Is this it? Is the Clinton campaign the last ever top-down, Democratic presidential campaign?

Joe Trippi thinks so. According to Trippi, “No one will make the mistake again of running a solely top-down presidential campaign in the Democratic Party.”

Trippi was one of four speakers (including Simon Rosenberg of NDN, Amy Walter of the Hotline, and Andres Ramirez of NDN) at New Democrat Network’s “The Uncharted Political Terrain of Campaign ‘08” event this afternoon.

Trippi compared the Clinton campaign’s traditional political strategy, which he called “the best top-down campaign in history,” to the Obama campaign’s bottom-up grassroots strategy success in

1. Cultivating small, online donors, and
2. Running decentralized volunteer efforts in caucus states.

Amy Walter, editor-in-chief of the Hotline, argued that the Obama campaign had no choice but to run a bottom-up grassroots strategy. Thanks to the rise of the Interne,t Walter said, campaigns can no longer spend their way out of tricky political environment. But, she quickly added that the strategy that wins the Democratic primaries may not provide an advantage in the general election:

The way Obama runs the primaries doesn’t indicate that he can run this way and win in the general election.

Do we still have a ways to go? Naturally. Trippi compared the Howard Dean campaign in 2004 to a Wright Brother’s first flight at Kittyhawk and the Obama campaign’s online strategy in 2008 as the first moon landing. We’ve come a long way in four years, but we haven’t colonized Mars yet.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 11:09 pm and is filed under 2008 Election, Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.