Trippi: "Down from Mt." Lessons learned from Jimmy Carter, Must Read.

[KoKo]

(Snip)
I want to talk a little bit about what you need to understand about the political system here. You guys don't understand…there's one thing I want you to understand. A guy named Jimmy Carter became president of United States, and it might surprise you to know this, but right after he became president and left around in there, the party pulled together this thing called the Hunt Commission. And the Hunt Commission's whole thing was to make damn sure that never happened again. Whatever this Jimmy Carter thing was, this guy who came out of nowhere, never bowed to the hierarchy of the Democratic party on his way to the White House, never really sort of went to the five thousand powerful people you were supposed to go to and bow to them and say, "Help me get this." He got there without any of them. And what they decided to do is, "We need to devise a system that will prevent that from happening." And this cycle…they devised this calendar on purpose. This thing, this cycle of these primaries coming faster and faster and faster and all of it being over very quickly was all designed as part of the retooling. They kept retooling it every cycle. "How do we make sure that no insurgent can possibly ever get this party's nomination?" And this system was designed to do that. And that meant that your only hope, your best hope for getting the nomination if you were an insurgent was to do everything you could to win Iowa or New Hampshire or both. If you failed to do that…this system was designed so that an establishment front runner like Kerry or Mondale or any of those guys would be rolling as soon as they got out of Iowa or New Hampshire and the nomination would be over in a week or two. And the only way that you could stop that from happening is to get big enough and strong. We are talking about insurgent here. This is like Gary Hart. Remember Gary Hart in 1984? I know this may be boring to you guys, but you need to understand this. '84: Gary Hart stumbles into Iowa, a nobody. He has got minus a hundred thousand dollars in the bank, a staff of seventeen he hasn't paid for two months. He gets 15% of the vote in Iowa, getting second, and that starts him down this road where he becomes famous. They moved up this cycle so fast this time on purpose to even prevent that, that your only hope was to become so strong and so formidable as an insurgent that you could knock out…you had to be able to knock them out in Iowa and New Hampshire, because if you did that then the system worked for you and not the establishment. That's what the Dean campaign had to do.

And you know, we did a pretty damn good job of it. We took all of us together -- and Howard Dean -- got to a place that according to the party rules it was impossible to get to. It should have been impossible for us to get to where we were three weeks before Iowa, to be ahead in every poll, to have more money than everybody. And how did that happen? And the reason is because there's no way to do that without the party apparatus and the party money and the institutions being for you. Well back then almost no institution in this party...it was all done with people, the American people --.hundreds of thousands of them -- all using the tools that were built over the Internet. That's was happened.

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