Dean's Manager Weds New Tech and Old Tactics
BURLINGTON, Vt. -- When Joe Trippi was a boy, all he wanted to do was design airplanes. Now he has to find a way to keep airborne a political campaign that has been defying gravity.
Trippi is the campaign manager for former Vermont governor Howard Dean. At 47, he is a veteran field operative who in the course of a long career in presidential politics has gone from slogger to blogger. "We're blending the shoe leather and the mouse pads," Trippi said, devouring an omelet one recent morning at a diner here a few miles from the campaign headquarters.
Trippi seems an unlikely person to help lead the Internet revolution in politics, a rumpled and sometimes controversial personality who broke into national politics doing the gritty and old-fashioned work of organizing. Now he is a little like one of those Silicon Valley entrepreneurs of the late 1990s.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50945-2003Jul26.html