Trippi starts his own blog - Democratic Underground

HFishbine

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Wed Feb-11-04 11:55 PM
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Trippi starts his own blog

http://changeforamerica.com/blog/

His first post (mods, no copyright notice):
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Digital Democracy
Joe Trippi

This past Monday I spoke at the Digital Democracy Teach-In, part of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. You can listen to my remarks here (first entry is my keynote, second is the Q & A session), and a number of blogs covered the conference, each with their own take.

I answered a question about my compensation for my work for Dean for America druing the Q&A at the conference, but I want to tell you what I think about these stories and why I worked on the campaign.

I worked for Dean for America for about 4 months before anyone asked me what I wanted to be paid. When the Governor and I finally sat down to talk about it, I told him that I did not want to be paid -- that I did not care about making money and that I believed in him, in his campaign and his message -- and that was enough for me.

I have said this before and I will say it again -- Governor Dean inspired me to enter the day to day fray of a Presidential campaign after 15 years of sitting on the sidelines. It was not money, but the very real opportunity to help change our country that drove me to move to Burlington, VT about 13 months ago.

At the time, we were a handful of staff -- barely enough money in the bank to pay for Governor Dean's travel, and not much money for anything else. And frankly the idea of being paid never entered my mind -- but I think a lot of people have forgotten those days when we first strated and the cupboards were bare.

But there is this pesky thing called the Federal Elections Commission with rules and stuff that require contracts -- and so the lawyers went to work on a contract -- even then I insisted that I did not want to know what the details of the contract were -- that I did not care about my compensation.

The facts are these:

1. I never had budget or check writing authority in the campaign -- nor did I have hiring and firing authority in the campaign. The day to day authority of these administrative parts of the campaign were placed by the Governor in the hands of Bob Rogan, his former Chief of Staff at the very beginning of my time with the campaign and lasted until I resigned.

2. I recently inquired about the contract and my compensation. It turns out it was a 7% contract. Meaning that if $7 million in TV was bought 93% went to TV stations to buy the time and 7% or $490,000 was paid to the firm in which I was a partner. My firm has 3 partners so my third or share comes to approximately
$165,000. I will let the grassroots and donors of the campaign decide if that was too much compensation. $165,000 is a lot of money, but it is not the $7 million the media and those leveling the attacks want you to believe either.

So why are they trying to make $165,000 sound like $7 million?

Because how do you stop a movement? How do you stop people from contributing to change their country? Its easy -- make them think the whole damn thing was a ponzi scheme to enrich a consultant.

3. My partner Steve McMahon had handled Governor Dean's media for over 12 years. And Trippi McMahon & Squier were hired as the media firm long before I volunteered to run the campaign when not many would. This is important -- because this fact means that as a 1/3 partner in my firm -- I would have made the $165,000 in 2003 if I had gone golfing in Fiji for the entire year instead of going sleepless in Burlington.

In 2002 I made spots in the wee hours of the morning and then went out and walked precincts by day, and get out the vote on election day. No one who has ever worked with me or met me would ever accuse me of doing politics for the money. No one.

I am proud of the work I did for Governor Dean, proud of any part I played in really changing things, and proud that I still believe that individuals working together have the power to change this country -- in fact that is the only power left that can still change things for the better.

I do not talk about the Dean campaign in the past tense. Because I still think Howard Dean can turn the race around. I have said it as loud as I can -- that I am out of the campaign, but I am not out of the fight.

I certainly am not perfect -- I have made my share of mistakes, but doing the Dean campaign for money was not one of them.

Joe Trippi