Howard Dean was about to take the stage. He had less than two hours to meet his fundraising goal, or he would have to answer for it. It was August 2003, when Dean was leading the Democratic pack. The campaign had set out to raise a million dollars during a four-day, ten-city tour. New York was the last stop. With two hours to go, internet donors had sent in $900,000. No one thought they could raise a hundred grand in 90 minutes, and Dean was faced with very public failure—in front of an already skeptical press-corps.

Weeks before, the campaign had wanted to show donors how they were doing, so someone proposed filling an online baseball bat gradually as money came in, like a thermometer at a church fundraiser. As the Dean team worried about the empty top of the bat someone writing in from somewhere made a suggestion on the Dean blog: if the web world could gather the rest of the $1 million by the time he took the stage, Dean should carry a red bat and tell the blog people they’d done it.

“I thought it was brilliant,” wrote Joe Trippi, Dean’s technology-obsessed campaign manager, in his book The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. “It would mean very little to the reporters and pundits, but those thousands of our supporters watching on C-SPAN, or watching streaming feeds on their computer screens would know the significance, the bat filled with red on the website and a red bat in the hands of the candidate.”

Trippi sent a young campaign staffer on the absurd mission: it’s past eight at night in Manhattan—go get a red bat to match the one on the website, and get it before Dean goes on at ten.

The web servers crashed. The 800 number bit the dust. Too many donations were coming in. The most robust online campaign machinery in history couldn’t handle its own support. But it was too late to matter. “A huge number stared at me from the screen,” Trippi remembered. “$1,003,620. I checked my watch. 10:00. I couldn’t believe it. We were high-fiving and hugging and just then someone on the stage called out, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the next president of the United States…’” The unfortunate staffer came running through the crowd, breathless. He launched the bat through the air at Dean, by then triumphantly mounting the stage. “You did it!”

If Trippi had had his way, that would have been the most famous scream of the campaign. It represented the real-time connection between in-person campaigners, conventional press, and thousands of individual acts online that made the campaign. Trippi says the campaign was near the beginning of a bottom-up revolution—an unstoppable international revolution of the political playing-field that will disrupt the entrenched game of money and special interests, leaving something like direct democracy in its wake. But this wasn’t the scream that would define the campaign. When their new methods went up against the old in Iowa, Trippi’s rowdy, idealistic operation hit a wall.

The Dean Campaign

Under Trippi’s leadership, the Dean campaign was quite literally run by people under 30. When he joined Dean’s staff a year before the Iowa caucuses, Trippi was working with a team of six. Within a few months, dozens of young people were heading to Burlington, Vt., to join the team. The press derisively called them “Deanie Babies,” “the Dean Swarm,” and “Deaniacs.” In fact, many of these young people were the soul of the campaign: Sarah Buxton was Dean’s 23-year-old scheduler; Gray Brooks, a 19-year-old college freshman from Alabama, took off on a road trip to join the campaign after hearing about Dean. Brooks introduced the governor the day he officially declared his candidacy. Mat Gross, who created Dean’s candidate blog (the first such blog ever), was another who just showed up—in his case he was hired on the spot just as security was throwing him out because he wasn’t on staff.

Trippi had a unique appreciation for the potential power of the internet in political organizations. He arrived in Burlington with the internet on his mind, after spending most of the 90s working for new-economy firms. He also had a long political history, starting as a campus rabble-rouser at San Jose State University. There he led a campaign that forced the university president to resign. Having spent the following 40 years working for underdog presidential candidates (none of the seven he worked for was elected), Trippi was finally at the helm, guiding a candidate in a way that combined his two loves: presidential politics and technology. It took someone like Trippi, who was fluent in the special languages of both politics and technology, to explain the young people and the old people to each other. When the young staffers wanted to decentralize control of the campaign into the internet community, it took someone like Trippi to convince the veterans.

“The reality is that you don’t need to wait for some knight in shining armor to get on a white horse and ride into Washington and change the country,” Trippi told me in July of 2004, trying to minimize his role. “I think the way it’s going to change is two or three or four million Americans realizing, ‘We have the power to change things.’ And I think this younger generation has figured that out. They’ve also figured out how to organize themselves, and they’ve also figured out that if they band together with people in the baby boom generation who want change, that they can make it.”

While Trippi played referee between young, idealistic, innovative volunteers and seasoned political operatives, it was his mixed background—working for presidential candidates since Ted Kennedy and obsessed with the internet since it was a Defense Department pipe dream—that made Trippi the missing link. It was political heresy to publish a fundraising goal, even in the form of the now-iconic red bat. Trippi was able to take a good idea from the web people and explain its worth to the governor’s more traditional advisors, and to a sometimes-skeptical Dean. He says he never understood why some older liberals resisted new ideas from idealistic young staffers.

“What I find amazing is that the parents who were baby boomers, who had long hair… Most of them were called hippies or freaks. When they were 22, 23 years old, the establishment warred against them and tried to snuff out their idealism,” Trippi says. “They’re the ones that are in power now, and what are they doing? … It’s like baby boomers think they were the only generation that had a right to try and change things.”

As Dean’s campaign manager, Trippi was in a position to facilitate the empowerment of another generation of rabble-rousers. But like every presidential candidate Trippi ever worked for, Howard Dean rode into the ground well short of the White House. They hadn’t started with much: a no-name governor from a tiny state, a man whose entire poorly-funded campaign staff had been eight people when the competition had small armies, a man with the dangerous habit of speaking his mind in public. Dean had never expected to be a frontrunner, and he sure as hell wasn’t ready to stand up to constant attacks from other candidates, traditional media, and Republicans.

It wasn’t just the evil media or dirty politics that took Dean down, though. The campaign was an experiment, constantly making breakthroughs and equally innovative mistakes. It was an organization led by people without a master plan. Trippi rarely slept, and his health suffered. A diabetic, he was in serious jeopardy of physical collapse through the entire ordeal, and he had a short fuse and a reputation for screaming at the same idealistic staffers he defended to the skeptics. By the time Al Gore endorsed Dean, Trippi says he knew they were going down. He’d expected to be going home long before that, but by the “I Have a Scream” speech in Iowa, everybody had forgotten how absurd it was that Dean had made it that far.

Trippi was full of optimism when I interviewed him for student radio in late July of 2004. Dean was long-gone, and far from his reemergence as chair of the Democratic National Committee. Trippi had written and published a book since the campaign fell apart. He thought that the Dean campaign had set something unstoppable in motion, even if 2004 wasn’t the year.

“Dean was the focus of all that energy,” Trippi told me. “The energy’s still there… I mean it’s sort of dispersed into a thousand different sites that have their own community or are building it.”

In hindsight, it’s easy to see how Dean’s internet community couldn’t be transferred to the Kerry campaign. The thousands of independent bloggers and campaigners hitting the streets and the web to help Dean had been linked through a few central nexuses. The Dean website was an obvious one. The iconic liberal blog DailyKos was another. But after Dean, some activists just quit. Others fought on, trying to do for Kerry what the web had done for Dean. But the Kerry campaign didn’t have a Joe Trippi. Even after they hired Zack Exley, the MoveOn.org operative who had helped the Dean campaign with its web ideas, to run their online operations, the Kerry camp was more centralized, and wrested control from the forces “out there.”

In July, Trippi saw this coming. “There’s so much creativity in this generation, and the tools that they have are so powerful, that they’re the ones that are going to help us change this system. It’s not going to be some of the Kerry’s of the world,” he told me. “It’s not Kerry’s fault he’s been living in the system as it is for so long. We were just lucky.” Or were they? Trippi’s free-spirit campaign self-destructed, and there’s no reason to believe that a decentralized, web-driven campaign would have worked any better for Kerry than it did for Dean.

After the Dean Bubble Burst

After the late-90s dot-com bubble burst, new economy thinking went back on the shelf. It was back to caution, prudence. A few years later, a whole new cadre of speculators is chomping at the nervous bit to turn a profit after Google successfully went public. For online activists, Dean For America was its own speculative bubble. Thousands thought 2004 was the time to revolutionize politics in America, and when Dean crashed in Iowa, Democrats retreated to tried-and-true TV-age strategies. Perhaps online politics will get a Google-style revival in 2008.

Grassroots activists regressed to TV-age tactics right along with the politicians. Since 1968, when Yippies, peaceniks and general freaks made a scene outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, political street theater has been for the benefit of television cameras. For the first time, a political party was exposed in chaos, live on television. And that year, just barely, Richard Nixon beat the conflicted Democrats. But as websites begin to erode television’s media dominance, the efficacy of street protests is more uncertain than ever.

“I think [street protests] will go away,” Trippi said, “because that is playing into trying to get something on television, you know, trying to provide some entertainment so that enough people will pay attention to the protests and think about it. But I don’t think that’s the wave of the future.”

That’s why Trippi called his book The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. As the Bush Administration continues to challenge the relevance of political reporters by simply ignoring their questions, so grassroots organizing proceeds without mainstream media filters. “You can’t put that genie back in the bottle,” he said. “I think it’s just going to grow, and I don’t know if it’s 2006 or 2008, but I fervently believe that we’re going to be the knights in shining armor that go change the place. And it’ll probably be 3 or 4 million of us.”

Trippi was implying that even if Kerry won with his 2 million online supportersin 2004, he wouldn’t be leading the revolution. It would come later, a “bottom-up generational change in this country that demands that the younger generation take responsibility for this country’s future and change it.” It would come only with the election of a candidate whose support was fundamentally based in these new political methods.

The red bat incident is a good example of how the online political revolution has not yet come of age. After all, even when Dean took the stage with a red bat, an idea that had arrived 90 minutes ago from one of hundreds of thousands of Dean supporters, the bat was on TV. The web audience for campaign video was still small, and it was still the traditional media who decided whether or not to show everyone else. The time had not yet come for real change.