Joe Trippi

Joe Trippi is a long-time Democratic campaign operative, serving most recently as campaign manager for presidential candidate Howard Dean. He previously worked on the presidential campaigns of Edward Kennedy, Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, and Dick Gephardt, and is a principal at the political consulting firm Trippi, McMahon & Squier, which produced Dean's television ads.

By the 1990s, Trippi had become largely burned out on politics, and was serving as a corporate consultant in Silicon Valley before he joined the Dean campaign in February 2003. The campaign, and Trippi specifically, soon became widely acclaimed for the innovative use of the internet, especially for fundraising. In particular, he was responsible for the creation of an official campaign blog, and for the use of Meetup.com and other social networking technologies to connect supporters, both of which are now being widely copied by other political campaigns.

Dean replaced Trippi on January 28, 2004 after consecutively losing the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire Primary. Trippi subsequently signed on as a commentator for MSNBC and is currently forming a new organization, 2004)

Quote

"There is only one tool, one platform, one medium that allows the American people to take their government back, and that's the Internet."