This is exactly how Trippi fucked up Dean's Campaign.
THE INTERNET IS JUST A TOOL IT WILL NEVER REPLACE THE GENUINE DEAL ... JUST IMPROVE UPON IT
The failed dot.coms had one thing in common they all neglected to use the basic bricks and mortar business principles in their business. E-business was still just... Business
Trippi neglected to use basic political campaign principles in Dean's campaign... Trippi became blinded by the bat which masked the basic flaws of the campaign... ferpete'ssake Trippi based winning on Iowa then he stayed in Vermont... go figure. Dean went to every county in Iowa, yet Trippi did not reign in the Iowa Dem party machine (ALTHOUGH KERRY DID WITH NO MONEY AND RUNNING MORE THAN 10pts BEHIND DEAN), Trippi did not counteract the Kerry electability meme, nor did he think to have a consession speech ready for Dean (from the CNN's True Believers it was clear that Trippi knew that Dean was losing... he did not prepare a next step... just his exit). All of these basic campaign tactics have nothing at all to do with the Internet
The Dot.coms and the Internet
Historically, there is always a bump in investment with the advent of better technology. The stock market has seen it's greatest increases in closely aligned to advancements in technology. Switching from using men stationed a few miles apart waving colored flags between Philadelphia and New York to the invention of the ticker tape saw a phenominal increase in investment on wall street. This corralation of substanstial market volume increases. The latestst ahs been the x-fold increase to access to the market using the internet.
Vast amounts of easily accessible funds flowing into the stock market with the simultaneous birth of dot.coms skewed the real driving force...
LOWER BARRIERS OF ACCESS TO THE MARKET (or CAMPAIGN)
That's it ... yes, it is a revolution ... but no magic here ...
This is what really touched off the boom. Now all of a sudden a housewife in Peoria could buy stocks from her kitchen table in demoninations less than 100 dollars.
The parallels to the Dean Campaign?
All of a sudden, that same housewife in Peoria could get realtime information about Dean, blog with his staff at head quarters and send in a donation of 25 dollars...all with out going to the bank or post office.
The same mistakes
Trippi and the Busted Dot.coms all became blinded by the tsunami of money inundating them that they MISTAKENLY thought they had entered into the Twilight Zone where old rules no longer applied ... whereas they actually were in the same place and the same old rules for bricks and mortar businesses and political campaigns still applied but they just had a new and improved tool for collecting money and getting information out... that's it
I am not aware of a single critical party function that a coalition of Move On, DFA, ACT and the Green party could not duplicate almost overnight.
The dot.comers threw out basic BUSINESS principles like ... income vs expense. At one point they were being handed money by investors WITHOUT even writing up a business plan or a cash flow analyis... because the money was flowing they did not think it was neccessary... just like Mr. Trippi whothought basic campaign principles no longer applied because he could put up a bat and get 5 million dollars in in a week (which he did).
