CEO-STYLE:

Donors Advocated Change: Dean Supporters OK With Losing Trippi (Jodie Tillman, 1/31/04, Valley News)

Hours had passed since the votes came in, since the group of well-connected fund-raisers learned their man had finished second in the New Hampshire presidential primary. Returning to their Concord motel after a late-night rally, some of the 100 men and women who had traveled from near and far to work for Howard Dean headed straight to bed.

But a group of about 20 on the so-called “Dean's List” -- people who have raised at least $50,000 for the campaign -- stayed up in the hotel's breakfast area. Worried by Dean’s showing in New Hampshire and in Iowa the previous week, they wanted to figure out where the campaign was going.

“It turned into a very intense discussion,” said Norwich resident Bill Stetson, who is on the Dean's List. “There was a feeling that we were off track. We just felt there was something wrong in Burlington.”

From one session lasting into the wee hours of Wednesday morning emerged a consensus among these influential supporters: The campaign's management style had to change.

And several hours after Stetson and another supporter reported their recommendation to the Dean national campaign co-chairman, news broke that national campaign manager Joe Trippi had been replaced with a Washington insider.

Steve Grossman, Dean's national co-chairman, said the group's recommendations coincided with what Dean himself had been thinking since his third-place finish in Iowa: that the team-management style favored by Trippi needed to be replaced with a more hierarchical, “CEO-style.”

The truly staggering thing here is not just that they spent $41 million dollars blowing leads in IA and NH, but that they thought there was more where that came from. It was a campaign with no adult supervision and seemingly not the slightest acquaintance with reality.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 31, 2004 4:43 PM