Dean Followers Accept Campaign Changes

WASHINGTON - By shedding his Internet guru and hiring a Washington insider to save his outsider campaign, Howard Dean risks turning off his idealistic, Web-surfing, coffeehouse-meeting corps of young supporters.

For now, lots of supporters say they accept that the communal, innovative campaign they loved needs to change to survive. Yet some of the magic has faded.

"For a while it felt like a real movement, and now he's just like any other candidate slugging it out," said Washington University college student Dan Carlin, who volunteered in Iowa and is now back home in St. Louis canvassing for Dean.

Dean's earliest supporters have been on a wild ride: from barely-known insurgent to Democratic front-runner to Iowa loser, mocked for an overwrought caucus-night speech. Dean, who raised a record $41 million last year, has been reduced to asking staff members to forgo paychecks for two weeks.

By bringing in Roy Neel, a former lobbyist and one-time top aide to Al Gore, the former vice president and 2000 Democratic nominee, Dean hopes to bring more discipline to his presidential campaign. It will become "a leaner, meaner organization," Dean said.

Neel supplants a folk hero of sorts within Dean circles: campaign manager Joe Trippi, who is credited with revolutionizing use of the Internet to inspire grass-roots fervor. Dean said Trippi chose to resign Wednesday rather than accept a demotion.

It was a blow to many who had enjoyed the personal attention Trippi lavished on junior staffers and volunteers, or who came to feel they knew him through his frequent e-mail updates and postings on the campaign's interactive Web journal, known as a blog.

"They are very pro-Trippi and very unhappy," said University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato, who counts dozens of students and former students among active Dean supporters. "They view Neel, who they do not know, as a typical Washington insider and they see this as a takeover of the campaign by the usual bunch who runs everything."

Only time will tell whether the loss of Trippi means fewer dollars, lower morale, and defections from within the ranks of Dean faithful.

"People on the blog felt an actual connection to Joe," said University of Virginia student David Wasserman, a Dean campaign intern last summer. "He was their icon and hero. When Joe wanted a favor it was like putting money into the cause for a friend. They were giving because Joe wanted them to."

Vanderbilt University professor Bruce Barry, who teaches a course on media and the presidential campaign, noted that most people who back a candidate - even those attracted to Dean through the Internet - can't name the campaign manager. Those who can are likely to be intense believers whose enthusiasm and hard work is vital, however.

"People working for the Dean campaign might be somewhat demoralized that he picked this Washington insider," Barry said, "but they might be energized by the fact that he's reinvented his campaign. He's not standing still."

In fact, many Dean supporters fault Trippi for spending millions too freely without producing a first-place victory in Iowa or New Hampshire - and for inspiring Dean's overwrought concession speech after the caucuses.

"We recognize there needs to be a change," said Laura Galante, a chairman of a Dean student group at the University of Virginia. Galante said she hasn't seen any defections yet.

"I'm upset about it but not devastated," volunteer Shauna Gordon-McKeon, a student at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., said of Trippi's departure.

For Carlin, the glow began fading after pollsters chose Dean as the front-runner in Iowa and the media scrutiny intensified, putting Dean on the defensive and prompting blunders.

He worries Neel's arrival marks a turning point.

"I've read that the Gore influence is growing and I'm a little apprehensive that it will become another staid, kind of boring campaign, just another establishment organization," Carlin said.

"I'm still committed to it," he said. "But I think it's lost a lot of steam."

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Connie Cass has covered Washington for The Associated Press since 1993.