At left is Joe Trippi, a political consultant who has joined the presidential campaign of Democrat John Edwards. This is big news in the political world, for several reasons.
First, Trippi managed the campaign of Howard Dean in 2004, helping to bring a little-known Vermont governor much, much further than anyone had expected. Dean self-destructed in the end — though he faced an barrage from his competitors that also helped bring his candidacy down — but his rise to the heights was an amazing thing to watch.
Second, and more important, Trippi was among the earliest political gurus to understand the power of the Net. Others have followed his lead, but Trippi deserves a lot of credit for helping to tap the online community, initially for funds but also for ideas.
He told me something that I put in “We the Media,” and it’s stuck with me: “Broadcast politics tells people they don’t count.”
Where will YouTube politics take us? Stay tuned…
(Photo by JD Lasica)
on Apr 21st, 2007 at 5:56 pm
Nonsense. The whole art of politics is making people *feel* like they count.
Dan, this is a good small example of where I think there’s valid criticism of what you say. You set up a strawman, the “Broadcast politics”, versus “YouTube politics”, the New New thing – and if someone wanted to point out the obvious playing to the Web 2.0 Kool-Aid, versus any reality, the only people who can get heard and protect themselves against the inevitable attacks are those with their own power-bases like Keen. And he’s playing to his own crowd. It looks like there will be a lot of this in the upcoming election cycle 🙁
on Apr 21st, 2007 at 7:37 pm
“Broadcast politics tells people they don’t count.”
This is a gross understatement of the problem. With mainstream media, you only heard what the major networks wanted you to hear, specifically what THEIR candidates had to say and anyone with enough money to BUY an election That’s the big difference with internet campaigning. It costs nothing to upload a position video to YouTube. Sure, candidates will be caught offguard with silly haircut songs and without a doubt there will be more silly parody videos like the Apple one, but in the end we still have MUCH more information that we ever did before. It’s only a matter of discovering the best way to filter it…in other words, who do you trust.
Here’s my own stab at a voter public service website…
http://www.ExpertVoter.org
It’s nothing more than organizing the existing YouTube candidate videos by issue. Very simple. Be very careful about the more mainstream efforts like YouChoose and CitizenTube. Follow the money. Google is not evil, it’s just that they are after ad money. As a result they are ignoring independent candidates. It’s just like their China censorship problem…just follow the money to understand how it works.
gary
on Apr 22nd, 2007 at 9:08 pm
Here’s a link to a blog post which includes an MP3 download of a Trippi speech at Williams College where he laid out pretty clearly what he figured would happen in 2008 . . . bonus stuff from Dukakis and Lakoff, too.
http://newshare.typepad.com/greylocknews/2005/11/speech_michael_.html
on Apr 23rd, 2007 at 12:22 am
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