Joe Trippi is like an entrepenuer. Lots of vision and energy. Entrepenuers are essential in getting a new business (or in this case a campaign) started, but when the business (or campaign) matures, they often fall short on the management skill for the day to day operation. I think that is what has happened here. It isn't anything negative on Joe's part, it's just that the leadership to get something started is just different than what it takes to keep it going. Right now we do need someone who understands the nitty gritty inside stuff including the dirty tricks being pulled by some of the other campaigns. All of our efforts will be for nothing (including Joe's) if the campaign doesn't face it's problems head on.

This precisely mirrors my thinking, so I'm bound to agree with it. The problem is, those dot.coms and other Internet-based start-ups that ditched their visionary founders for run-of-the-mill corporate management have a pretty dismal record of success. And in this situation, there isn't a lot of time to let everyone get up to speed and turn the company around. If Dean doesn't win something very soon, even if its only Delaware, he's basically screwed.

All along the punditocracy (including rank amateur pundits like myself who have the inexplicable urge to share their lack of knowledge with anyone who comes down the pike) has been saying that Dean has money and organization and a 50-state campaign and would, because of all those things, be in it till the end. Now it turns out there's no money, the organization is in turmoil, and all the February 3rd states are being ignored in the hopes of bringing in Washington state or Michigan. Well, that's a strategy, of sorts, and perhaps the only one that's available to them in their straightened circumstances, but it's hardly a high-probability one, and it's one that could prove itself to be wanting very, very quickly.

Dean himself, in his talk to his staffers, talked about a long, drawn-out, "war of attrition", but that kind of campaign assumes that the insurgent is embedded in the community and can draw on those resources at liberty while the front-runner wears himself out trying to get rid of the thorn in their side. Problem is, the clock is ticking, and there's really no time for a long, drawn-out insurgency. The front-runner, piling up win after win (or, at least, delegate after delegate) can afford to wait it out, because, in this situation, time is on his side, not on the the side of the guerilla campaign. (And, in any event, what makes anyone think that Neel, coming from a big campaign background, is the right type of guy to run that kind of enterprise?)

No, I think everything now is stacked against Dean, and in a way that being the underdog, a condition that always has appeal for many Americans, really won't help much. So while I'm glad that Neel is enough of a good politico to know that he must pacify the troops before turning to the actual work that has to be done, it's almost a foregone conclusion ("inevitable," Matthew Yglesias might say) that Dean is done.

Postscript: Simon Rosenberg, writing on the blog of the New Democratic Network, has what I thin is a very good take on the long-term effect of Joe Trippi's work:

Pundits will be discussing for a long time the meaning of Dean, and will work to dissect what happened over the last six weeks. I’ve written about this some already (see Making Sense of Dean), but I think the easiest way to understand what has happened is that Dean, like many innovative insurgents, has had trouble turning his dynamic insurgency into a sustained and serious candidacy. But regardless of the outcome of the Democratic nomination, like many other insurgents he has created a vastly different political landscape and language.

The Dean insurgent phase - from June 2003 to Jan 2004 - also coincided with a remarkable rise of the Democratic Party. In our June poll from last year all Democrats trailed Bush by 16-20 points in direct matchups. Today, in the latest Newsweek poll, all Democrats are within the margin of error of Bush, and Kerry actually leads. As Dean the insurgent changed our Party the public responded to our new, stronger and better approach and we gained 15 points across the board for all candidates.

Dean’s full-throated indictment of Bush has become the industry standard; the tone, tenor and style of his Internet communications have been emulated by everyone in the Party and even Bush; and perhaps most importantly and lastingly, he has allowed the Party of the middle class to once again understand how to make the middle class a partner in our politics and not just consumers of our policies.

[...]

Dean and groups like MoveOn have shown that the Internet is an efficient and effective way to allow many new people to participate in the system again. And what the Dean campaign understood first is that by giving a role for regular people to play in your politics it made the argument that your campaign was really about the middle class much more compelling and true. Our audience as a Party has changed. And you can hear it in our language as a Party - the forgotten middle class is forgotten no more.

What Dean and its Trippi era have done is to make the Party of the middle class more authentically the champion of the middle class by fundamentally altering how we finance and imagine our politics. This campaign is about them. No winks, no nods. We now know that we can only win this race with not just their votes but with their active participation in our politics again.

Our frontrunner Kerry has adopted this approach. He talks of his website, talks of taking back the country from the special interests, talks about how all of this is for "us" and not him. And if it sounds like he means it, he does.

My fellow New Democrats, this is what we've been calling for for twenty years - a politics driven by the interests of the middle class. What many in our movement have not understood is what Trippi understood – that to be true to our word, to be the true champions of the middle class, we would have to fundamentally change our politics, and make it more participatory, more open, more iterative, and more democratic.

The Dean/Trippi contribution to all of progressive politics – including us New Democrats – has been huge. They clearly made mistakes along the way, perhaps fatal ones, but it cannot change the fact that our politics and our party today are stronger for it.

[via Tapped]