E-Campaigning in the Democratic Party – Joe Trippi

Issue 1 | 24 February 2009

On a visit to Australia sponsored by Microsoft, Joe Trippi, United States media consultant and campaign manager and  author of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet and the Overthrow of Everything [HarperCollins], addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 24 February 2009. Joe Trippi’s innovative use of the internet for small-donor fundraising in the Dean for America ended up raising more money than any Democratic presidential campaign in history, all with donations averaging less than $100 each. This sort of campaigning led the way for the phenomenon that became Barack Obama.

E-CAMPAIGNING IN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

JOE TRIPPI

Thank you very much for that introduction. I would like to thank Microsoft and The Sydney Institute and the others involved in putting this event together, and for bringing me here. I’ve spoken in many places but never in a place where I was distracted by the view as I was speaking to the audience like this place – it’s just beautiful, what a setting.

A big change has happened in communications and it’s brought on the events that people have witnessed in the Howard Dean and Barack Obama campaigns and in other parts of our society. What we’re witnessing is not just a shift in medium. We had a shift from radio to television that occurred for the first time in America, and it occurred in the race between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. There was a candidates’ debate where almost every person who listened to radio believed that Richard Nixon had won but anybody who watched the same debate on television was sure that the young, charismatic John F. Kennedy had destroyed the sweaty, bearded, forgot-to-shave, Richard Nixon. That was sort of the first great political struggle between two media. Television won out and we’ve seen the power of television ever since. That is not what we’re seeing today with the internet. This is not just a shift from one medium to another. And, again, as powerful as television was, it didn’t wipe out radio; radio is still all around us and someone like Russ Limbaugh is a powerful force in the United States because of the radio.

What we’re witnessing is much more like what happened to society before the printing press versus after the printing press. Before the printing press, power and knowledge was in the hands of those who could afford to pay scribes, often monks, to hand-write the powerful books, the most important books of the era – the Bible was in the hands of people who could pay scribes to write an individual copy of it. Suddenly the printing press happened and power shifts happened from those at the top, and the wealthy, to everybody. Suddenly pamphlets could be printed and handed out on the street. People like Thomas Paine could create revolutions, and dialogue and discussion in the United States and around the world started to happen.

That’s what we’re seeing here. This isn’t just a shift from television to new media or the internet or text messaging; this is a shift in power and it’s taking it, like it or not, from those at the top and distributing it to more people at the bottom, to average citizens. That is also the beginning of the story in the Dean campaign and Obama campaigns – the beginning of a new bottom-up technology that was many-to-many and with no barrier to entry. Any two people in a garage with a PC or Mac could invent something so creative, so energising, that it spread to millions of people just by spreading it to their friends, because it was a message that got other citizens to join a campaign or common cause for the common good to make a difference.

We have not seen anything like this, both the shift in medium and the shift in power, since the printing press. It’s a multifaceted, many-to-many printing press with no barrier to entry; any citizen can create an act of journalism, can change the course of an election. You saw this recently, here, with journalism springing out of the bushfires where citizens with cell phone cameras were reporting the news and moving things into the media when the professional media didn’t even have a camera near some of the action because they can’t be everywhere. So this is what’s starting to happen.

There were a lot of people in politics who don’t understand the internet and there’s a bunch of people who are technologists and internet folk who don’t really understand the day-to-day operation of politics. I happen to be one of the people who grew up every day wondering what was going to have the biggest impact on people to change their lives – was it technology or politics? Certainly the cell phone has done more to change people’s lives than any single politician, so I’m still to this day not sure to this day that I’ve figured that out.

During the Howard Dean campaign we had to invent a lot of things which people take for granted today. And we created something called DeanTV. It was a broadband channel that you could watch on your laptop. It was populated by different videos of citizens out there saying, “Here’s my song I made for Howard Dean,” or “Here’s my video I made for him on why I thought he should run,” or “Here’s a video I caught of him yesterday.”

We created DeanTV and had 190,000 people at a time, watching it. Three or four years later, there would be YouTube, the same thing as DeanTV. The only difference was we didn’t try to sell DeanTV or try to get it funded. YouTube had 67 million viewers the day Barack Obama announced his campaign. So what we had to create and or invent as DeanTV, Barack Obama’s YouTube, just four short years later, had 67 million people watching at any time. We created DeanSpace and DeanLink which were our own social networks because Facebook and MySpace didn’t exist or were only happening on a few college campuses in the United States at the time of Howard Dean’s campaign. Three years later, millions of people were on Facebook. Today, so many tools on the Internet are empowering individuals to make a difference, to cause real change.

We’re now in a period where if five of your friends send you an email at the weekend saying they just saw a new movie that everyone’s been talking about, and all five of them tell you that the movie was really horrible, it no longer matters how many millions of dollars the studios are spending on television or posters around the country telling you it’s going to be the greatest movie you ever saw. You’re probably not going to that movie. This is the power of the bottom, the power of your peers, the real power that people are listening to. To average people, the truth in the information, the authenticity of it is what counts rather than listening to those in power, those at the top or those they don’t trust anymore. That’s what is so engaging about our new technology. Journalism is being fundamentally changed by this. Any citizen can now create an act of journalism, or commit an act of journalism, without even knowing it sometimes.

In the United States, Dan Rather is no longer the anchor of the CBS evening news because he covered a story in which it was reported that certain documents had proved President George Bush had not performed admirably in his National Guard service. Dan Rather put certain documents up on the screen but there was someone in the television audience who was an expert in IBM Selectric typewriters and knew the fonts used did not exist on that typewriter for the year the documents were supposed to be covering. This person went on a blog saying that CBS had it wrong; that these were forged documents, and that he knew they were forged documents because he was an expert in the field. Well, CBS responded that it was not true and that the famous Dan Rather was an expert at news reporting. Ten days later, Dan Rather had to go on air and admit he and his team had it wrong – all those documents about Bush were false, they were forgeries. CBS had been reporting a lie for ten days. Dan Rather, one of the best investigative reporters the United States has produced, had to resign. Why? Because of an unknown guy on the internet.

To some extent, everybody is an expert at something. Your plumber’s an expert at plumbing. We now have a world in which all this expertise can be shared, can be moved forward. The guys at the top – such as the anchor desk at CBS news – no longer has all the information available. And one of the things we learned in the Dean campaign was that the 65 people at national headquarters weren’t as smart as the 650,000 brains out there who had signed up to work for Howard Dean.

So what happens when you have a campaign, or a corporation, or a journalism entity that understands that it’s time to empower citizens and to engage with them? When the Obama campaign come along, based around a man who had been a dedicated community organiser, things were organised bottom-up from day one. At the same time, the arc of technology and change – the internet, Facebook, YouTube, all the things that didn’t exist just three years earlier – were coming online with even more power.

A bunch of people from the Dean campaign went to work for Obama and built his web networks for him. So we witnessed the second bottom-up campaign in history, that of Barack Obama. It demolished what people had begun to hear when they were thinking that Hilary Clinton could not be beaten. The Clintons had been the biggest fundraising network out there, save for maybe George Bush. But it was the old style, raising funds in the big way. So they were defeated by a campaign that was almost impossible to imagine earlier in the year. And that was how he won.

Today, it’s hard to remember when no one thought Barack Obama had a chance and that the Clinton campaign was going to walk away with the election. The whole reason the Obama phenomenon exists, the whole reason he won the Democratic nomination, is because of the resources that millions of Americans donated to him in small amounts, donations under a $100. He raised over half a billion dollars on the internet this way; 13 million Americans who joined with him, and are out there, working, and organising for that common purpose.

And let me tell you how ridiculous these numbers are. There are 300 million Americans and we were doing somersaults down the street because 13 million of them decided they were going to join Barack Obama and sign up for him on the internet. It’s ridiculous. With 300 million Americans, we’re just scratching the surface; it’s just beginning in the United States. This is the smallest of first scratches of what has been happening. It’s the first birthing of a new kind of politics, a new bottom-up way that’s going to change the way society works because people at the top don’t have all the information, with their scribes writing the important stuff. Everybody out there can collaborate, can join together and create something as magnificent as the Obama campaign.

There in no country immune, or industry, from the changes that are coming because of this communications revolution. The change is going to spread everywhere. You’ll have industries who will adopt it faster, understand it, and there’ll be those who remain in denial and CEOs who hope that none of the change happens until they’ve retired. But it’s coming, whether slower in one country and faster in another. South Korea was way ahead of the United States in this. They elected their leader using cell phone text messaging technology long before the Dean campaign. I went to school on the South Korean campaign and read everything I could. It formed the basis, or fundamental thinking, of the Dean campaign.

There are people, now going to school on Obama. Everything is changing rapidly. In Nigeria there are 1.6 million landlines and 67 million cell phones. On the poorest village, everybody will share one cell phone with the rest of the village. When you think about that, suddenly there’s a way to talk to people about HIV/AIDS; there’s a way to talk to them about mosquito nets – you can text message 67 million people. All this is starting to happen now. And I am talking about governance, about the way corporations are going to have to work, about the change that’s going to happen with journalism. I can see democracy itself is going to change because the relationship between millions of people, not just their voting but actually being engaged with their leaders.

All of this will mean that Congress will become less powerful than the presidency. People who complained about the Bush years, also complained about an imperial presidency in which the president had too much power and ran roughshod over Congress. But members of Congress right now will soon find themselves between a rock and a hard place; in other words Barack the President and millions of Americans. All of a sudden, millions of Americans will be looking to the President as their man in government and will be pushing him to force the House and Senate to move along. Howard Dean and Barack Obama, in a few years, have built a huge advantage over the Republican Party which doesn’t have a network of millions of people who contribute and are involved.

George Bush didn’t need that; he was president. He had a bunch of millionaires who sent him cheques, and it worked. Howard Dean, out of necessity, had to raise small dollars, and Barack Obama did the same thing. Now a strange situation operates where the Republican Party has almost no ability to fight, no ability to fund itself and the Democratic Party has massive numbers of people, money, and so on. What television took out of the game of modern politics was people; politics became a bunch of court jesters and consultants who could fool anybody by telling their guy what to say on television. When that happened, people got left out – it was all about, “how can we fool the people?” But now the future is, “how can we engage the people?”

Everything in our society used to be about being the biggest – the biggest rental car agency, the biggest network, the biggest party – it was all about being Goliath. The internet and this new medium is creating, what US conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds has called “armies of Davids”. His book is titled The Army of Davids. The theory is that the internet has created a swarm on the net to work in the common good and common cause on issues or interests users have in common. In this world, you don’t want to be Goliath any more. Those armies of Davids will take Dan Rather down. If you misstep, they’re going to swarm on you.

When you think about it that way, the best example might be the music industry. When people realised they no longer had to buy a whole album to get one song which they could download from the internet, the recording industry kept saying, “No, no, no, you’ve got to buy the whole thing.” They played like Goliath. The army of Davids grew and the smart company decided to give the army of Davids some slingshots by giving them iPods and iTunes. Microsoft started doing that and the trend took off. The slingshot companies are doing really well in that exchange. The people are doing really well, the army is doing well; they’ve got 99 cent music. Goliath is not doing too well, and has lost a lot of business.

So now we’re handing out tools to people like happened in the Obama campaign and providing people with tools, empowering them, millions of them. This will not just affect politics, but also journalism and the way companies do business. I don’t believe any industry or any government or any democracy is going to remain unchanged because of this force. Hopefully, non democracies will be changed also, because people now have power to come together and demand change in their countries as well. We’re at a very early stage of something very, very powerful.