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"FacebookPinterest\n\nThe first sign of trouble wasn't Howard Dean telling that poor old man in Iowa to sit down and shut up, or Howard Dean instructing the reporters traveling with him on the day of the caucus to \"get a new life,\" or even Howard Dean growling like a rabid wolverine onstage. It was Trippi. Trippi was too calm. Joe Trippi doesn't do calm.\n\n\"Whuh\" he says, slouched against a wall in a gymnasium in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in his wrinkled London Fog trench coat, twenty-four hours before his guy implodes. \"You don't believe what you read in the papers, do you\" he says. \"We're gonna win this thing.\" He pauses. He's smiling. He is as calm as I have ever seen him. \"What are you gonna say That I crashed and burned in an Iowa cornfield\"\n\nTrippi laughs. This is scary.\n\n\"Where are we\" he asks.\n\nCedar Rapids.\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\nSomething happens to a man who has given his entire life, his entire soul, over to a political candidate. And is about to watch it all blow up in his face.\n\nJust a few weeks ago, Trippi was the Genius, the new Carville, the guy who turned a short and prickly former governor of Vermont (Vermont!) into the short and prickly shoo-in for the Democratic nomination. Every day, twenty hours a day, for over a year, Trippi had been methodically, painstakingly building what would turn out to be\u2014win or lose\u2014the largest grassroots organization in the history of American politics. It was, as he liked to put it, \"a frickin' revolution.\" Dean for America! YOU have the power! All that money in little, teeny checks. All those true believers whom he nurtured and fed and who bought all those bumper stickers and Dean teddy bears on the Internet. All those treks across the country with his PowerPoint presentation, trying to convince the unenlightened that Howard Dean was presidential material. All those late-night blog sessions with weirdos in ponytails and ponchos. All that hope and idealism and innocence\u2026about to crash and burn in an Iowa cornfield. Because, in the end, even the most brilliant strategist couldn't save Howard Dean from Howard Dean. So why is Joe Trippi smiling\n\n\"Because this is the fun part,\" he lies. \"We finally got to the fun part.\"\n\nIt's late September, and the revolution is in full swing. Joe Trippi is wearing a Diet Pepsi that just exploded in his crotch\u2014\"Aw, FUCK ME!\"\u2014and doing eighty in a thick fog down a winding two-lane highway in Vermont. \"This make ya nervous\" he asks, revving it up to ninety to pass a truck, bouncing in his seat, his fists pounding the steering wheel to Warren Zevon. \"Try not to talk through the next song, okay\"\n\nIt's close to midnight, and Trippi is driving the \"four and a half frickin' hours\" to New York City because he missed tonight's plane out of Burlington ( just one of the problems with having your campaign headquarters in frickin' Vermont). He has to be in Manhattan first thing in the morning to give a pep talk to the New York campaign team, attend \"some stupid lunch\" with magazine editors (\"Great, like I have something to say to Glamour magazine\"), meet with Tom Brokaw personally and with Dan Rather's \"person,\" have a sit-down with Bob Kerrey to try to persuade him not to go with the other Kerry, hop a late-night flight to Detroit for breakfast with some union guys, then fly back to New York in time to prep Howard for the next debate. Life is good.\n\n\"WHAT\" he screams into his cell phone. It's Kristen Morgante\u2014his fiercely capable assistant, a pretty 24-year-old who often prefaces her reports to Joe with \"Listen, asshole.\" \"His mom's gonna be calling me ME About what\" He moans like he's just been stabbed. \"Why, Kristen, why\" It turns out Howard's mother is concerned that her son is worn-out and wants to discuss this with Trippi. Like a lot of people, Mrs. Dean is apparently under the impression that Howard actually listens to everything Trippi tells him.\n\nA minute later, Kristen calls back. Now the man himself is trying to reach him, she reports. \"Fuck!\" Trippi says. He's lost his signal. He contemplates what could be so important to Howard this late at night. He's dialing like a madman and finally gets through to headquarters. Howard didn't say anything, um, wrong today, did he Not today. The only glitch was when Howard veered off his prepared speech, the one they'd handed out to the press. \"He delivered the first one and a half pages of it,\" Trippi explains. \"He promised to deliver the first three pages of it and then go off.\" He laughs. \"But that's one of the reasons people like Howard Dean. He's unscripted. He speaks extemporaneously. And I don't wanna mess with that.\" Well\u2026maybe sometimes. \"When I leave, I'm terrified. Half the shit he's had to apologize for is stuff the staff did when I was on the road.\"\n\nAnd the other half\n\n\"You can't tell him what to say. I mean, you just can't. It pisses me off sometimes.\" So how much do you and Howard talk about personal stuff\n\n\"Huh\"\n\nPersonal stuff.\n\n\"Shhhhh, this song's amazing. This is the best song in the world.\" He cranks up Neil Young's \"Cortez the Killer.\"\n\nHe hits the replay button. \"You talked through it,\" he whines. \"So now we have to play it again.\"\n\nHis phone is ringing. \"Kristen, CHILL! God, please chill. I'm frickin' fine.\" She's worried about him driving. A few hours earlier, much drama ensued at headquarters when Trippi left for New York. Kristen, his wife, Kathy, and the rest of the harem\u2014a group of sassy women who worry endlessly about Joe Trippi\u2014had wanted someone to drive him. But Trippi pitched a fit. \"This is not helping!\" he shouted, flailing his arms over Kristen's desk. \"It doesn't help me when you're worried about me, do you unnerstand\"\n\nBack in the car, he turns up Warren Zevon's \"Excitable Boy.\" He sings along, pounds the dashboard, bounces in his seat, spits tobacco juice out the window. \"They don't get it ,\" he bitches. This is Trippi's favorite insult. \"This ride is the closest I'm gonna get to a vacation for the next year.\"\n\nAnother several dozen middle-of-the-night calls transpire between him and \"the Web team,\" \"the blog team\" and the rest of the Deanie Babies back in Burlington, who are chronicling their latest Internet haul\u2014Web-site fund-raising being just another one of Trippi's innovations. Trippi wants to know\u2014every half hour\u2014precisely what the take is. One of the kids makes the mistake of telling Trippi they're up to \"about $800,000\" tonight. \"NEVER tell me it's about something!\" Trippi yells. \"Cardinal rule! This is about discipline in the campaign. Do not EVER give me a number that ends in zero. Do you get it NO ZEROS! Spread the word. And, oh, if it really does end in zero, just add a one to it, okay\" He takes a breath. \"And hey, man, thank you for being there this late doing this.\" And has he mentioned how much he appreciates him\n\nEvery twenty miles or so, he gets a little misty. Every song reminds him of some kind of profound shit. This one reminds him of when Kathy left him for frickin' Larry when they were still dating, this one was what he played when she was gone. There are songs that remind him of September 11 and songs that remind him of his mother. But mostly they remind him of what's-his-name. Like \"Pinball Wizard.\" \"When I hear this, they're talking about Howard Dean.\" It used to remind him of his days fixing pinball machines in the student union to pay his way through San Jos\u00E9 State University\u2014before he dropped out to work for all those losing Democratic presidential candidates: Ted Kennedy, Walter Mondale , Gary Hart, Dick Gephardt, even Jerry Brown. But now it's Howard that Elton's talking about. \"How do you think he does it I don't know,\" Trippi sings. \"He's a pinball wizard, there's gotta be a trick. \u2026See, they all think it's a magic trick!\"\n\nHe pulls over at a rest stop, almost clipping the gas pump. He needs to replenish his Diet Pepsi supply; he drinks a case of this stuff a day. But the rest stop, too, reminds him of Howard Dean\u2014the last time he made this trip, they were to get her. \"When we left, I said, 'This is gonna be four and a half frickin' hours. Can we stop to get some Diet Pepsi' And Howard says, 'Of course, Joe.' Then he got on the road, like pedal to the metal, and wouldn't stop.\" Joe remembers begging him, \"The next exit, can we stop\" But Howard just kept driving. \"The next exit, can we stop\" But Howard, being Howard, kept whizzing past the rest stops. \"I knew it was a game,\" says Joe. \"So finally, about halfway through, I said, 'You know, Dick Gephardt would have stopped by now.' \" And at the very next exit, Dean slams on the brakes and finally lets Joe pee and buy a Pepsi. \"He can be so fucking stubborn,\" says Joe, laughing, like this is a foreign concept to Joe Trippi. \"You just gotta unnerstand him.\"\n\nBut does he like him\n\n\"To tell you the truth,\" says Joe, \"I respect him more than I like him, and I'm not sure he likes me very much. But I think he respects me.\" He smiles, pops in some Peter Gabriel, stuffs a wad of cherry Skoal in his mouth, cracks open another Pepsi and asks if I can shut the fuck up for a while. Please.\n\nWhen Joe Trippi showed up in Vermont in January 2003, Dean for America had $157,000 in the bank, seven staff members working out of a room on top of the Vermont Pub and Brewery, 432 supporters that they knew of and, as Trippi likes to put it, \"an asterisk for a candidate.\" (Worse than an asterisk : a former governor of Vermont!) When in walked Trippi. At that moment, he remembers hearing two voices\u00D1\u2014both of them in his head. \"One of them is screaming, 'Run out of the room! Get out of here right now! You're a sicko! Don't do it!' And the other voice is saying, 'You gotta do this.' \" Of course, he did.\n\nBack then, there wasn't exactly a long line of consultants clamoring to work for Howard Dean. Trippi was an easy target. At 46, he had long since \"checked out,\" as he loves to say, had given up the dream of ever running his own \"presidential.\" In fact, he hadn't even worked full-time on a presidential campaign since 1988\u2014during which he watched his first chosen candidate, Gary Hart, implode over Donna Rice, and his second, Dick Gephardt, win Iowa but lose the nomination to Michael Dukakis. He was bitter, cranky and broke. (He claims he's still owed $89,000 in expenses. Then again, Howard Dean has yet to pay him a dime in salary.) For a great many reasons, he got disillusioned. With the system, with his career, with just about everything. Full of angst and disappointment\u2014which, okay, he thrives on, but still\u2014he gave it up.\n\nHe continued to do races, of course\u2014congressmen, governors, mayors, what ever\u2014but he had given up The Dream. He swears. He even moved out of Washington to a farm on Maryland's eastern shore with his new wife, Kathy, and a donkey named Dinky.\n\nProblem is, guys like Trippi never get it out of their system. Steve McMahon knew that when, last fall , he started calling Trippi, hounding him to join the Dean campaign. \"You gotta come see this guy,\" he crowed about Howard. McMahon is one of Joe's partners at Trippi, McMahon &amp;amp; Squier, the consulting firm Trippi cofounded\u2014and stayed with, even through his \"disillusionment.\" Steve and the rest of the firm had been helping Howard for years in his four races for governor of Vermont, but they knew they needed something more: Only Trippi had walked the walk for twenty years in places like Iowa and New Hampshire; only Trippi knew how to run a campaign from the ground. McMahon realized that if Howard was really serious about this president thing, he needed the scrappiest, most innovative, most fearless guy out there. A guy who needed Howard as much as Howard needed him.\n\nTrippi recalls how McMahon reeled him in. \"First it was 'I think Howard is seriously thinking of running for president.' And I'm like, 'Great, good for you, that's wonderful, good for him, fuck off. Click.' \" Then it was \"Get your ass to Iowa.\" McMahon wouldn't take no for an answer. He begged and badgered until Trippi schlepped to Iowa with his duffel bag\u2014like a child going to camp, he has his name written on masking tape across the front\u2014where Dean was making an early, unnoticed appearance. Trippi stood on the sidelines and watched. He watched the energy, he watched the passion. He had it, fucking Howard Dean had it. \"He spoke to me,\" says Trippi. He was saying all the things Trippi didn't think politicians, let alone Americans, believed anymore. Stuff about taking back your country. \"YOU have the power!\" Howard screamed. And Trippi fell in love.\n\nSeven minutes into my first meeting with Joe Trippi, he cries. It's late July, a heady time, when Howard Dean is beginning to morph from asterisk to holy shit. The polls are on fire, the money's pouring in, the press is enamored. Jesus, Trippi was right\u2014you really could get thousands and thousands of people to send $66 checks to a former governor of Vermont!\n\nHe's in his office in Burlington\u2014a sty decorated with three-day-old burritos, cans of shaving cream on the windowsill, phone cords that he constantly trips over and an enormous oil portrait of Howard Dean, looking young and crisp and fresh, that Trippi says he'd like to paint a mustache on. In front of him are thirteen empty cans of Diet Pepsi lined up on his desk with wads of chewed-up cherry Skoal stuck in them. He's slumped in his chair, wearing his usual uniform of overlaundered Gap polo shirt with whatever he had for breakfast on the front and khakis that are always an inch or two too long and frayed at the bottom from having swept the floors from Des Moines to Manchester.\n\nThe tears come when he talks about his father, whom he could never please and who spent his life telling him he was \"a bum.\" And when he talks about the relay race at Hollywood High, when his scrappy team came from behind to win. And when he talks about his friend Paul Tully, the strategist who dropped dead at 48 in a hotel room in Little Rock in the middle of the '92 Clinton campaign, killed by this business. But the tears first come when he talks about\u2026Kevin Costner.\n\nKevin Costner\n\n\"You don't get it,\" he says.\n\nCostner, it turns out, did a treacly movie called For Love of the Game that is well known in the Dean campaign as \"Trippi's movie.\" When he first tells me that I have to watch it to unnerstand him, he insists that I not say in print that he told me to watch it. Until I discover that Joe Trippi has told everyone in the Burlington headquarters to watch the movie. So they could unnerstand him. It's about an old pro baseball player, he explains, \"who's pitching the game of his life, knowing\"\u2014dramaqueen pause\u2014 \"that it's his last game.\" He gets choked up. \"That's what's going on here,\" he says. \"This is it for me.\"\n\nThere is one particular scene in the movie that so resonates with Trippi that the young members of his staff will frequently walk into his office and shout the line. It's when the catcher approaches Costner on the mound and says: \"We suck, but right now we're the greatest team in baseball.\" He pulls himself together. \"I don't usually come unglued,\" he lies. Then he shouts: \"We SUCK, but right now we're the greatest team in baseball!\"\n\nAlmost on cue, his little dog, Kasey\u2014an overly caffeinated terrier who appears on the Dean Web site as the \"director of canine outreach\" \u2014comes scampering into his office. \"Kasey!\" says Joe. \"Sit!\" He rises from his desk and stands menacingly over the dog. \"Would you rather work for John Kerry or be dead\" The dog whimpers. \"WOULD YOU RATHER WORK FOR JOHN KERRY OR BE DEAD\" Kasey rolls over and acts dead.\n\n\"Good girl! Good girl!\"\n\nHe was supposed to run the family flower shop, Trippi's Florist in Jamestown, New York. That's what Joe's father, a difficult man even by Sicilian standards, had in mind for his firstborn and only son. There was nothing else Joe could do that would ever please his father. \"He told everybody else how proud he was of me,\" says Joe, his voice cracking, \"but he always told me I was a bum.\" Joe, in turn, did his own Sicilian thing\u2014trying desperately to impress Dad, but sticking it to him at the same time. Dean staffers say privately that Howard, like Dad, doesn't appreciate Joe enough, that no matter what he does it's never quite enough. Perhaps it's no coincidence that Dean has his own father thing. His was Park Avenue\u2014the dad who wanted him to stay on Wall Street and was less than overjoyed when he went to medical school instead. Dean has said in interviews that he spent his life trying to please his father. It is exactly what Joe Trippi says about his own dad.\n\nTrippi's parents split when he was 3, and his mother, Peggy, took Joe and his baby sister to Los Angeles. She would have three more children and remarry, \"I don't know,\" says Joe, \"two, three or four times.\" He doesn't know\n\n\"I was 3 when it started. She was a single-mom waitress with two jobs\u2014Denny's and a nightclub\u2014and five kids. I would listen to her come home complaining about the big dinner party that she worked her ass off for all night and left her with a fifty-cent tip.\"\n\nI ask Trippi if his mother is proud of what he's doing. \"I don't have a clue if she knows I'm working for Dean or not,\" he says. They can go months without talking. By the time Joe was a teenager, his father had moved the shop to California, to be closer to the son who couldn't please him. The idea of Joe getting an education was something neither of his parents ever mentioned. \"My father believed going to college was playing hooky from real life,\" he says. His best friend from the high school track team rescued Joe from a life delivering flowers to dead people by one day persuading Joe to come along with him to take the SATs. Joe didn't even know what the SATs were, but he aced them and got accepted to San Jos\u00E9 State.\n\nThe long road to Dean began in his freshman year, when he became the campus agitator. It was a 17-year-old Trippi who led the movement to oust the president of San Jos\u00E9 State when he came out against affirmative action. It was Trippi who led fights over student parking and over the row of campus shops, because their money was with a bank that supported apartheid in South Africa\u2014and he didn't let up until the shops' accounts were moved to another bank. The only problem was, one of those campus shops was Spartan Florist, his father's business. \"I knew exactly what I was doing,\" says Trippi. He remembers vividly the raging calls he got from his dad, who was shamed and humiliated.\n\n\"They're asking me,\" his father yelled, \"can't I control my own son\"\n\n\"Tell them no, you can't,\" Joe replied.\n\nJoe and his father were estranged for years after the Spartan debacle. When Trippi dropped out of San Jos\u00E9 State just a few credits shy of graduation\u2014to drive his gold Pinto to Iowa and work for Ted Kennedy for president\u2014his father called him a bum and a political hack. Four years later, Trippi was a top gun in Walter Mondale's 1984 campaign for president. Mondale was the kind of father figure Joe had never had. There were days, Joe recalls, when Mondale would ask him an awful lot of personal questions as they traveled from Iowa to New Hampshire, then finally to Pennsylvania, where Mondale's primary win of that state put him back in the game. It was a huge win for Mondale, and Trippi, who ran the state for him, had delivered it.\n\nThe night of the victory celebration, Mondale summoned Joe Trippi to his suite at the Bellevue-Stratford in Philadelphia. The crowds were waiting in the ballroom for the vice president, but Mondale had something to take care of first. \"I go to the presidential suite, and there's Fritz Mondale and this scrawny old Italian guy.\" Trippi begins to cry. \"My dad.\" In the middle of the campaign, Mondale had located Trippi's father and flown him to Philadelphia for a reconciliation. At the end of the emotional meeting, Mondale\u2014who famously carried a pair of big red boxing gloves on the campaign trail\u2014decided it was time to give up the gloves. He autographed them\u2014\"To Rocky Trippi\"\u2014and handed them to Joe. \"I wouldn't be here if it weren't for your son,\" he told the father.\n\nAfter that, Joe and his father planned a trip to Sicily. It was time to heal the wounds. But Joe took another race first\u2014thinking, when it was over, then he'd go to Sicily. His father died before that could happen, alone in his chair, of a heart attack. When he was buried in Jamestown, Joe laid one of Mondale's boxing gloves in the casket. \"I was selfish\u2014I kept the one with Fritz's signature.\"\n\nAt that point, Trippi was considered a prodigy in that rarefied world of political consulting where you can get your ass kicked but still be respected by your peers for the little victories\u2014an Iowa here, a New Hampshire there. But that's also when he started getting fed up with the world. His whole \"fuck this\" period, as he calls it, began in May of 1987, when he was working for Gary Hart. He believed passionately, truly, in Hart and then watched him commit political suicide, abetted by the media, with Donna Rice on his lap. He started to wonder, What am I doing this for\n\nThe following year, a close friend of his who worked with him on Kennedy and was now a chief aide to a congressman called in a panic: \"Joe, you gotta help me, you gotta help me. The Washington Post is trying to do a story saying I'm gay.\" Trippi made all the calls he could to squash the story, but his friend was outed. \"That Sunday, the day they ran the story, he killed himself. Jumped out a building and killed himself.\"\n\nThen, a few years later, his 5-year-old son, Teddy, was run over by a car. Trippi was shooting some ad for a gubernatorial race when he got the phone call. He was already separated from Katie, his first wife and the mother of his three children. He flew back from the job, the almighty frickin' job, barely in time to hold his son's hand. Teddy endured thirteen hours of emergency brain surgery, but he lived. Did Trippi need any other sign Any other omen to reevaluate his frickin' life He married Kathy soon after Teddy's accident and repaired to the farm. Which is where he was, sitting in his father's old chair, when McMahon convinced him to come to Howard. \"I'm sitting there, I've sworn it off, I'm not shootin' up heroin anymore,\" he says. \"I don't care how good the shit is, I'm not doin' it.\" He was doin' it. He went to Iowa and got sucked right back in.\n\nHe had another reason to stay away. He hates to discuss it, but he's sick. \"I'm not really into this inquisition into my health,\" he rants. Then, as is his custom, he simmers down (\"Are you mad at me\") and allows that, well, okay, having serious diabetes probably isn't a good thing when you're running a presidential campaign. (For a doctor.) He's supposed to get lots of sleep, eat well and regularly, ercise and avoid stress. He admits that \"every doctor I've ever seen has told me, 'Get out of the business\u2014you're gonna kill yourself. This is the worst fucking business you can be in.' \" He pauses. \"So I'm stuck in the position of pitching the game of my life. And I don't know if I can make it nine innings.\"\n\nHe's not exaggerating. He's ill. At times it is painfully obvious. All of which certainly raises the question: Is Howard Dean worth killing yourself for\n\nHis current doctor is Judith Steinberg Dean, Howard's wife. Isn't she worried about him \"Can we get over this already\" (The last thing he frickin' needs, he explains, is The Washington Post's Dan Balz asking how he feels every day.) Later he admits that occasionally Howard will ask his wife in Joe's presence, \"'How's he doing' And she keeps telling him it's doctor-patient privilege,\" says Trippi, strangely relieved that he can continue to kill himself.\n\nLast summer he also cracked a couple of ribs. When Howard realized Trippi was in excruciating pain\u2014the staff had to tell him!\u2014\"he comes in and starts doing the doctor thing,\" says Trippi, rolling his eyes. \" 'Does this hurt Does this hurt' And I'm like, 'Ow!' I think he actually enjoyed jabbing me in the kidney.\"\n\nSo how did he crack his ribs \"Oh\u2026\" After falling asleep standing up at a Dean event one day, then crashing to the ground. At least he thinks it was that. It might have been the day before, when he threw himself on the floor, on purpose, to illustrate his dissatisfaction with Howard\u2014who finally decided to put some line in his speech that Trippi had been begging him to include for weeks. What's a couple of cracked ribs to illustrate your point\n\nBack in his office in late summer, Trippi pops a disk into his laptop. \"Check this out,\" he says. \"It'll scare the living fuck out of you.\" It's his PowerPoint presentation titled \"You Have the Power,\" the one he's been taking around the country\u2014to union guys, members of Congress, donors, whoever he thinks he can convert\u2014that shows, in fancy charts and graphics, just how formidable the Dean movement is. In money, in people, in \"Meetups.\" On each of Joe's little charts, the Dean campaign is a big surging line, while everyone else is flatlining. That was then.\n\n\"We're about to do something really fucking dumb,\" he recalls telling the various groups he's done his presentation for, if \"we\" don't rally around Dean. \"All because of what 'Cause John Kerry keeps telling you we're not electable What the fuck makes him electable We're kickin' his ass! Last time I checked, the only way you're electable is if you're the nominee.\"\n\nTrippi also loved to tell his audiences, \"I don't care if you run out of the room right now and tell John Kerry\" everything he's shared. \"Because there's not a damn thing he can do about it.\"\n\n\"Because he's not Howard Dean,\" Joe says. \"That's his problem. The rest of the guys, they still don't get it. They're still like, 'What's the bat about' \"\n\nThe bat. It is the once iconic symbol by which Dean raised his money. \"The bat,\" says Trippi gravely, \"is a powerful thing. Because this whole campaign is about putting power back in the people's hands.\"\n\nYou can still log on to BlogforAmerica and watch the Trippi mind in action. There are bat goals\u2014say, a $1 million bat with a three-day deadline, or the \"Thank You Al Gore!\" bat, which raised more than half a million\u2014and you can watch the bat turn redder and redder as the contributions pour in. It's as addictive as a game show. \"A bat\" the other campaigns howled. Until, well, the bat worked. Soon Kerry had a \"hammer.\"\n\nTrippi used to consider it a badge of honor every time one of the other campaigns stole something, which used to happen constantly. Soon everyone had discovered the Internet! Soon everyone had a blog! But Trippi figured that by the time everyone else took him seriously, it would be too late. Remember the exponential theory. While the Dean forces were doubling by the hour, the other campaigns were making fun of them. \"Now, even if they want to catch up, it's too late,\" he crowed in September. \"They missed their chance to kill us. Now they have to fight us.\"\n\nBack when Dean was riding high, Trippi would sit in his office at five in the morning plotting new ways to \"freak everybody out.\" Like running ads in Texas. Texas! The cojones. Or flying 500 evangelical Deaniacs from Texas to Iowa to knock on doors and say, \"I'm from Texas! I know George Bush! He sucks!\"\u2014which, at the time, seemed like a brilliant idea. Or getting all those people who were showing up at Dean Meetups to write letters to strangers in Iowa. He supplied 40,000 people with two stamps, stationery and instructions to \"say what you feel.\" So many of the Dean faithful participated in the letter-writing drive\u2014\"Dear [Person in Iowa], I live in Seattle, and I think Howard Dean is great\"\u2014that there were people in Iowa who were getting three a day. \"You go to the mailbox, and there's this handwritten letter, and it's from some schmo in Seattle!\" says Trippi, presuming that people would think this was a good thing.\n\nBut his real talent was in the care and feeding of his \"peeps.\" Trippi knew it wasn't enough to put up a Web site; you had to interact with them, empower them, listen to them. Which is why you would find him, at all hours of the night, instant-messaging perfect strangers out in DeanWorld.\n\nIsn't that a little\u2026weird\n\n\"You don't get it,\" he replies. \"It's them. These are the people who are doing it\"\u2014\"it\" being the Howard Dean phenomenon\u2014\"and I'm gonna pay attention to them.\"\n\nSome of the best campaign ideas\u2014what Dean's rivals called gimmicks, until they worked\u2014came from bloggers who'd log on and send in their suggestions. Trippi read them all. When Dick Cheney was going to raise a quarter of a million dollars at a fat-cat luncheon one day in July, one blogger suggested a Cheney bat. They beat the vice president's haul with 9,621 $50 donations while Cheney was still on the soup course. Then there were the \"house parties.\" One night, a few thousand people opened their homes simultaneously for a Howard Dean lovefest\u2014capped by Howard making one enormous conference call, \"which I still don't quite understand,\" says Joe, laughing.\n\nBack at headquarters, back in the glory days, the cultlike fever was even worse. Twice a day, at 11 a .m. and 4 p.m., the young staff would go into a hallway and do \"Push-ups for America.\" Occasionally, Howard would come in, roll up his shirtsleeves, get on his hands and knees and join them.\n\nTrippi would stay in his office. \"They're frickin' nuts.\"\n\nIn August the campaign hit its peak when Trippi took his show on the road. Buoyed by the response from the hinterlands, his team came up with an idea: the Sleepless Summer Tour. The rock-star connotation was intentional.\n\nThe plan was to hit ten cities in four days, on almost no sleep. When the tour touched down in Seattle and 10,000 people were waiting for Howard Dean, Joe knew this was huge. But it really got good when they landed in Texas. Bush Country. What better place to shove it up W.'s ass\n\nTrippi sits in the back of the bus from the airport to the first event in Austin, on a Pepsi-induced high. For the entire ride, he and his partners\u2014McMahon and Mark Squier\u2014joke about how they could \"whack\" John Kerry in the next debate, which was going to be sponsored by Lations.\n\n\"Maybe we should attack Kerry in Spanish!\" Joe suggests. \"He won't know what we said!\"\n\n\"No,\" says McMahon, \"we should ask Kerry a question in Spanish.\"\n\nThey ponder the ways Kerry could \"nuke us.\"\n\n\"It could be a race between us and the ketchup money,\" says Joe. \"But it won't be a race between us and Kerry.\"\n\nThe bus unloads at Ruta Maya, a big old barn-slash-coffeehouse that is packed to the rafters with Bud-guzzling Dean supporters and signs that say TAKE BACK OUR COUNTRY. The crowd is so huge that speakers have been set up outside to handle the overflow.\n\n\"Holy shit,\" says Joe.\n\nInside, Dean is on fire. Trippi does what he usually does when Dean speaks: He mouths the words and moves his hands like a symphony conductor, occasionally jumping up and down. \"Don't yell so loud!\" Dean is saying. \"Karl Rove'll hear you over in Crawford!\" When he says Bush is from Texas, they boo. \"You're right, you're right, the president comes from Connecticut. Isn't this a great crowd I'll tell ya, I won't get away with talking like this eight months from now. I'll have to be presidential.\"\n\nJoe and Steve Mc Mahon exchange raised eyebrows. Um, maybe they should take that line out. The problem, says Joe, is that \"the worst way to get him to do anything is by telling him to say or not say something.\" That will almost guarantee he'll do the opposite.\n\nNext stop: San Antonio, where more than 5,000 people are screaming for Dean in an auditorium. Even Howard seems genuinely surprised. \"Five thousand Inside\" Dean asks. Yes, Governor.\n\nJoe shifts into manic-action mode. No detail is too small to agonize over. Can someone move the podium a few more inches to the front of the stage\u2014now Can the TV cameras see the TEXAS IS DEAN COUNTRY sign Let's put some more \"folks\" up there on the stage. \"We want the right mix of faces,\" he explains. (Translation: We don't want everyone standing behind Howard Dean to be white.) As the crowd starts to chant the campaign's slogan\u2014\"I AM Dean for America!\"\u2014Howard bounds onto the stage and proceeds to give a speech that is electrifying. Joe jumps up and down, lip-synching along with Howard, doing his little conductor thing, as Howard yells, \"You have the power! YOU have power!\"\n\n\"When we started, in January,\" Joe says, \"we had one-tenth this room. Nationwide.\" For a second, his eyes mist up again. But then the speech is over, and Joe's all pissed off because they didn' t play the LeAnn Rimes song \"We Can,\" which he has personally chosen as the frickin' theme song for the campaign.\n\nThat night the Sleepless tour is booked at a Residence Inn off a highway in San Antonio. It's 11 p.m., but Joe has no intention of going to sleep. The bat has just hit $700,000. The night is young.\n\nDean joins the crowd of press and staff scarfing sandwiches and beer. \"Are we having fun yet\" asks Howard.\n\nWe're about to. One of the \"blog masters,\" Karl Frish, a.k.a. Karl-with-a-K, starts doing his Joe Trippi impression. He has him down cold: the slurred Good-Fellas voice, the angst-filled rolling of the eyes, the whuhs. He does Joe the day he got his hair cut for Judy Woodruff and the day he returned to headquarters to discover that his staff was gathered at the window, watching the Vermont sunset . \"The sunset!\" he'd screamed, apoplectic . \"Do you think the Kerry campaign is watchin' the frickin' sunset\"\n\nThe crowd, including the candidate, is in stitches. Karl-with-a-K goes on to his Lieberman impression and then the crowd-pleaser: Kerry. Dean is loving it. He nudges Steve McMahon to do his Kerry impression. Then it's Dean's turn. He stands up and does his own Kerry\u2014complete with the hand slapped across his chest and the deep, self-important voice (\"I served in Vietnam\u2026\").\n\nMore yuks ensue over the fact that John Kerry is also in Texas tonight and \"only twenty people\" showed up for his Texas Meet-n-Greet. \"But if those twenty people e-mail one hundred people\u2026,\" says Karl, cribbing the Dean stump speech. Dean cracks up, then decides to go to bed. \"See you in five hours,\" he says, retiring to his room.\"\n\n\"Let's go find a bar,\" says Joe.\n\nThe following morning, the gang is back on the plane at 6 a. m. Joe is slumped in his seat up front when Howard strolls on board to applause from the press, waving the San Antonio Express-News. \"Great news! Great news!\" Dean says. He has a big announcement to make. On the front page of the second section is an article about the power of the Internet\u2026and it's all about John Kerry! \"Eat your heart out, Joe Trippi ,\" Howard proclaims as Joe squirms in his seat. \"We're gonna frame this and give it to Trippi!\" One reporter asks Joe to read the story aloud. He groans.\n\nWhen the plane lands in New York, Trippi forms a huddle with his staff on the tarmac at LaGuardia. \"Remember, no matter what happens,\" he says, \"nobody can ever take this away from you.\" He chokes up. The staff is in tears.\n\nA few weeks later, at midnight on September 30, Trippi has successfully shocked the planet. The Dean campaign has broken Bill Clinton's fund-raising record of $10.3 million in a single quarter (and that's when the guy was frickin' president!). Not only did they break it, they shattered it, bringing in $14.8 million, in donations that averaged $77 a pop.\n\nThe staff presents Joe with a two-foot-long bat cake, but Trippi is pissed that they didn't hit $15 million.\n\nThe next morning, he sleeps in\u2014which, for Trippi, means getting three hours of sleep instead of two. When he stumbles into the office, Kristen hands him a stack of press calls to return and gives him a little hug. \"You did it,\" she says. The Dean campaign will be the media darling today, but Joe knows better than anyone how fleeting such things can be. He holds his head in his hands.\n\nOne of the young staffers bursts into his office. \"We SUCK, but right now we' re the greatest team in baseball!\"\n\nTrippi laughs. \"Thanks, man,\" he says.\n\nBack then, things were happening so fast\u2014too fast\u2014that he'd even gotten offers to jump ship, most notably a third-party feeler regarding the Clark campaign in September. As if. Joe swears he wouldn't work for any of the other Dems with a gun to his head. \"It's Howard Dean, don't you get it\" he says. Howard Dean, \"not Joe Trippi,\" who moved the masses, who got all those schmoes, including Joe Trippi, to believe again. Of course, it would also be Howard Dean, and not Joe Trippi, who would screw it all up.\n\nAs the money keeps rolling in and the press swarms outside his door, Trippi sits at his desk with eleven empty Diet Pepsi cans lined up in front of him, making phone calls. He has decided to personally call every supporter who broke each $100,000 mark. The plan is to send each of them a Louisville Slugger bat signed by Howard Dean. (At the time, it seemed like a good use of Joe's energy.) \"Hello, Martha This is Joe Trippi from the Dean campaign\u2026Yes, it is,\" he says to some lady in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her $25 contribution won her a baseball bat! Martha can't thank Joe enough. \"No, thank you. It's you, Martha, it's you and people like you. You are the campaign\u2026\"\n\nAnd the weird thing is, he believed it.\n\nA few minutes later, Kristen stomps in.\n\n\"He's here.\"\n\n\"Who's here\"\n\n\"The governor. Asshole.\"\n\nDean strolls into Joe's lair in jeans, his son's windbreaker and a T-shirt that says LOWE'S HOME IMPROVEMENT.\n\nTrippi whistles. \"Man, you can dress.\"\n\n\"You like this\" says Dean.\n\n\"Yeah, you got this whole hip-hop thing going. The shirttail-hanging stuff. I can't pull that off.\"\n\nDean smiles. He wants to know what Joe thinks. About the record-breaking fund-raising drive, about the new barrage of press. About everything. Just two guys, neither of whom thought they'd ever be sitting here running for president. And winning.\n\n\"I thought you were shockingly on message this morning,\" says Joe.\n\n\"You trained me!\" says Howard. \"I do a good job when I'm paying attention to you.\" Joe laughs. \"Really. I actually listened to what you said. See I'm trainable.\"\n\nFour months later, Joe Trippi is standing in the gymnasium in Cedar Rapids, watching the man he thought was trainable rev up one of the last crowds to witness Howard Dean, front-runner. Trippi paces the floor. Gone is his little conductor thing. He isn't bouncing up and down and lip-synching along tonight. He's just staring, blankly, quietly, at Howard on the stage. Howard, in the eleventh hour, has rolled out a new speech (more hope, less rage), a new look (green sweater) and a wife! \"They must be really desperate,\" cracks a TV producer. But even an appearance by the elusive Judy Steinberg Dean, in a frumpy blue sweater set, isn't enough to turn things around.\n\nTrippi grabs one of the Iowa volunteers. \"Tell me the truth,\" he says. \"How does it look I don't care about polls. What are you seeing out there\"\n\n\"You want an honest answer\"\n\n\"Fuck,\" says Joe.\n\nClose to midnight, he is riding in a van from Iowa City to Des Moines. \"I'm fine, I'm frickin' fine,\" he's saying. \"I think we're gonna win.\"\n\nHis cell phone rings. It's his pollster, Paul Maslin, who not only has bleak news out of Iowa\u2014but bleak news out of New Hampshire. Trippi hangs up and stares out the window.\n\nHis phone rings again. \"WHAT Aw, fuck. I hate this business. This fucking sucks. Okay, thanks.\" He hangs up. \"They're robocalling our ones,\" he moans. Their \"ones\" are the Iowans they've identified as absolutely, positively Dean voters (though it would turn out that they were absolutely, positively wrong on the number). He has just gotten a report from the field that Dean \"ones\" are getting bombarded with computer-generated phone calls telling them to make sure to caucus for Dean\u2014then giving them the wrong address.\n\nWho would do such a thing\n\n\"Kerry,\" he snaps. \"They're the only asshole snake campaign that would do it.\" He sighs. \"Every frickin' day now, I'm reminded of why I got out of this in the first place.\" The following morning, the morning of the caucus, Trippi runs back and forth in the four-degree Iowa weather between the Des Moines headquarters and, a block away, the Dean Storm Center, ground zero for the 3,500 Deaniacs who have left their jobs and their families to come to Iowa and knock on doors. Many of them are wearing fluorescent orange hats that say THE PERFECT STORM and buttons that say I SEE DEAN PEOPLE. They're screaming, \"Two, four, six, eight! Howard's gonna operate!\"\n\nTrippi looks wasted. He seems to have shaved only half his face, and his hair looks like Jack Nicholson's in The Shining. He spends the morning revving up the troops\u2014\"You did it! You did it!\"\u2014but most of them want two things from him before they venture back out into the cold to knock on doors: his autograph and a picture.\n\nThese are the people who slavishly participated in the Internet phenomenon, sending checks, buying teddy bears, blogging past midnight\u2014in the process, getting as attached to Joe Trippi as they did to Howard Dean. Trippi patiently indulges every request. \"Mr. Trippi! Mr. Trippi!\" the faithful yell. Everyone seems to have a suggestion for Joe\u2014who, after all, encouraged this, cultivated it. There's the overly pierced kid who has a \"brilliant idea\" for how they can win\u2026Alaska! Another who has written a thirty-second ad that he insists on reciting to Joe: \"Hello, I'm Howard Dean\u2026\" Another who has \"a company that has a unique way to get Howard Dean to the White House.\" But the coup de gr\u00E2ce comes when two guys who drove up from Missouri corner Joe. \"Excuse me, Mr. Trippi, I know you're busy, but\u2026\" They tell him they've driven all the way up here with a statue that they'd like to plant somewhere in Iowa but are unsure which precinct is most deserving.\n\n\"A statue\" asks Joe.\n\n\"Yeah, man,\" says one. \"It's cool. It's a statue of the corporate guy pissing on the average man.\"\n\nTrippi stares blankly. \"Whuh\"\n\n\"It's, like, what it's all about, man.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" says Trippi. \"Thank you. But please. I wouldn't do it today. Please. Just go out and get votes for the governor.\" In retrospect, this might have been the big mistake. Sending these guys out to knock on doors of Iowans. But this was the monster Joe Trippi had created. Live by the blog, die by the blog.\n\nLater as Trippi stands in the back of yet another auditorium, listening to the guy (from Vermont!) he made a contender, one of his aides whispers in his ear.\n\nIt looks bad. Really bad.\n\nTrippi nods. He starts to tear up. \"So we'll come in second By how much\" Less than 5 percent, says his aide. (No one seems to anticipate Kerry trouncing Dean by nineteen points, not to mention Edwards coming in second.)\n\nTrippi returns to headquarters. The kids in the orange hats are sitting in front of a TV, listening to the pundits predict gloom and doom for Dean. You can hear a pin drop. And Wolf Blitzer.\n\nTrippi walks up a set of stairs, where Steve McMahon is sitting alone in a dark room, sucking on a Tootsie Pop, shaking his head.\n\nIt's over.\n\n\"Okay,\" says Joe.\n\nWorse than over. They're going to come in third.\n\nHe gets in the backseat of a car headed to the \"victory party\" at the Val Air Ballroom, in Des Moines, where, hours later, Howard Dean will deliver his freakazoid concession speech. The following morning and for days to come, Howard will get crucified. But for tonight, Joe is still standing by his man.\n\n\" How great is this\" says Joe Trippi, as Howard rolls up his sleeves and begins to detonate. He's serious. He likes it. He really likes it. The Deaniacs are loving it, too. ( Maybe you had to be there.) \"This has got to confound the press to no end.\"\n\nUm, yeah.\n\nThen Howard does his primal scream\u2014AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGH!\n\nSo why is Joe Trippi still smiling\n\nBecause, in the end, he really was a true believer.\n\nOne week later, Howard Dean celebrated his second stunning primary loss, in New Hampshire, by whacking Joe Trippi, the guy who believed when nobody else did, the guy who built this thing from nothing. The guy who would have killed himself for Howard was suddenly in the car with Kathy and the dog, driving fourteen hours back to the farm in Maryland. The dream was over.\n\nBecause, in the end, it was Howard Dean who didn't get it."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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