A Conversation With Joe Trippi

Political Players is a weekly conversation with the leaders, consultants, and activists who are shaping American politics. This week, CBS News' Brian Goldsmith talked with veteran Democratic strategist Joe Trippi at a conference on Youth and Voting sponsored by Harvard's Institute of Politics. The following is an edited version of that conversation:.

CBSNews.com: Joe, you were Howard Dean's campaign manager in 2004. What were the biggest positive lessons from that campaign that you think the 2008 candidates could emulate?

Joe Trippi: Well, I think that campaign proved you can get more people volunteering for you and raise more dollars if you have a strong Internet component to your campaign. And I think the tool sets of Facebook, MySpace, YouTube -- all these things that we didn't have -- only make it more powerful for people to send their friends video of you and say, "Hey, vote for this guy." I mean, different things like that are much stronger than they were for us.

And I think we were pretty successful at changing that paradigm. You'll see more of that this cycle.

CBSNews.com: Are there some tools that you would say a candidate shouldn't use because there's no control and they could quickly spiral out in a way that could hurt the campaign?

Joe Trippi: No, I don't. We never ran into those kinds of problems. I think we ran into trying to use technologies that weren't ready for primetime yet like text messaging in 2003 or 2004. I'm still not sure it's ready yet. You can go down an alley and spend a lot of time and resources trying to become the biggest text messaging network in the country, and it doesn't amount to anything.

I still have yet to find the website or the tool that blows your campaign up. I mean, the Dean campaign didn't get blown up by something that happened on the web. Although a lot of people predicted that would happen, it doesn't happen.

CBSNews.com: And what are the negative lessons? I mean, what do you think campaigns in 2008 could learn from Dean that they should do differently? Was it your spending rate? The way you used technology?

Joe Trippi No. Look at the campaign, the candidate, and his message--and the old politics still matter. I mean, negative politics still works. Attack ads still work. Just because you use the internet to raise all this money doesn't mean somebody can't nuke you and cause you to lose and cause your negative ratings to go up. It's not going to protect you any more than a lot of money to buy television that was raised at dinners will protect you from attack ads.

On the spending, I think everybody's going to do it even worse this time because, as important as we thought winning Iowa was in terms of the calendar, it's even more important this time. We were operating under a theory saying, "there's no sense in having a dime after Iowa and New Hampshire because whoever wins Iowa and New Hampshire will not be stopped." We, I think, were right in making that judgment, if you look at what happened with John Kerry.

And I don't think having $40 million or $50 million in the bank would have stopped John Kerry from rolling through those states. Some other campaign manager may make a different argument. But that's the one I would make.

And I would make the case that this year, it's even worse because all those states have moved up. And I don't care if you have $400 million in the bank, and Hillary might. If somebody surprises her and wins Iowa and New Hampshire, that person is going to be rolling. They have so much momentum that all that money hoarded and saved up, all those chestnuts, aren't going to do you any good.

CBSNews.com: Let's talk a little bit about the technology because you, obviously, were a big innovator and a pioneer four years ago.

Joe Trippi: Look, the first wagon train across the country didn't necessarily take the best route, right?

They were still a bunch of brave people in the wagon train. The arrows were coming. Did the first one even make it? I have no idea. But I'm saying, look, we were pioneering. Sometimes we did go down the wrong road -- I mean, we did, "Oh, gosh. That's a dead end. We've got to turn around and come back." But I mean, there's no way if we tried to not blaze a new trail and tried to do it the old way, there's no way anybody would even know who we are today.

CBSNews.com: So what do you think the next trail is? Or is it just going down the 2004 trail in a more sophisticated, more experienced way? Or do you think there's an entirely new and different way of doing it for the next cycle?

Joe Trippi: Well the technology's evolving, so that's going to make it different and more powerful. These campaigns have much more powerful tools like Facebook and MySpace and YouTube that we didn't have.

But I think what's interesting to me is the lack of transparency this time for some reason. None of these campaigns are saying how many supporters they have online. I mean, none of them are saying how much money they've raised on the internet.

CBSNews.com: Why is that?

Joe Trippi: It flabbergasts me. It's this really weird thing where the technology's evolving further, but the campaigns are actually regressing. The one thing I thought that everybody or that at least us and Clark and some other campaigns had sort of proven is the power of transparency. I mean of basically people knowing. You know the number of supporters, the amount of money raised —- the sort of a transparency where the supporters of the campaign actually had some incite into what they were helping to build.

And for some reason, none of these campaigns -- they have varying transparency on their website but nothing near I would say even 50 percent of the kind of transparency that you saw even in the Kerry campaign. I mean, that's what I'm saying. We're not talking about the Dean campaign here.

These campaigns have had moments of transparency versus a campaign of transparency. So that interests me, but I view that as almost a step backwards.

CBSNews.com: And do you subscribe to the view that the message and the candidate are still so much more important than whatever the technology is to deliver it? Or do you think that we've crossed some threshold where the technology and the ways of communication have become in some cases as important as the candidate and the message?

Joe Trippi: You know, I would say that the message and the candidate do matter. But there's something different here in that a candidate who's powerful on television still has to figure out how that candidate is going to buy millions of dollars of TV.

Someone who can get that same kind of power -- but who's authentic and get that to happen on the internet -- suddenly millions of people can see it, and they didn't pay anything. The candidate can go from nobody knew him to everybody's talking about him. So I think you could be a decent television candidate but a great Net candidate. I mean, the ability to communicate is different. Nixon was really good a communicating on the radio but horrible at communicating on television.

John Kennedy was amazing at communicating on television, but when people heard him on the radio, they couldn't understand half of what he was saying because of his accent. So I think we're changing now -- moving more towards authenticity having prominence in this medium. And so you can have a candidate who's better at communicating in this medium than in any of the old ones.

CBSNews.com: Speaking of message, it seems that John Edwards more than any of the other Democratic candidates is to some extent picking up where Dean left off in terms of a populist message. I don't know if you would disagree with that. Do you think that either of the other major Democratic candidates, Hillary or Obama, are as clear in their messaging strategy as Edwards is at this point?

Joe Trippi: I think what I would say is Edwards gets it. I mean, he definitely gets this medium, gets the importance, has thought his message out I think more than the others. But again, he ran four years ago. I think of all of them, he had a bigger opportunity to experience campaigning.

He's been the most transparent using actblue.com, for instance, to raise money over the Net to show transparency. So even though he's less transparent than Dean, he's still probably the most transparent of any of the candidates out there. I'm a little surprised at both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in that, like I said, they both have excellent websites and things like that that make you say, "Oh, geez. They're really thinking about this."

And then all the sudden I kind of look at it and go, "Well, wait a minute. They've disappeared for a couple of weeks." I mean in terms of what they're doing or their message.

CBSNews.com: The one candidate, or potential candidate, you didn't mention is Al Gore. The Hotline, which is the National Journal's political newsletter, mentioned this rumor -- I don't know if you saw it -- that if Gore ran, you might be his campaign manager. Is there any truth to that? Do you have any sense about whether Gore's going to run?

Joe Trippi: Well, first of all, I have no sense about whether Gore's going to run. I've got to tell you, I don't really think he's going to go.

I have absolutely zero insight and have no idea where the rumor came from because, no, there's been no call. But I would say that the interesting thing is that Al Gore has made the leap.

This may be a little too harsh on him. But he was the inauthentic, choreographed, everything-scripted candidate for President of the United States in the year 2000. And he lost. And he's become the authentic, not-scripted, transformational leader on global warming and the Iraq war and issues he cares about.

The fear I would have is that guy could be president. Could win. I mean, lead a transformational change in this country's presidency that I think we really need. The fear I have is that the second he becomes a candidate, if he does, he becomes the careful, choreographed, inauthentic, "I got something to lose, I got to be careful because I could lose now" candidate. All he can lose now is his fight to stop global warming.

And, he can make that fight and keep leading on it. So like I said, I think like his -- the guy that we see today is a guy I would go to work for in a nanosecond to help change the country. You know, whether it's about global warming or a potential candidacy. I, one, don't think he'll run. And two, my fear would be if he did, we'd never see the guy that I'm talking about again. You know, that guy. And that's not his fault. That's what I'm trying to say about the process.

CBSNews.com: We obviously just came from a conference about how young people could be attracted to politics. And Howard Dean struck a very powerful chord among some young people. What do you think are the three or four biggest lessons a campaign should learn about how to reach out to young voters?

Joe Trippi: Trust 'em. I mean, that's the biggest thing the Dean campaign did -- we trusted young people. We said, we trust you to organize your own Meetup or your own Generation Dean meeting on campus. Or it was the young people in the campaign that came up with Dean Corps. Which is, the kids would get together and go clean up a river or something wearing their Dean t-shirts.

I got to be honest with you, I was sitting at headquarters going, okay, even I don't understand how that gets us votes. But then we'd get the local Davenport paper and it'd have the picture of the Dean kids in their Dean shirts bending over pulling garbage out of a river.

And there'd be a story about it. And there was nothing overtly political, we're doing this to get votes. It was so authentic and real that these kids really cared about it. That I think it did help us. So I think, basically, the biggest thing is trust.

By Brian Goldsmith