Dean's campaign was a nasty civil war; divide & bicker

Divide and Bicker
The Dean Campaign's Hip, High-Tech Image Hid a Nasty Civil War
By Howard Kurtz, Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 29, 2004

The feuding and backbiting that plagued the Howard Dean campaign had turned utterly poisonous. Behind the facade of a successful political operation, senior officials plotted against each other, complained about the candidate and developed one searing doubt.

Dean, they concluded, did not really want to be president.

In different conversations and in different ways, according to several people who worked with him, Dean said at the peak of his popularity late last year that he never expected to rise so high, that he didn't like the intense scrutiny, that he had just wanted to make a difference. "I don't care about being president," he said. Months earlier, as his candidacy was taking off, he told a colleague: "The problem is, I'm now afraid I might win."

As Dean was swallowed by the bubble that envelops every major candidate, he allowed his campaign to sink into a nasty civil war that crippled decision-making and devastated morale. In the end, say some of those who uprooted their lives for him, these tensions hastened the implosion that brought Dean down.

The polarization revolved around two people: Joe Trippi, the rumpled, passionate, sometimes headstrong campaign manager who drew rock-star coverage in the press, and Kate O'Connor, the quiet, shrewd, low-profile Vermont confidante who never left Dean's side.

Trippi, 47, said it was "hard for a campaign manager to function" amid the "infighting" when he was constantly being undermined. He said O'Connor was trying to help Dean, "but there were two worldviews of what was best for him, and those two worlds kept colliding.

"We would have served the governor better if it hadn't existed, but it did, and it did play a role in our not making it. Those differences were a disservice to him. But he is the candidate and had a lot of say."

O'Connor, 39, joking about her "evil" reputation, said that "my mind boggles at some of this stuff. . . . You don't manage Howard Dean, and that was a problem for some people who came in and wanted to manage him. I understood that. Other people just didn't understand that. . . . You learn who the loyal people are. You learn who your friends are."

Interviews with more than a dozen Dean advisers -- portions of which were not for attribution because many did not want to be viewed as disloyal to their former boss -- produced a picture far different from the public image of a hip, high-tech operation of dedicated Deaniacs.

It was, instead, a dysfunctional political family, filled with tales of blocking access to the candidate, neutralizing internal rivals, trying to penalize reporters deemed unfriendly. And some of its members just plain despised each other.

The Discord Coalition


Every presidential campaign has an ambitious strategist, a James Carville or Karl Rove, pulling the strings back at headquarters, and an unassuming body man (or woman) traveling with the candidate, a loyalist who can read his moods, cater to his needs and watch his back. And there are often tensions between "the office" and "the road." For Trippi and O'Connor, the sparring began early and never let up.

When Dean, once dismissed as a gadfly candidate, was surging to the front of a crowded Democratic field in September, things came to a head.

O'Connor, according to a staffer who saw the e-mail, wrote a friend that she wanted to get rid of Trippi and that she felt like quitting herself except that she needed to protect Dean. This followed a clash in which Trippi and other top political advisers helped craft a major Boston speech in which Dean was to denounce special interests -- only to have him toss out most of the speech after O'Connor expressed her opposition.

O'Connor, who said she had "possibly" sent the e-mail but did not recall it, said Dean felt the speech wasn't suitable for a large rally. But she confirmed that she was "uncomfortable" with the campaign's move toward "harping on the special interests. . . . I thought it was not a message that was true to who Howard Dean was." While she offered her opinions, "the thought that I could manipulate him is just absurd."

In October, as much of the media and political establishment began to view the former governor as unstoppable, Trippi was so frustrated by the mounting strife that he threatened to resign, he and other officials confirmed. Trippi asked his campaign allies to join an "intervention" with Dean to get things changed, but they told him he was being unrealistic. Trippi's partner in a consulting firm, Steve McMahon, and Trippi's wife, Kathy Lash, a campaign aide, talked him out of quitting. But he made a pact with his wife that, win or lose, he would quit the day after the New Hampshire primary.

For all the low-level warfare between what was termed the "Washington faction" and the "Vermont faction," O'Connor does not believe the disagreements damaged Dean's effort. "Maybe I'm just naive," she said. "Maybe it did and I'm oblivious to the fact that it hurt the campaign."

Bob Rogan, the deputy campaign manager and, like O'Connor, a longtime Vermont aide to Dean, believes the criticism is overblown.

"While it's easy to blame the Vermonters, I'm not going to participate in the blame game," Rogan said. "It's ridiculous to think that Kate, Howard and I ran this into the mountain on our own."

Suspicious Minds


Back in 2002, there was just Howard Dean, an obscure small-state governor, and Kate O'Connor, who had managed his Vermont campaigns and was running the presidential effort out of her house.

Trippi, a national political veteran and Internet consultant whose Alexandria firm had handled Dean's Vermont advertising, signed on as campaign manager in February 2003.

Even when there were just a handful of staffers, Dean and Trippi had trouble seeing eye to eye. Trippi complained to others that the candidate -- and O'Connor, who was always by his side -- didn't trust him.

On a plane ride that spring, Dean asked Trippi about working out a contract for his salary and for his consulting firm to handle the advertising. As Trippi has recounted to several colleagues, he told Dean to deal with his partner McMahon because he didn't want a salary and wasn't doing this for the money. Dean's response, according to these accounts, was to tell another staffer that he would not give Trippi financial control of the campaign because "he doesn't care about money and I don't want anyone who doesn't care about money managing the money."

A pattern of suspicion and doubt had been set. When Trippi, who worked from a messy office with a beat-up couch in the Burlington, Vt., headquarters, had trouble reaching Dean on the road, he became convinced that O'Connor wasn't giving him the messages. O'Connor dismissed that complaint, saying, "Nobody who wanted to talk to the governor couldn't get to him."

Even the highest-ranking advisers found Dean resistant to changing his approach. Dean strategists say campaign chairman Steve Grossman repeatedly urged the candidate to talk about treating patients as a physician and expressed frustration that Dean never took the advice.

"Unfortunately Howard never took advantage of that unique quality and experience he had, that of being a doctor," Grossman said. Had Dean used more "personal examples" involving patients, it "would have humanized him and created more of an emotional link between him and the voters."

Trippi dispatched various aides to accompany Dean and O'Connor on the road, but problems developed each time. One said he was viewed as "Trippi's spy." Another said O'Connor would "kill" people she viewed as insufficiently loyal. A third said staffers were frightened of "the wrath of Kate." As fundraising surged and the campaign was rapidly expanding, Trippi tried to hire several seasoned pros but told colleagues that O'Connor had blocked his efforts.

"Completely false," said O'Connor. "I didn't meddle in hiring." She said Trippi refused to hire some people suggested by Dean, which Trippi confirmed.

But O'Connor saw herself as standing up for Dean. "If Washington people wanted to change a position, Kate would be the first one to say no, because she knows how long and how adamantly the governor held a particular position," said Sue Allen, Dean's longtime Vermont spokeswoman.

"She had the thankless job of keeping him on message. He's the kind of guy who will chat with somebody and change his opinion. She would control access, and that angers people. . . . She's a handy scapegoat."

David Bender, the New York senior deputy campaign director, said that when O'Connor complained about exhaustion and he suggested some time off, "she looked at me with a ferocity in her manner and voice and said: 'I know they want to get rid of me. . . . I will do this job if I have to do it from a hospital bed hooked up to an IV because I'm the only one who protects Howard. Everyone else wants something from him.' "

Spin Control


The internal struggle produced sharp disagreements about dealing with the legions of reporters who were investigating or traveling with Dean. The candidate and some of his advisers came to feel under siege by the media, while some correspondents were irritated by a campaign they viewed as not ready for prime time.

Dean's often testy relations with journalists were exacerbated, several officials said, by what one who spent time on the trail called O'Connor's "contemptuous attitude toward the press."

When Dean was to fly from New York to Detroit and back on a small charter, O'Connor turned down a request by New York Times correspondent Jodi Wilgoren to ride along, a campaign official said. At a luncheon, Wilgoren slipped Dean a note saying the staff's decision would prevent her from covering the Detroit event. Dean overruled the staff and allowed her on the plane.

"Kate didn't speak to me for a couple of weeks because I'd gone around her," Wilgoren said.

O'Connor said it wasn't her job to decide which journalists got on the plane. But she acknowledged her frustration with the coverage. "I stopped reading newspapers and watching television," she said, because many stories were "completely false."

Several officials say O'Connor helped stoke Dean's anger about articles viewed as negative, sometimes before public events. She "got him very worked up" about a Newsweek report on his finances before an Iowa debate, said one staffer who saw her read it on her laptop. Trippi told Dean by phone that the piece was tame.

Dean sometimes pressed Tricia Enright, the communications director, to complain to editors about negative stories by their reporters and say Dean would no longer deal with those reporters -- calls that Enright usually declined to make, two officials said.

Enright said she tried "to develop relations with the media." But Trippi said that "people like Trish Enright, who thought we should give more access to reporters, were seen as somehow soft on protecting the governor. You got a bad mark next to your name. . . . That created a schism. This was an overly protective group of people who thought they were protecting the governor but were hurting him."

While Trippi constantly bantered with reporters, he could lose his temper as well. When The Washington Post's Jim VandeHei wrote a story on Dean's misstatements -- filed on the night that he and Trippi had dinner and drinks -- Trippi sent word through an aide that neither he nor Dean would speak to him again.

In another incident that left tempers frayed, a Time story online quoted Dean from an interview as having said, "We won't always have the strongest military." According to an official who heard the discussions, Dean and O'Connor told Trippi, who was worried about damage control, that the candidate had never used those words and Trippi should explain that to the press. It turned out the Time reporter had recorded Dean's comment.

O'Connor called the matter "petty," saying she could not have disputed the quote because she wasn't there.

Even Trippi's admirers dubbed him the "mad scientist," a fast-talking, frenetic salesman who worked the phones all day and spent the wee hours answering bloggers on the campaign's Web site. But his detractors said he wasn't attending to the nuts and bolts of staffing and scheduling.

"Joe was a brilliant strategist, but he wasn't a manager," said an official sympathetic to O'Connor. "We all tried to fill in for Joe's shortcomings."

Enright's press operation also drew some internal flak, with detractors saying she held no morning message meeting and was slow in getting back to reporters. National spokesman Jay Carson said the campaign "got so big so fast that we weren't ready for a lot of the stuff that came down the pike."

Enright said her small staff, which she couldn't get permission to expand, was deluged with hundreds of calls a day. "We did the best we could with the resources we had," she said. "A lot of times it was triage."

"Everyone worked their heart out," McMahon said, "whether they had been around Howard a long time or a short time. The system that Howard set up and Howard liked was a lot of different people giving him a lot of different advice simultaneously. That's not necessarily the best way to run a presidential campaign, but it was the way he was comfortable with."

The strains of the campaign, meanwhile, were exacerbating Trippi's diabetes. On a June visit to California, his blood sugar level got so high that he lost his vision for several hours. But he disregarded medical advice and kept working around the clock.

Money and Myths


By the fall, the Dean operation was using its Internet savvy to raise more money than any Democratic campaign in history but was spending it almost as quickly. Trippi, who said he regrets some of the early spending on television ads, tried to stop what he saw as marginal expenses, such as the hiring of a communications director in Maine, the 11th state to vote. Trippi openly grumbled about Dean giving the financial authority to deputy campaign manager Rogan. He and two other senior officials said they were mystified that the amounts they were told they had in the bank would abruptly shrink by millions of dollars after spending decisions had been made.

"With 20/20 hindsight, the biggest mistake I made was not to demand ironclad authority over the budget and check-writing," Trippi said. "Bob Rogan is a really good person, one of the best I've met in politics, but he had never run a presidential campaign before and it made no sense to put him in that position."

Said Rogan: "The revisionist historians are hard at work. Together we made some mistakes, all of us. What I managed was the checkbook, not the spending decisions. . . . It's preposterous to suggest I was the one making those decisions unilaterally." He said Dean, Trippi, McMahon and pollster Paul Maslin were all involved, a point confirmed by McMahon.

Despite the sniping, Dean made the cover of Time and Newsweek, Trippi made the cover of the New Republic, and the Howard Dean phenomenon was taking the country by storm. Trippi seemed to be engaging in false modesty when he kept telling reporters, "The biggest myth in American politics is that Joe Trippi is running the Dean campaign." Few grasped at the time that he was sending a veiled message, and that he felt the campaign ship might soon hit an iceberg.

While he was talked out of quitting in October, Trippi clearly had never bonded with Dean.

"We talked a lot on the phone, but we never became best buds," Trippi said. "I respect him a lot more than I liked him. I think he respected me a lot more than he liked me."

The Schism Widens


Kate O'Connor knew about the Al Gore endorsement. Joe Trippi didn't. He blamed O'Connor. He also blamed Howard Dean.

It was early December, and Dean and Gore had agreed to keep quiet about the former vice president's plan to announce his support within days, fearing a premature leak. Trippi grew suspicious when staffers were asked to charter a large plane to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He asked Dean, who said someone would be endorsing him but he couldn't tell Trippi who it was. Trippi reminded him that he was the campaign manager. But Dean wouldn't budge.

The larger message was that O'Connor had known and the Washington faction had not. O'Connor said she was simply doing what Dean and Gore wanted. What no one knew was that this would be the high point and that the corrosive sense of mistrust would eat away at the campaign at the worst possible time.

Over the next six weeks, Dean's rivals escalated their attacks on his fitness for the White House, and he was hit by an avalanche of negative headlines. "Every media organization and reporter went after us because, you know, take down the front-runner," he told CNN.

But Dean also started making high-profile mistakes. After the seizure of Saddam Hussein, Dean's top political aides scripted a San Francisco speech in which the candidate would say that although his opposition to the Iraq war was unchanged, the capture was a victory for the American military. At the last minute, Dean added a line that the country was no safer, sparking a new controversy.

It was during this period that some senior officials became convinced that Dean wasn't serious about doing what it takes to win the White House, especially when he refused repeated requests to ask his wife, Judith Steinberg Dean, to make even an occasional campaign appearance. Dean did not respond to an interview request, but O'Connor believes he never wavered in his desire to be president.

Still, she said, "he didn't expect to be there" as the front-runner, and they were surprised at the intensity of the media barrage. "We never anticipated the constant getting beaten up over something every single day," O'Connor said.

But others felt the campaign should have been better prepared to play defense and that this contributed to the daily drip of damaging stories.

Senior officials, for instance, said they had never been able to gain access to the boxes of Dean records in O'Connor's garage or the files kept in her car trunk. Enright had reviewed tapes of Dean's appearances on a Canadian talk show from 1996 to 2002, but there was one tape she never got -- and NBC triggered a flap by reporting that Dean on that tape had disparaged the Iowa caucuses as "dominated by the special interests." The staff blamed O'Connor, who said she had never seen that tape and that the material in her Ford Focus was just news clips from Dean's gubernatorial days.

Campaign officials said they also tried to get O'Connor to dig out old National Rifle Association questionnaires completed by Dean. Enright was blindsided when the New York Times obtained one from a rival campaign, showing that Dean had opposed restrictions on owning assault weapons -- a contradiction of his current position.

When Dean, despite raising $40 million, finished third in Iowa on Jan. 19, he ripped up his prepared remarks and started yelling on his campaign bus, officials said, proclaiming that the message of taking on Washington's entrenched interests hadn't worked, that the grass roots were a mirage and had let him down.

Trippi told him the front-runner's weight Dean had complained about, because it was forcing him to measure every word, had been lifted from his shoulders, according to accounts from colleagues. Trippi said Dean should tell his supporters that he'd only just begun to fight.

Dean walked into the ballroom and began screaming the names of states he intended to win, finishing with a guttural "Yeaaahhhh!!" In the days that followed, O'Connor minimized the impact of that moment.

"We didn't get to see television because we were on the road all the time," she said. "We had absolutely no idea it was being played all the time."

Returning to Vermont, O'Connor maintained in a meeting with Hollywood activist Rob Reiner, who had flown in to advise Dean, that people were overreacting to the high-decibel speech and voters didn't care. Reiner was flabbergasted at this attitude -- he wondered whether the staff was "crazy" -- and expressed amazement that they hadn't moved faster to neutralize the issue, two participants said.

The warfare continued over Dean's message, the outsider-against-Washington-special-interests pitch that Trippi had developed in a PowerPoint presentation, tested in polls and, despite O'Connor's concerns, used to sell the candidate to major labor unions.

Dean's policy director, Jeremy Ben-Ami, declared in an e-mail: "The message of the campaign is simply no longer our campaign vs. the special interests. This is not what the governor wants to be saying -- or frankly what he ever really wanted to be saying."

Joe Drymala, the chief speechwriter who received the e-mail, resigned in protest. "I refused to believe it because I didn't want to," he said. "To believe that was to believe that Howard Dean was a fraud."

Ben-Ami said he was explaining that Dean "wanted his message to be at least equally focused on solutions and his record." But Trippi argued that John Kerry and John Edwards had beaten them in Iowa by stealing the message.

Trippi, who had been courting former Gore aide Roy Neel as an addition to the team, started hearing rumors that Neel might replace him. He told O'Connor and Rogan that he was prepared to leave and there was no need for whispered meetings about his future. They assured him there was no effort to dump him.

Something in Common


On Jan. 28, the day after Dean lost New Hampshire, Trippi had his bags packed, ready to quit. Kathy Lash says she confronted O'Connor and Rogan in their office, saying that they had lied to her husband for days and that this was no way to treat him after all he had done.

O'Connor insisted she knew nothing until Dean and Neel sealed the deal that morning. "There was no 'Get Joe out of here.' I know people don't believe that," she said. Rogan said he had known for a couple of days that Dean was courting Neel but that "the governor was hoping Joe could accept he needed some help with his management skills and would see it as a positive."

When Dean delivered the news that Neel was getting the top job, Trippi declined an offer to stay on in a secondary role. McMahon repeatedly told Dean he was making a mistake, but Trippi told him to sit down, that he didn't want to make things harder for the governor. When Trippi and his wife left the building, they were surrounded by photographers and concluded the story had been leaked.

Trippi returned to his farm on Maryland's Eastern Shore, having earned $165,000 through his consulting firm, and signed on as an MSNBC pundit. When Dean bowed out from the presidential race on Feb. 18, Trippi was driving to Washington and could only hear the speech on Rush Limbaugh's radio show, fuming as Limbaugh made disparaging remarks. Afterward, he fought back tears.

"I wouldn't have done it for anybody else," Trippi said. "He really did inspire me. . . . But it came to a point where I realized I couldn't make a difference in his campaign anymore."

O'Connor thanked her longtime boss at an emotional staff meeting that day. "I came into this campaign not because I wanted to work in the White House or be a television commentator or write a book," she said. "I did it because Howard asked me to help him. My loyalty is to Howard."