WHAT Joe Trippi is doing IS Important,...........
BUT, HOW he is Doing it is EVEN MORE Important  !!!!

Trippi's INTERNET savvy permitted him to see opportunity staring him in the face from the soft glow of a COMPUTER screen.

Trippi has used COMPUTER -driven fund raising and unorthodox voter outreach as his hallmarks. The INTERNET has been present in previous campaigns. But it took Trippi to capitalize on its explosive potential to spread word of mouth at the speed of
BYTES.

In the "ordinary" world, information acts like dropping a pebble in the water, the concentric circles will move on their own.

On the INTERNET, Concentric Circles act like they are on STEROIDS!!!!!

WHEN Oh WHEN, will the Italian American Organizations recognize the Incredible value, and opportunity, and even the SALVATION of the Italian American Community, that the INTERNET offers???? I am not speaking merely about a Web Site, but an interlocking E mail Data Base List of Italian Americans!!!!!!!!!

Until then, we will be fighting the Italian American Cultural War of Accentuating the Positive, and Eliminating the Negative, with muskets, in a time of nuclear capability!!!
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Joe Trippi: Dean's campaign chief blends
tech smarts with seasoned strategy

Associated Press
By Mike Glover
December 8, 2003

DES MOINES, Iowa - As an operative who has rustled up voters from
Texas to Maine in campaigns past, Joe Trippi knows it takes sweat to
create opportunities in politics. This time, he saw opportunity
staring him in the face from the soft glow of a computer screen.

Trippi's Internet savvy and penchant for old-fashioned political
trench warfare have proved an effective combination in Howard Dean's
campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Dean's campaign manager has helped transform the little-known former
Vermont governor into the party's leading contender, using
computer-driven fund raising and unorthodox voter outreach as his
hallmarks.The Internet has been a fixture of sorts in two previous
presidential campaigns. But admirers say it took Trippi to capitalize
on its explosive potential to spread word of mouth at the speed of
bytes.

"He had the experience and the prescience to make it happen," Bill
Carrick, a mentor and longtime associate, said recently. "He's a
perfect out-of-the-box person for a campaign that started off like
Howard's."

Now comes the true test. The Iowa caucuses in just over a month
launch the primary, and Trippi will be either a genius or gadfly when
all the delegates are counted. If Dean captures the nomination,
Trippi's skills and staying power will be tested against President
Bush's formidable campaign machine on the biggest playing field.

Heady stuff for a 47-year-old, rumpled computer geek who has been on
the losing end of a handful of Democratic campaigns, among them the
unsuccessful White House bids of Edward Kennedy, Walter Mondale, Gary
Hart and Dick Gephardt, a current Dean rival.

"Joe is kind of an unmade bed," said Tim Dickson, a Virginia-based
political consultant who has known Trippi since the 1980s.

And he's something of a hothead, not unlike his boss, associates say.
Several counterparts in rival campaigns have experienced Trippi's
in-your-face style.

Trippi got his start in politics in 1979 when, 14 credit hours short
of an aerospace engineering degree from San Jose State University, he
quit school, left California for Iowa and began working for Kennedy.
He'd been captivated by the Massachusetts senator's primary challenge
of an incumbent Democratic president, Jimmy Carter.

Carrick recalled that late in the campaign, when the Kennedy campaign
was out of money and on the ropes heading into Texas, Trippi drove
from Arizona with five or six friends packed into a green Pinto and a
plan to lure voters to the party caucuses.

Kennedy captured about one-third of the available delegates. Whether
it involved setting up lemonade stands outside polling places, as
Trippi tells it, remains in dispute.

Kennedy's candidacy failed, but for Trippi it led to an association
with Democratic operative Bob Shrum and the 1984 campaign of
Democratic nominee Walter Mondale, then work for Hart and Gephardt in
1988.

Some of that was plain legwork - assigned to Maine for Mondale, he
organized scores of new caucuses in a mere matter of days.

"I remember him as being very intense, maybe even scarily intense,"
said David Axelrod, a Chicago media consultant.

Burned out on presidential campaigns, Trippi spent nearly two decades
advising high-tech companies, piling Silicon Valley know-how onto his
political acumen.

For Dean, Trippi looked through the prism of the Web, back at the
1984 Democratic race when Hart made his first run for the presidency.
The insurgent Hart campaign proved difficult to quash because of its
self-organizing energy, according to Trippi. Mondale had the backing
of almost the entire Democratic establishment, but it took him until
mid-April to force Hart out.

"It dawned on me, being on the other side of Hart with Mondale, that
if you drop a pebble in the water, these concentric circles will move
on their own," Trippi said. The Internet "was Gary Hart's concentric
circles on steroids."

Trippi noticed the online buzz about Dean spreading on its own and
found ways to shape and spur it, yielding dollars, networks and
excitement. It proved the perfect nontraditional launch for an
upstart candidacy.

"He understood the Internet in a way no one else did," Dean said.
"Absolutely, we would certainly not be where we are today without Joe
Trippi."

Other candidates have struggled to match the success of Dean's chat
rooms and Web logs, or "blogs," not to mention the campaign's
ever-inventive ways of raising money.

With a baseball bat icon showing progress, Dean challenged donors to
match the expected $250,000 take from one of Vice President Dick
Cheney's luncheons. They nearly doubled it in a weekend.

The Times Argus Online - Dean's campaign chief blends tech smarts with seasoned strategy
http://www.timesargus.com/Story/75730.html