got under way, of course. Dean didn't become the Democratic nominee, and he shuttered his bid a month after the Iowa caucuses not having won a single state. Trippi's new book, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, is thus less a memoir of that turbulent period than an attempt to retrieve the lessons of Dean's campaign from the dustbin of failed primary efforts. He wants us to remember Dean not as the hothead whose unscripted yelp from an Iowa ballroom cost him the election, or as the liberal firebrand whose challenge gave his party a spine transplant, but as a man who, even in losing, changed the nature of politics. "It was," he writes, "the opening salvo in a revolution, the sound of hundreds of thousands of Americans turning off their televisions and embracing the only form of technology that has allowed them to be involved again, to gain control of a process that alienated them decades ago."

Even for Democrats who didn't support Dean, Trippi's "revolution" continues to be a reason to look back on the candidacy with some fondness. Finally, they say; someone has figured out a model for how the party can be politically successful in the post-McCain-Feingold age. I shared a lot of that enthusiasm, and still do. But looking back at the campaign through Trippi's eyes, it's become clearer and clearer to me that Dean's model, like any new technology, can be as dangerous as it is useful. Unless properly harnessed, the new politics of the Internet may do to future candidates what it did to Dean: Make them lose.

A shoebox and a dream

Trippi, of course, didn't create Dean's devoted army; central to the story of the Dean campaign was the manner in which the candidate's army of volunteers, bloggers, and donors created itself. But more than any other person, Trippi was the...