GIVE THE MONEY BACK JOE! By Eric C. Jacobson I have a quaint belief that no leader of an electoral political movement – particularly one financed by small donors and aptly dubbed “people-powered Howard” – should take home more than $10,000 per month for their services. The vice-president of the United States grosses only $198,600 a year, or about $120,000 net. (A rip-off of the taxpayers in the present case, but I digress.) Most Americans would give their eyeteeth for a gig that netted $120,000 year. Howard Dean’s former campaign manager Joe Trippi is a seasoned political operative – a field hand in a succession of Democratic presidential campaigns (Teddy Kennedy in 1980, Walter Mondale in 1984, Gary Hart in 1987, Dick Gephardt in 1988) – who was way ahead of the curve in 2003 when it came to seeing the potential of the Internet as a fundraising and message-dissemination platform for an insurgent presidential candidate. A hardworking unpretentious visionary, Trippi guzzled diet soda and imbibed chewing tobacco day-in and day-out, and gave a lighthearted human face to the campaign which nicely complimented Dean's own relentless and intensely idealistic persona. All too human, it turns out. While he performed yeoman service for over a year, putting his “normal life” on hold and foregoing other career opportunities for a long-shot presidential candidate, he also reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars in windfall profits from his services to Howard and Judy Dean and their populist campaign for the presidency. In hindsight, the good doctor and his wife struck a naive and unwise business arrangement with Mr. Trippi. In the course of managing the good ship Dean, Trippi was permitted to excessively financially reward himself. He employed his own media consulting firm, Trippi, McMahon & Squires to produce and place with broadcast and cable outlets throughout the country nearly all the paid media spots Dean ran publicizing his candidacy. Trippi’s firm made a 15% commission on Dean’s $10 million-plus worth of television ads alone. (For some crazy reason, such arrangements are considered 1.

“normal” in the political consulting field, even though they are ethically dubious. When are presidential candidates are going to stop standing for this? Such consultants provide no service that talented salaried staffers cannot provide equally expertly for reasonable, flat-rate salaried compensation.) Assuming this is all Trippi took home from his services for Dean, this comes to (his share of) $1.5 million for approximately 15 months work. Say Trippi and McMahon had to split this sum: that’s $50,000 per month for Joe! (Dean’s deputy manager, Andrea Pringle, was a partner in Whistle Stop Communications, a firm which produced and distributed the direct mail literature Dean sent to hundreds of thousands of Democratic households. Pringle and her firm presumably also received fees in the form of a healthy commission on the millions of dollars Dean spent on direct mail.) This an unconscionable windfall profit for public interest employment, most of which should now be voluntarily returned (or forsaken, if it has not yet been paid). After all, it comes out of the pockets of tens of thousands of small donors who are passionate about social justice and ending the Bush Administration's bellicose foreign policy -- not in supporting the lifestyles of wealthy political consultants. Managing a political campaign is a public service profession. The pay scale cannot (honorably) rival that of a successful freelance business startup. A manager should not make a financial killing even where the campaign succeeds beyond anyone's wildest dreams, as Dean's did before Iowa (and may yet again). The long and short of it is that at the outset of his campaign Dean got rolled contractually by a savvy political consultant who entered into a commission arrangement for handling Dean's paid media in lieu of a high salary up front, conducted a media spending spree from which he personally benefited enormously financially, and then “got out of Dodge” when the campaign showed signs of going south. There were signs of trouble as long ago as the spring of 2003 when Trippi urged Dean to make a cameo appearance on the HBO political soap opera K Street, a show about life inside the Washington, DC beltway. Good publicity? Not exactly. Dean's appearance in this fictional TV series (starring the political odd-couple James Carville and Mary Matalin as Washington lobbyists) was inappropriate, and un-presidential. Trippi himself mugged in the background in one of the scenes. 2.

The show itself stunk, received low ratings and was abruptly canceled last fall. Worse, the media spots Trippi’s firm produced for Dean can charitably be described as standard fare. They presented Dean an ordinary politician, incorporated dated footage from his gubernatorial campaigns which Trippi’s firm managed and captured little to none of the brio and fervor Howard Dean inspired in his barnstorming appearances across the country in the late summer of 2003 as a presidential candidate. In contrast, at a fundraiser at the House of Blues here in Los Angeles on December 15th, after Dean spoke a screen came down and a magnificent two minute political film was shown depicting the essence of the Dean message and ethos. It was produced by Angeleno filmmaker John Felson and several local supporters of Dean including a professional composer who provided a moving original score. Among other aspects, it makes perfect passing use of two lines in Al Gore's stirring speech endorsing Dr. Dean last December, deftly symbolizing the passing of the torch from Gore to Dean. It sent chills down my spine and, according to Felson became known within the Dean campaign circles as “the California spot”. (I thought of it privately as the Something IS Happening spot.) Trippi never aired the California spot in Iowa or New Hampshire even though Dean’s New Hampshire campaign manager kept pushing to use it. It is even unclear whether Dean personally ever saw it until it was almost too late. The campaign finally screened it before a national audience on C-SPAN before Dean spoke in Tacoma, Washington on the Tuesday night that Dean finished out of the running in seven other primaries a week after his loss in New Hampshire. If Dean wins Wisconsin, hopefully the spot will be aired in California media markets prior to our March 3rd primary. It may -- or may not -- be too little, too late. This was not Trippi’s only mistake. He could and should have had a much more detailed strategy for helping Dean “close the deal” with Democratic voters. When Dean emerged prematurely as the front-runner last year, there were indications he was not readying himself properly for “prime-time.” Judy Dean carried on “business as usual” far too long. The Deans gave the impression they were not taking their potential elevation to America’s first couple as seriously as they should. A great campaign manager would have given the Deans better advice in this regard. 3.

Trippi also let the campaign get over-enamored with its online communications platform and its belief in grassroots organizing. There is no doubt that the Dean 2004 model is the wave of the future in presidential campaigning. (In reality it is “back to the future” of what the Gene McCarthy campaign did in 1968 and George McGovern did in 1972 under Gary Hart and Gene Pokorny’s leadership, and Hart himself did to a lesser extent in his own insurgent presidential campaign in 1984). In one conspicuous lapse among others, the Dean campaign failed to train its Iowa precinct captains in the details of the logrolling that goes on within the Iowa caucuses. The Kucinich and Edwards people ran circles around the Dean people within the caucuses. It turned out that internet-plus-grassroots-organizing techniques were not mature enough in 2004 to serve as a bypass road past the gatekeepers of an endemically skeptical commercial media and the traditionally persuasive influence of paid television advertising. When the (commercial media) empire struck back over the holidays, filling the newsstands with damaging cover stories featuring “Doubts About Dean”, the Dean campaign had no effective reply and Iowa Democrats were left to enjoy the holidays and brood about their tentative choice of Dean to lead the Party in 2004. Had “the California spot” been running at saturation levels in Iowa and New Hampshire through the holidays, voters there would have had their antidote. Instead Trippi plowed millions of dollars of the small donors' money into yet another pedestrian ad attacking Dick Gephardt for his pro-Iraq war vote. Gephardt replied in kind, and Iowa voters ultimately fled from both for the safe harbor of the “nice” candidates, Edwards and Kerry. Notably, the Gephardt campaign was being managed by Steve Murphy, a partner in Murphy Putnam Media Inc., a firm which produced and placed Gephardt’s political ads. Murphy and Trippi are ex-colleagues who had a falling out in the early 1990s and did not speak for five years. Whether this personal rivalry clouded Trippi’s judgment only he knows. He and Murphy engaged in an unproductive war of words and ads in the days and weeks before the Iowa caucuses. It is even possible that the two were consciously or unconsciously motivated to bleed campaign funds in the service of that rivalry, knowing that each was banking a sizable commission on the ruinous advertising spending. 4.

It is also reported that Trippi was the one who urged Dean to go out and buck up the disappointed volunteers in Iowa the night of his disappointing third place finish in the caucuses. The rest may – or may not – be history. Trippi could help correct his past mistakes and show his true colors as a devoted public servant by refunding to Dean the windfall portions of his compensation as Dean campaign manager, that is, everything above the $10,000 a month (net) he was rightfully entitled to make for his diligent 24/7 services to Dean and the American people. “Victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan,” the expression goes. For the moment, Trippi, McMahon & Squier are three wealthy orphans. Do the right thing Joe: Give the money back! We can really use it! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Eric C. Jacobson, a public interest lawyer practicing in Culver City, is a delegate candidate for Howard Dean in the 36th Congressional District. His email address is [email protected].

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