Taking risks brings some rewards for Dean's campaign manager

By Sarah Schweitzer, Globe Staff, 9/12/2003

BURLINGTON, Vt. -- On a recent afternoon, the architect of Howard Dean's surging presidential bid was talking politics and campaigns, which is to say holding forth in expansive, paragraph-sized bursts.

Joe Trippi, sounding more philosopher than political pugilist, meandered across a broad intellectual plane, flinging analogies to computer programming and the America's Cup sailing race, beginning sentences and dropping them off without end. But with a tilt of conversation to the Dean game plan, Trippi switched to bullet points.

"We said at the outset we would do four things: We'd compete in Iowa, we'd compete in New Hampshire, we'd compete on the Internet, and we'd compete for money," Trippi said. "It's not that we don't care about Oklahoma; it's just that if we do any of these other things, we'd be dead."

Trippi has carried out the plan with remarkable effect so far from his Vermont headquarters, where a portrait of his boss stares down and black blinds are drawn against summer sunlight. Dean, former governor of Vermont, has pulled ahead in polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, a position many say he owes to Trippi's yen for innovation combined with a focus on discrete, bankable tactics.

Trippi is credited with seizing on the Web as a vehicle for fund-raising and organizing, a move that has helped the campaign, at minimal cost, rally a base of hard-core supporters. The campaign recently wrapped up the Trippi-inspired "Sleepless Summer" tour, a four-day, nine-city blitz that drew crowds in the thousands because of promotions on the Web. The campaign is immersed now in Trippi's "September to Remember" fund-raising drive, pegged to the third-quarter reports due at month's end.

Trippi, who is 47, rejects the notion that he thought up the campaign's Internet infrastructure, saying there was online jabbering about Dean before the campaign manager came aboard last spring. "We just harnessed what was out there," said Trippi, who worked for a high-tech company in the 1990s before returning to Democratic politics.

Workers at other campaigns dismissed online chat rooms and Web logs, or "blogs," but Trippi saw untapped political energy. And therein, some say, lies the quality that has defined Trippi: a willingness to embrace the next big thing, however untested it may be.

In the world of business, Trippi scouted for upstarts; in politics, he has sought out insurgents. He worked on the underdog presidential campaign of Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts against President Jimmy Carter in 1980, and last year, on the successful campaign of US Representative Tim Holden in a bitter Pennsylvania race against George Gekas, a Republican congressman.

"He has a very strong attraction to beating the odds," said Michael Ford, a political consultant and friend of Trippi. "There is this need in him to show those who say it can't be done. He says, `It can.' "

Coupled with that quality, Ford and others say, is a mind that thinks strategy all the time. Trippi's friend and business partner, Jude Barry, recalls a road trip with Trippi shortly after former senator Gary Hart of Colorado pulled out of the presidential race in 1987, leaving both jobless. As they rolled alongside a South Dakota field, Trippi demanded they stop. The field, Trippi explained, was where settlers had formed their wagons into a box shape and staved off attacks from Native Americans. "I was like, "Joe this is an empty field,' " Barry said. "But he said, `This is an important place where strategy worked.' "

Trippi is not an outsize personality like political mastermind James Carville. Trippi makes his home with his wife, Kathy Lash, a Dean spokeswoman, on Maryland's Eastern Shore, and eschews Washington night life, saying he cannot bear the phoniness of hobnobbing.

Critics say his penchant for strategy can resemble a taskmaster's brutalism. Trippi put it this way: "I don't do these things halfway. I get immersed."

Trippi grew up in Los Angeles. His father, an emigrant from Italy who worked as a florist, separated from his mother, a waitress, when Trippi was young. Trippi was the oldest of five children.

In high school, Trippi pegged his future on airplanes and enrolled at San Jose State University for its aerospace engineering program. But he lost interest along the way and switched his major to political science and devoted himself to community politics.

Trippi served as student council president and was among the vocal critics of college president John Bunzel for his opposition to affirmative action. Trippi rallied students around Iola Wiliams, an African-American woman seeking a city council seat in overwhelmingly white San Jose. "We would be sitting around in a meeting and Joe would say, `That's good, but how about this way?' " recalled Williams, who lost but was later appointed to the council. "Joe had a way of tweaking things and that little tweaking meant the difference between good and great."

Trippi left school before graduation, signing on to Kennedy's presidential campaign and later to bids by former senator Gary Hart of Colorado, former vice president Walter F. Mondale, and Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri. As an organizer, Trippi earned admirers for his creativity. When he worked for Mondale in 1983, assigned to the state of Maine, Trippi realized that some towns did not hold caucuses. He set up 93 in three days, increasing votes for Mondale in the state's straw poll, a move dubbed a political coup at the time.

Trippi later turned to media consulting, cofounding the firm Trippi, McMahon & Squier in 1991. The Wall Street Journal dubbed the group among the "new, self-styled barbarians" for ads with hard-hitting messages. The most famous, perhaps, was one that attacked an opponent who suggested women could be jailed for having abortions. The ad showed fresh-faced young women in cells, the camera panning down row upon row of them, before coming to rest on the Statue of Liberty behind bars.

Trippi sat out presidential races in the 1990s. He was finishing up Holden's bitter congressional race in Pennsylvania when he got a call from Steve McMahon, Dean's media consultant. To hear Trippi tell it, the decision to join the Dean team was a reluctant but inevitable one.

"I'd just been through the most disgusting race of a pretty disgusting career," Trippi said in a tone half-confessional, half tongue-in-cheek. "But here was [Dean] talking about the common good and not being out just for ourselves. And I thought: How the hell can I? . . . And the more I watched him, the more I thought, you're going to do this again . . . Do not do this. You're going to do this. This is the guy you have been waiting for."