Jerome Armstrong’s Oral History of the Dean and Clark Movements

(This is a comment elevated from my post on why Democrats and Obama don’t do what progressives want.  It is written by Jerome Armstrong, not by me. Jerome was the founder of MyDD (Kos’s Blogfather) and co-author of Crashing the Gates, among other things- Ian)

by Jerome Armstrong

In the fall of 2002, I was busy putting together about a 10-page memo for Joe Trippi on how Howard Dean could win the upcoming Presidential campaign. And it had revolution written throughout. Fundraising, organizing, communicating, the whole thing. In that document was laid out the fifty state organizing campaign, how blogs would build the movement around Dean, and how small dollar online donors could become bigger than the John Kerry’s decades-long amassed donor mailing list. Nothing short of revolutionary. If you’ve read Trippi’s book, you’ll see that he gained insight into applicable tactics from the rip roaring 90′s Raging Bull financial commenting site. I was also on those boards (for better or worse– or much worse), so we were both of similar mind when Joe got the opportunity to take over managing the campaign, on the possibilities. We also saw what McCain did after New Hampshire, with online fundraising, in 2000. It was quite fantastic. Heady days. But the point is that it was all revolutionary for the campaign, especially so being the primary for Democratic President. The electricity of the netroots movement emerged right alongside Howard Dean message that was anti-Bush, anti-war, and full-bore partisanship.

And if you experienced that ’03 campaign, you gained insight into those revolutionary tactics. If you did not, then they didn’t make up what you brought to your next campaign. And the experience didn’t need to be one of being on the winning side either. I have to credit a book that Nate Wilcox had me read for understanding this, by my looking at what happened with TV and how it changed political campaigning, by Ray Strothers called “Falling Up: How a Redneck Helped Invent Political Consulting”.

So, in 2003, we on Dean’s campaign had a big advantage on the rest of the campaigns. Dean, for the most part, knew the message to use. The campaign knew exactly what tools to use to grow. None of the other campaigns (Gephardt, Kerry, Edwards, Lieberman) could figure the internet part out (save Clark’s nascent campaign).

Howard Dean’s Strategy

As we entered the Spring of 2003, the Dean campaign staff gathered together with early bundlers for a strategic retreat in Vermont at the Trapp family lodge. Trippi had always worked on separate presidential campaigns against Paul Maslin. So, wanting to work together, he had brought him on as Dean’s pollster. They put together a campaign strategy that made sense. In short, rely on the internet-based strategy to grow the campaign up to the caucuses and primaries. Dean would lose to Gephardt in Iowa, placing second. Then, followed by Dean winning first in New Hampshire, he’d thereafter steamroll to the nomination. This plan went awry by the Fall though, when public polls came out showing Dean way ahead in Iowa too. Maslin tried to temper Dean’s expectations, but Dean decided a sweep was a must, and the whole campaign strategy was changed. Iowa all of a sudden meant everything.

Dean For America

Second, also from that March 2003 Trapp family lodge meeting. Trippi, Markos, Zephyr, Matt Gross and a few others and myself sat out on the front lawn early into the next morning, drinking and talking about what we were in the middle of transpiring. Finally, around 2 am, the staff comes to shut us up for the night, as the other guests are complaining. As we are ending and walking in, I ask Trippi what’s going to happen when it looks like Dean might win. At the point, it was still unfathomable to most, but I could tell it wasn’t a new thought to him, but instead something he’d been mulling quite a bit, and he replied: “the moment when the insurgent becomes the frontrunner is the moment when he either becomes the establishment or…” and just looks at me, like he was waiting for me to answer, but his face gives me no clue as to how to answer. My thought is that, ‘well yea, the insurgent throws down the revolution,’ but that answer didn’t phase the ‘what happens next’ look on Trippi’s face.

Fast forward about 6 months, I get onto the campaign elevator in the morning, arriving late as usual, same time as Trippi and his wife Kathy Lash. She turns to me and says, “Dean is going to be on next week’s cover of Time and Newsweek.” My first thought was to get them both signed by Dean, which I did later, but I turned to Joe and said to his nodding up, “I guess this is that moment”.

Well, what came next first is that Dean tried to become the establishment candidate. By November and December 2003, the formal endorsements. First Labor groups, then Al Gore & Bill Bradley, were rolled out. Tom Harkin in Iowa. Dean’s poll numbers grew higher. The fundraising numbers went through the roof, but a funny thing was happening with grassroots internet support. It was coming to a standstill around 600,000. I was running all of the online advertising for the campaign, so I firsthand saw the efficacy and resulting metrics for every ad we put out there. We were growing in fundraising, but the movement wasn’t getting bigger. It got so bad, that Nicco Mele had to fudge up the email signup numbers that were public on the website some days (due no doubt in part to Clark’s campaign which I’ll mention below), and we had to figure out techniques to do more than juice them going higher.

What Happens Next

So, when the insurgent becomes the frontrunner, Dean tries to become the establishment and win it all, starting in Iowa. And then we learned what really came next, and what Trippi didn’t even want to give voice too, perhaps fearing the jinx of materialization, or maybe just not having a clue either, but I think he knew what he feared happening. And here, we are talking about 1) the splitting of the movement; 2) the murder-suicide; 3) the dancer’s music being turned off .

Part of the first is the Clark campaign; part of the second was done by people that included the guys that wound up making up the inner core of Obama’s ’08 campaign; and part of the third was done by the corporate-DC media meme.

Clark

Sometimes I wonder if the division is just a feature of the whole thing. The Clark movement is complex. There was a point in time after it was all over, when a scandal formed, by something Zephyr Teachout said about Dean and Trippi having ‘bought out Markos and Jerome’ for their blogging. Zephyr was wrong about that part, but what she was really referring to (and something I fully explained when this came out) was that we’d been talking with Wes Clark about his running for President. The problem was that Markos and I wanted to work together as political consultants. I had ties with Dean, he with Clark, and so we agreed that whomever hired us first is where we’d go. That made the dilemma easy, or so it seemed at the time.

Back then, in 2002, I lived out in Seaside Oregon, in a wooden log-heated cabin on the banks of an estuary, from which I’d kayak out into the pacific ocean during days when I was free from online trading. I was standing outside on the phone one morning, amidst the chickens, listening to Trippi say, “Look, it’s the moment. I don’t want you to be thinking 10 years from now ‘I wish I would have taken the opportunity’ and not have taken it.” I was thinking to myself, ‘this sounds inspiring but it also sounds like something he might say to everyone he want’s to hire but’… I’m in, and tell Markos I’m heading out, moving the family to Vermont. But Markos doesn’t quite want to give up on the Clark dream, so while we go to work for Dean, he keeps maneuvering and eventually sets up a back room meeting for Clark and Dean.

In the meantime, Maslin revs up a focus group to run the possibility of a Dean-Clark ticket. One night, as the campaign is shutting shop, Trippi asks me to stay on in his office and watch the 3 hours of tapes. Alone in HQ’s late into the evening, the future seems to be laid out. The possibility of teaming up an anti-war Doctor that’s Governor, and a 4-star General that’s progressive, just wows the dozen or so democratic primary voters assembled for the group.

Once Dean gets the gist of the focus group results, he decides that he will break convention and, months prior to the voting, ask Clark to be his VP. Markos and I buy DeanClark.com and dream of 16 years. Clark agrees to meet with Dean but won’t decide on the VP role for sure. It goes back and forth but the meeting is on. Trippi told me later that the day of the meeting, Clarks’ guy called and asked that Dean not ask the question. But when Dean is set on something, I am pretty sure it went down with Dean asking, and Clark not committing. Only those two were in the meeting. Dean left the meeting saying it’s not on. Later, Clark would claim Dean asked him. I’m sure he did.

The second part of this involves Hilary and the Clinton’s. In the fall of 2003, Armstrong-Zuniga, as our nascent firm was called, got a call from Patti Solis Doyle, about interviewing for Clinton. I had known of the Clinton’s since going to school in Arkansas in the mid 80′s. And despite one of my close friends being the president of the College Republicans, and having a girlfriend that worked on Clinton’s Little Rock Gubernatorial campaigns, I couldn’t be bothered to even vote. But in 1986, I walked into the election-night hotel room full of campaign supporters the night of the election, as the couple was going on stage, and I didn’t even notice Bill up on the stage, just being taken aback at the radiance around Clinton. I will digress and mention that it’s also the night I stepped out onto a balcony to share a joint, and walked back into the hotel penthouse amidst a small circle of guys that were spittin’ tobacco juice onto the carpet floor, saying crazy-ass militant and reactionary shit: a Tommy Robinson suite and crew. WTF, I thought, if this lunatic is a Democratic rep, we are doomed.

I digressed to talk about the origin of the Tea Party, and now return to Hillary Clinton and the Fall of ’03, when AZ went to DC and met with Patti Solis Doyle. We were ‘chosen’ with two other firms for her new media operation, and it awaited finalization. Only much later did I learn that Clinton wasn’t just making a plan of setting up a team for her ‘standing committee’ or whatever, but instead was putting together a team for jumping into the ’04 presidential campaign. Damn, naivety strikes again. But anyway, when that didn’t happen is when Clark decided to make it a go. And Clark was supplied with plenty of former Clinton-Gore staffers and Arkansas funding to make it a go. Not all, mind you, as there were definitely grassroots operations leading the way. Without that, Clark was nothing. It was just as electric at times for Clark as for Dean. But without a doubt, coming about for whatever reasons, the division of the netroots here had succeeded. It wasn’t nearly as nasty as ‘08, but a feature, not a bug, perhaps.

Obama Team Origins in 03 and 04

Axelrod was the main strategist on Edwards entirely Iowa-based campaign; Gibbs started out as the communications director for Kerry, before moving to become the leadership of a PAC that played a big nasty role in Iowa; Plouffe led Gephardt’s Iowa political effort. They were on the opposite side of Dean in 03-04, and so they learned the revolution the hard way. And no doubt hated it, for that matter. Every single snide remark that was made about Dean’s campaign, the bloggers and the netroots, originated from their campaigns. It was Robert Gibbs that placed the quote, “Some of these Meetup events look like the bar scene from Star Wars.” Gibbs did much worse damage with the anti-Dean TV ads he helped get funded and air in Iowa. The Gephardt campaign went nuclear on Dean in Iowa. Totally committing suicide with heinous and suicidal accusations to bait the Dean campaign into a fight. Those items are well documented. I noticed something else though too, which happened late in the Iowa campaign, and deserves mention. This was the makeover that Axelrod performed on Edwards campaign. Most believe, that if the ‘04 Iowa caucus had been a week later, Edwards would have won it. I think that’s true.

The week prior to the caucus in ‘04, I flew out to Iowa and just drove around, attending events of the candidates and taking it all in. I’d report back to Trippi what I was seeing. Trippi, hilariously to me, had a seemingly 24/7 video camera person trailing him everywhere, even with private conversations. I would wear the orange beanie and meet deaniacs from all over the country in Iowa for the caucus, hang out with Matt Stoller, Annatopia and other bloggers, attend the other candidates events, and break bread with all the DC gravy train consultants and reporters hanging out in Des Moines. Three things were clear to me. First, the Dean campaign was in glorious shambles on the ground. Second, Edwards had stolen the campaign’s ‘change’ message. Third, Dean was not very fun to listen too, being way too hot on stage.

Seeing the public poll numbers for Dean slip from a month prior, everything was tense. Trippi had been freaking out over all the mismanagement happening at the organizational level, so a few weeks out hired as many old hands as he could to try and salvage the caucus operation. A significant structural problem for the campaign was that Iowa and New Hampshire were run in-state, separate from the national internet campaign’s efforts. That wasn’t as big a deal for NH, as it was just a few hours drive to Manchester from Burlington, but Iowa was isolated.

It was a massive miscalculation to change the strategy to making it all about Iowa, but what capped it all off for me was seeing Edwards had changed his campaign slogan to “Change for America”. I had thought, based on my results from online advertising, that part of the explanation for Dean’s fall off in appeal is that the hardcore support behind the “You Have the Power to Take Back Our Country” message just wasn’t widespread enough to win an election. I had begun testing slogans like “Let’s Change America” and the like, and found them more having more widespread appeal as the elections neared, but Howard had just not learned how to handle the energy created by the crowds, got into a bubble, and every time I saw him speak, as the campaigned progressed toward the Iowa caucus, he became more and more strident. Edwards was mellow (quite the contrast with ‘08) and had the appeal for those tuning in late. I remember standing at the back of the audience at one of Edwards events, next to a reporter whom pointed out Axelrod to me, muttering, ‘damn, that guy knows how to mold plastic’. As far as I was concerned, Edwards nailed it, just too late. Having Edwards become branded as the ‘change’ candidate in Iowa, rather than Howard Dean, was quite an deft accomplishment.

Anyway, this trio, Plouffe, Gibbs, and Axelrod, all saw what was revolutionizing political campaigning firsthand in ‘03-04. And after that, Axelrod and Plouffe would go into MA in ‘06, and embrace a pre-Obama, decentralized online-offline campaign for Deval Patrick. Contrast this with Clinton’s top team. Solis Doyle, Mike Henry, and Mark Penn. The campaign organizational leadership for Clinton. They had no experience at all with the ‘04 Presidential race. I’ll come back to this later.

Dean’s Takedown

The Scream. Ugh. Right after the Iowa caucus, I went and spent a week in DC. I had planned it being an event of transitioning to something great. It turned out to be a ‘what’s next’ sort of thing as the writing on the wall meme took hold. Not that this was my take, I saw right through it and believed that Dean would transition to win NH and be right back in it. But then, I’d meet with people in DC that viewed it and were already talking about the Dean campaign in the past tense. ‘Oh, that was terrible how the media destroyed his campaign… now that it’s over, can you help us with our internet strategy?’ These were DC people that just prior to The Scream had Howard Dean pegged to win it all. Ahh, dammit.

The Scream was covered in CTG and elsewhere, and the only other thing I’d add is that the wound was entirely self-inflicted. The Dean sound guy running the feed to the networks isolated Dean’s voice, instead of opening it up to hear the crowd and context. Anyone that listens to a feed with the crowd can hardly hear Dean’s voice, and it certainly isn’t a sole scream. It’s funny to think that such a seemingly small tweak set off a meme that derailed a historical campaign, but such it is.

The way a meme comes across in DC was explained really well by Dylan Ratigan recently, saying in effect that, “everyone in power, and the political system as a whole, knows that the solutions to reform the system already exist, yet pretending we don’t know the solutions exist is the easiest way to maintain the current system.” The Scream was an easy way to pretend DFA never happened. The plug playing the music was pulled. The moment had arrived, and the candidate did not become the establishment. Instead, he was utterly destroyed by his campaigns isolation of the dancer’s voice from the followers screams, and the replaying of this scene, over and over again, across America’s TV’s.