"For Love of the Game: The return of Joe Trippi"

Noam Scheiber (The New Republic):

One of the little-foreseen consequences of the Internet era is the decline of an august institution called the spin room, the place to which campaign aides run after each presidential debate to talk up their boss's performance. There was a time, not too long ago, when the typical spin room looked like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on a day that the Dow was in freefall. But, with campaigns now mostly engaging in e-mail combat, and with reporters rushing to post instant wrap-ups on their websites, there's little appetite for face-to-face interaction. You could have taken a reasonably sound nap in the spin room after several recent debates.

One such debate took place at Dartmouth College in late September. The first high-profile spinner on the premises, Mark Penn of the Clinton campaign, stands around in his pinstriped suit for five or ten minutes before a reporter even asks him a question. Tradition has it that an eminence like Penn must be trailed by a grunt carrying a large sign with his name on it. This is so he'll be identifiable amid the mob of reporters crowding the room. But tonight it looks like some kind of sight-gag.

Maybe ten or 15 minutes later, a dark, droopy-shouldered man with graying brown hair struts into the room, wearing ratty jeans and a tweedy-looking blazer. Though he has no sign-carrier, the man would be immediately recognizable to most veteran reporters as Joe Trippi--the guru behind Howard Dean's miraculous rise and (some would say) his fall. Trippi became a minor celebrity during the 2004 campaign, when he used the Internet to set fund-raising records for Dean and lead a rebellion of peasant-bloggers. Problem is, there don't appear to be many people who covered the '04 campaign in the room tonight. For several minutes, the only people questioning Trippi are me and an earnest British journalist, who sounds like he's following his first U.S. election.

Trippi is in an expansive mood nonetheless. John Edwards, whose campaign Trippi now more or less oversees, has had what, by all accounts, is the best night of the three major candidates. But the real topic of conversation is Barack Obama, who disappointed once again. Trippi is eager to join the speculation about what's going on with him.

Most campaign sharpies speak in sound bites. An unusually helpful one will toss in some tactical insights or off-the-record gossip. What makes Trippi so compelling is that he spins out full-blown theories, which he narrates with great passion. Perhaps his most famous theory was immortalized by the journalist Richard Ben Cramer in What It Takes, his epic about the 1988 campaign. It starred Dick Gephardt in the role of Dick Gephardt and former senator Paul Simon in the role of Bambi, and it concluded with Trippi telling Cramer: "So, in the NBC debate, Gephardt takes out a .357 Magnum and blows Bambi's head off."

Tonight's theory goes something like this: For the better part of a year now, the press has treated Obama to fawning coverage, the kind of attention that would cost you half a billion dollars to buy yourself, and even then it wouldn't be as effective. And, yet, after a brief moment of upward movement, Obama is back to around 20 percent in many state and national polls. "So, somebody's got to explain to me--I don't care if he's got $400 million," Trippi says. "You can't replicate what the media did for him."

At a certain point, I feel obliged to ask about the Obama organization in Iowa, which the scuttlebutt says is the most sophisticated of all the major candidates'. That's when I'm reminded of a second thing reporters love about Trippi: his distaste for the norms of campaign syntax. I see a small grin form on his face, and Trippi, whose voice normally sounds like a combination of Kevin Costner and Kermit the Frog, lapses into his best prisoner-of-war impression: "Their organization is formidable. I don't know how we're going to overcome it," he says.

The Brit's jaw drops. "That's your quote?"

"I'm saying that ironically, just so you know," Trippi responds. "That's my quote, except it's ironic."

A few feet away, I see a rival spinner's eyes widen.

The last time I showed up at Trippi's farmhouse on the Eastern Shore of Maryland was February of 2004. It was not long after Howard Dean's spectacular meltdown in Iowa, which had led to Trippi's ouster, and the mood was grim--for both of us. A few months earlier, I had proclaimed the Dean campaign a juggernaut and Trippi its driving force. True, I was hardly the only journalist to get caught up in the moment. But I was probably the only journalist who went on about it for 7,000 words. With a picture of Trippi on my magazine's cover. Under the headline: THE MAN WHO REINVENTED CAMPAIGNING. We sometimes struggled to make eye contact.

At the time, Trippi was being accused of everything from botching Dean's Iowa strategy, to spending the campaign into the ground, to lining his own pockets with outsized consulting commissions. Many of these charges turned out to be either false or overstated, and Trippi spent much of our interview debunking them. But the truth was that, for a man whose boss was once such a sure bet it almost seemed pointless to hold the primaries, Trippi didn't seem that broken up about the way things had turned out.

At least not about Dean per se. Prior to Trippi, campaigns had mostly used the Internet to do the same things they'd always done--raise money, send information to voters--only slightly more efficiently. Trippi had used the Internet as an interactive tool, making people feel invested in the campaign the way they felt invested in other online communities, like blogs and chat rooms. These supporters would then recruit friends and relatives, effectively doing the campaign's job for it. What really weighed on Trippi was the idea that this online movement might be dismissed as a fad. "All I want for someone to say is this thing worked," he bleated. He seemed to take comfort in the dozens of letters pouring into his mailbox from Deaniacs around the country--via "snail mail," ironically. One typical letter read: "Until you made Howard Dean a known candidate and got me involved through the Internet ... I was only stewing in my anti-Bush rage, not understanding how we could ever get his ass out of the White House." The letter ended with a reference to a tearful call Trippi had placed to MSNBC as he drove home from Vermont: "P.S. I listened a bit to the [Deborah] Norville interview last night, and felt your pain as you choked up ..."

It's safe to say that the mood had lightened by the time I trekked back to Trippi's house a few weeks ago. His wife, Kathy Lash, and I made small talk while Trippi sat on his couch wearing paint-stained sweatpants and a ratty t-shirt, barking orders into a cell phone. Trippi shooed her away once he hung up. We had less time than he'd expected, he explained. Edwards was getting off a plane at five o'clock and Trippi needed to have a memo ready for him by then.

Trippi's road back from the Dean debacle was almost as conventional as his rise was unorthodox: He wrote a book, launched a new consulting firm, advised a few foreign candidates and domestic campaigns. What looked like a fad in early 2004 was, by 2006, clearly the future, and Trippi's services were increasingly in demand. (Leonardo DiCaprio will reportedly play Trippi in a forthcoming movie version of the Dean campaign.) Trippi guest-lectured at Northwestern for a class taught by Obama strategist David Axelrod, and the two men briefly discussed how he might join the campaign. Several weeks later, Trippi met with Clinton strategist Howard Wolfson to discuss a possible role in Hillaryland. When neither option panned out, an acquaintance put Trippi in touch with John and Elizabeth Edwards. He flew down to North Carolina for a three-hour conversation and accepted a job with Edwards a few weeks later.

Trippi is that rare species: a basically honest guy who often sounds like he's bullshitting you. There are times you're so certain Trippi is telling a tale you practically roll your eyes. Then you go back and verify the details ... only to discover it's true. To wit, a story Trippi told me about John Vinich, a former U.S. Senate candidate in Wyoming. In 1988, Vinich overcame a nearly 20-point deficit in the final weeks of his campaign against Senator Malcolm Wallop. "We made this five-minute spot. And it croaked Wallop, just croaked him. ... It was just a masterpiece. One of the greatest things I've ever done," Trippi recalled. The ad featured a newscaster reading reports of Wallop's numerous sins: accepting $5,000 from the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, a man who condones mass marriages; flying on the Moonies' jet; etc. "And so [the night of the election], no one can believe it. Vinich is going to be the U.S. senator from Wyoming. I mean, this is like out of nowhere." Later, I pulled up a New York Times article from November 10, 1988. Sure enough, Vinich and Wallop were headed to a recount after most observers--the Times included--had written Vinich off. (Wallop eventually pulled out the victory.)

This is the dilemma I face as I try to figure out how, at some point this summer, Trippi's role within the Edwards campaign evolved from media and Internet consultant to chief strategist. The story I hear from people close to the campaign is that Trippi moved to fill a vacuum that existed when he came aboard. Edwards's nominal campaign manager, David Bonior, was a distant figure--more like a traditional campaign chairman than a day-to-day manager--while many of Edwards's top aides from 2004 had undergone major life changes (babies, weddings, high-powered jobs) and were reluctant to move to North Carolina. By July, the campaign was hemorrhaging money, and Trippi lobbied the Edwardses to hire two close associates: Chris Kofinis, who became communications director, and Paul Blank, who became deputy campaign manager. The move stopped the bleeding--and effectively consolidated Trippi's control.

But, of course, you can't just tell a reporter you've taken over. Here's what Trippi says when I ask if he's the guy in charge: "You know, I'm not. I never wanted to run the Dean campaign in the first place, and I'm not running this thing. ... I couldn't, even if I wanted to." Then he pauses to acknowledge his own track record with Dean, where he also started off as a consultant and ended up as the boss. "Even if I didn't want to run this like I didn't want to run the Dean campaign, and I was sort of thrust into it, I can't play that role. I'm really one of the three strategists for the thing, with [pollster] Harrison Hickman and [the other deputy campaign manager] Jonathan Prince."

The thing to understand about Joe Trippi is that being an underdog is absolutely central to his identity. Trippi's parents divorced when he was three months old, and his mom worked two waitressing jobs to put food on the table. Twenty-two years later, he dropped out of college to work as an organizer for Ted Kennedy's presidential campaign. It is, in other words, no surprise that he would see himself as an outsider. What's sometimes surprising is how pervasive the feeling is. At the height of the Dean phenomenon, when the world was ready to crown Dean the nominee, Trippi favored allusions to For Love of the Game, a movie about a washed-up pitcher on a lousy team who somehow pitches a perfect game against the Yankees. "We stink!" the Deaniacs would yell, adapting a line from the movie. "But we're the best team in baseball right now."

Or take his decision to join the Edwards campaign. Trippi first turned down the offer after meeting with John and Elizabeth in North Carolina. It was probably a wise decision, given that he suffers from Type 2 diabetes. (He also recently developed diabetic neuropathy, a condition that triggers an intense stabbing sensation; Trippi takes anti-seizure medication to control it.) A few weeks after declining the job, Trippi heard the rumor that Elizabeth's cancer had recurred and Edwards was getting out of the race. "I've got MSNBC going ... and, um, you know, I'm laying back like this, going yeah, that's really too bad. I really liked them. ... So they walked out and said they were going to keep going." Trippi was floored. "Here I am, feeling all sorry for myself with my anti-seizure medicine, and they can go." Finally, Trippi said to himself, "Dude, you're fifty-one. You spent your whole life trying to make a difference in politics. And you can make a difference with them. And they're going to soldier on with this. Get up. Go to the phone. Call."

In this sense, Trippi's way of framing campaigns is almost a perfect extension of his personality. The Dean campaign delighted in attacking the Democratic establishment. Trippi quickly honed Edwards's message along the same lines, which meant turning fire on Hillary Clinton. An e-mail Trippi sent out in September called Hillary a "corporate Democratic insider" and said that "there isn't an American outside of Washington who would not be sickened" by a fund-raiser she planned to hold involving lobbyists and members of Congress. Edwards himself began channeling Dean, too. At a debate in August, Edwards took a veiled shot at Hillary so Dean-like it shocked some of his staffers. "You will never see a picture of me on the front of Fortune magazine saying, 'I am the candidate that big corporate America is betting on,'" Edwards said, alluding to a cover story about Clinton. "That will never happen. That's one thing you can take to the bank."

Even Trippi's personal dealings are colored by his Jedi-versus-Death-Star worldview. The Dean campaign famously split between Trippi and his tech-savvy loyalists, on the one hand, and a corps of Vermont hands on the other. Trippi (probably correctly, in retrospect) came to view the Vermonters as a dark force plotting against him. The Edwards campaign, too, has developed Trippi and anti-Trippi factions--with the latter composed mostly of veterans of Edwards's first run for president. "If you weren't there for the last cycle, it's not weird for you," says a former aide with ties to the old guard. "But, for people who were there, there have been adjustments."

One of the things you often hear said about Trippi is that, out of every ten ideas he has, one or five or nine will be brilliant (the numbers vary according to how the person feels about him), and the rest will be disastrous. The trick, according to this view, is to have people around him who can screen out the duds.

I think this is true but incomplete. The Democratic primary Trippi is perhaps most obsessed with is 1984, when Gary Hart challenged Walter Mondale. Trippi talks constantly about the race around Edwards campaign headquarters, and he brings it up with me, too. On February 28 of that year, Mondale enjoyed the largest-ever lead by a non-incumbent in a nationwide poll. "Look at the banner headline in The New York Times," Trippi tells me, searching for the article on his laptop. "It's 'Mondale Leads Rivals by Record Level.' It was Mondale fifty-seven, Jesse Jackson eight the morning of the New Hampshire primary." And, yet, Hart somehow won New Hampshire and went on to give Mondale the fight of his life.

On one level, the story is another example of Trippi's sympathy for the underdog. But what's curious about it is this: Trippi actually worked for Mondale that year. Listen to him tell it often enough, and you get the impression that there's something else going on. You begin to suspect Trippi would rather lose in style than win boring or ugly--as though he were not so much an operative as an aesthete who just happened to work in politics. Trying to engineer a spectacular victory--trying to pitch that perfect game--may cause you to crash and burn from time to time. But that's the price you pay for art.

The night after the Dartmouth debate, I happened to overhear Trippi at the airport in Manchester, New Hampshire. He was having a heated phone conversation with another reporter, and, after he hung up, I tapped him on the shoulder. "Great night for you guys last night," I said. He looked frazzled. "Man, you guys just don't understand what we're trying to do with this public financing thing."

The "public financing thing" was Edwards's announcement earlier that day, during an interview with CNN, that he planned to accept federal matching funds. The decision would give him an infusion of cash but impose strict spending limits. The press immediately interpreted it as evidence that the campaign was broke, leading to two days of negative stories. What left most people scratching their head wasn't the decision itself--if you're broke, you're broke, there's no way around it--but the timing. It was mystifying that, at precisely the moment Edwards had put Hillary on the defensive and was riding high, the campaign would raise unprompted questions about its own viability. It had Trippi's fingerprints all over it.

The fallout was swift among Edwards's money men. "I had thirty to forty phone calls in a period of a couple hours," says Fred Baron, Edwards's finance chairman. "[Trippi] apologized; I accepted. ... It likely won't happen again." Still, some in the campaign smelled blood and, over the next few weeks, worked to marginalize one of Trippi's lieutenants.

When I later asked Trippi about the public financing announcement, he seemed contrite. "I was one of the people that argued for doing it that day. ... Harrison [Hickman] argued against it and should deserve credit for being right. " But there had been a rationale: Throughout the campaign, Edwards had been hectoring Clinton about taking contributions from lobbyists. Each time he did, Clinton would say that spurning lobbyists wasn't the answer; the answer was public financing. Now that Edwards was going to have to take public financing anyway, why not call her bluff? That's where Trippi came in. "We had just had a great debate night. So now: 'Join us. You said public financing. We're going to do it. Join us, or tell the American people why you didn't mean what you said, '" he explained, suddenly perking up. "What we didn't expect was the cynicism of the press corps, which never even went and asked her. I mean, to this day, I don't think there's a single reporter who went and said, 'Hey, he's doing this, are you going to join him?'"

It was a highly questionable assumption: Hillary had made it clear for almost two years that she would be opting out of the public financing system. Why would any reporter bother asking her about it now? But, you had to admit, the logic had a certain elegance. You could almost imagine some alternate universe where the press had grabbed the story and spent the next two days pestering Hillary, not Edwards. It was the same universe where Gary Hart had beaten Walter Mondale and Howard Dean had won Iowa. That this universe never existed didn't necessarily detract from Trippi's enjoyment of it.