January 28, 2004

Feathers Flying in Burlington

Call this "Duck's Last Stand." Howard Dean dumped his campaign manager Joe Trippi and is guiding the campaign down a cost-conscious path by asking staff to "defer their paychecks for two weeks." It seems to me Duck, M.D. was running his campaign like a dot com drunk with venture capital cash at the height of the Net bubble. The campaign raised $40 million and gave up matching federal funds. Now, it can't pay the staff. If this campaign is about decentralizing things, why isn't there any mention of the money trouble on the weblog? Do they not want to shock those in the echo chamber? Don't Dean, M.D. and his raft trust the followers to come up with some good ideas? Some revolution this is turning out to be.

Dr. Dean told reporters, "We had geared up for what we thought would be a front-runner's campaign. It's not going to be a front-runner's campaign. It's going to be a long, long war of attrition." I thought Dr. Duck preferred to be the insurgent instead of the front-runner. At least that's how Trippi was spinning it after their third-place finish in Iowa.

Dean, M.D. also fell into the "fatal echo chamber" of his own (and Trippi's) creation. Slate's William Saletan describes a rally in New Hampshire last Monday:

Dean makes light of his concession speech on caucus night in Iowa, in which he vented his emotions with a visceral roar. In the week since then, he has repeatedly explained that he wasn't trying to scare the television audience; he was just trying to mirror and affirm the enthusiasm of his supporters who were in that room in Iowa. But that's the problem. Dean wasn't talking to the country. He was talking to his movement. And when he capped that speech with a fiery litany of states that he would win after Iowa—Massachusetts, Missouri, North Carolina, Arkansas, Connecticut—he was exhorting his troops to vanquish the Democratic presidential candidates from those states. It was the speech of a crusader, not a president.

Replacing Trippi is Roy Neel. Neel is a "Washington insider" Duck, M.D. has been railing against for months. Neel used to work for AlGore and is a former head of the U.S. Telecom Association, something Dr. Duck would call a "special interest."

Howard the Duck's kool-aid kids must just love this. When Dean, M.D.'s done those followers will have quite the hangover.

"Dean Replaces Campaign Leader in Shake Up"

"I See Dean People" [via Power Line]

UPDATE: Oliver Willis reports [via Political Wire] that Dean, M.D. is down to $5 million. He writes,

What did they do, smoke all that money like cheap cigars? The whole idea of a decentralized campaign is to save money, not spend money like you're Pets.com reincarnated.

Nevermind that the ads they ran were crap.

"The Dean Bubble Pops - For Real?"