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I’ve been able to spend some time reflecting on the year that was and on the people who over the years caused me to cling to my stubborn belief that one person can make a difference.

As we enter the New Year of 2005, I’ve been able to spend some time reflecting on the year that was and on the people who over the years caused me to cling to my stubborn belief that one person can make a difference.

For myself one person stands out, above all the rest, as having made the biggest difference in my life – my high school best friend, and fellow member of my high school track team, Marc Cobb.

In high school Marc was a tall thin rail, an African American kid living in Watts, in South Central, Los Angeles. We had gone to the same Junior High School, taken drafting classes together (Marc wanted to be an architect) and when we got to the same High School Marc talked me into going out for the track team with him. For four years we would run the same grueling workouts together – and run in the same races together.

Then we went on to different colleges, and I became a political nomad, and somehow we lost track of each other.

Nearly 25 years after losing contact with Marc I was writing my book, and there was no way I could leave him out of it – his impact on me had been too important.

I wrote about how my mom had raised 5 kids on her own, about how no one in my family had ever talked about college, let alone planned on going, until the day I saddled up next to Marc in the school quad, and asked what he was doing filling out all those papers he had on his lap.

“College” he said.

When I asked him what an S.A.T. was (the Scholastic Aptitude Test taken to get into to college) he practically fell over in disbelief that I did not know. Well Marc made me sign up for the test, he tutored me to get ready for it, made sure I was there to take it, and helped me fill out all my college application forms. For the first time ever, a Trippi was going to go to college. And all these years later I know it only happened because Marc Cobb was one person who made a difference.

I wrote in the acknowledgement section of my book “Marc Cobb, wherever you are, you changed my life. We ran our hearts out on that old square track in high school – and a part of you has been running just off my shoulder ever since.”

So call it fate – but a few weeks ago I was on my way to Los Angeles to participate in a conference of the Online News Association representing MSNBC, and on the very same night – just one block away at a different hotel my high school reunion was being held.

Even though I had never gone to my high school reunion before, I could not wait to get done speaking at the ONA conference and then high tail it over to my reunion in hopes of seeing Marc.

As I entered the reunion I noticed a framed picture.

It was a picture of Marc Cobb, still flashing that engagingly hip smile of his and underneath the picture were the words “In Loving Memory.” Marc, it had turned out, had passed away after running a race in Sacramento, California some years ago.

I was crushed by the news for days afterwards. But as I started to reflect on my own wild ride over the past few years, I realized that the mistakes I made (and there were plenty) were mine alone – but any good I had done, any difference I had made was in large part due to Marc and so many like him.

So I am not going to do anything corny now like dedicate 2005 to Marc Cobb. But my New Year’s resolution will be — one person can make a difference. Marc Cobb proved that’s true. Let it be true of all of us in 2005.

Happy New Years Everyone.

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Over at Brand Autopsy, John Moore, former co-guest host for the Fast Company blog, has listed his annual 2004 Marketing Books of the Year Awards.

Right there in the thick of things is Joe Trippi’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything” winning the award for Best Business Strategy Book along with works by Dan Gillmor and James Surowiecki.

Be sure to check out the post and add your comments. While you are at it, Joe’s book makes an excellent holiday gift and is being offered at 37% off on Amazon. Quite a steal if you ask me.

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Joe Trippi will be on Air America Radio’s Unfiltered with hosts Lizz Winstead, Chuck D, and Rachel Maddow this morning at 10:00AM.

Joe joins Rachel and Lizz to talk about his recent article in the Wall Street Journal. In the Op Ed piece, Joe describes what he thinks the Democrats need to do to take back their party. Stick around for another great rendition of “The Party Machine.”

Be sure to comment here after listening or call in to ask Joe a questions: 1-866-303-2270.

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Last week, as part of my Fellowship at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, I invited former Senator Gary Hart to talk about the general theme of an incredible book he wrote “The Restoration of the Republic” that I believe every citizen should take the time to read.

In any case, Sen. Hart graciously agreed to take the time to meet with a group of students and he talked about the origins of our republic – about the principles of civic virtue, the common good, and civic participation – ideas we hear too little about in today’s attack dog politics.

He talked about how the founders, particularly Thomas Jefferson, believed that a remote central government was likely to tend towards corruption and away from the people.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately of how the Democratic Party needs to reform itself to empower people to have more of a say in the decisions that effect their lives – and so I wrote a “Trippi’s Take” column today that was largely inspired by Gary Hart’s talk at Harvard. I hope you will check it out and let me know what you think.

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal printed an Op-ed I wrote “Only The Grassroots Can Save the Democrats” that I hope you can check out and comment on.

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The answer for Democrat Party is not to move left or right – it is to lift itself up to the high principles on which our nation was founded.

Civic virtue, the common good, the idea that with the rights of the citizen there are also duties and responsibilities of the citizen, the creation of the commonwealth, and the opposition to corruption at every turn, are not naïve notions – they are the tenets of a sound and healthy republic – the principles on which our nation was founded.

Paramount to the very idea of a republic is the active participation and involvement of the people in matters of common concern. America’s founders, particularly Thomas Jefferson, believed that in our republic the people were to be the sovereign – and no one else.

The campaign of 2004 demonstrated just how far we have strayed, as a nation, from these founding principles.

Today, the sovereign is made up of those with the money. Campaign contributors and lobbyists have more say over our laws than the people.

Both political parties have been practicing transactional politics at the detriment of engaging the American people in common cause to solve our problems, and neither party has demonstrated the courage to ask Americans to sacrifice for the common good.

“A tax cut for your vote” or “A prescription drug benefit for your vote” is transactional— particularly when you have no real plan to pay for either. In a perfect world, both of the parties would step away from the abyss of this kind of politics – but at least one of them must, and I hope it’s the Democrats.

The answer for Democrat Party is not to move left or right – it is to lift itself up to the high principles on which our nation was founded and reform itself in the cause of restoring the republic for which we stand.

To do so will require rebuilding the party from the ground up, returning much of the power in the party to the grassroots, and building new institutions that empower more Americans to participate and have a say in the decisions that effect them.

Gary Hart, the former Senator from Colorado, in his excellent book “The Restoration of the Republic” wrote that to Thomas Jefferson “The most effective protection of individual rights, civil, legal, and political was widespread democratic participation in the affairs of governance. The greatest danger to rights was citizen detachment and in the political resolution of public concerns by interested forces dominating a remote central government.”

The Republicans have diagnosed the problem of a remote central government in Washington and rallied against it – offering no real alternative other than to dismantle it.

The challenge for Democrats is to empower the grassroots of our republic – the people – to actively engage and be involved in their self-governance, and to return to the principle that the people are the sovereign and not the special interests.

Gary Hart wrote that the founders concern for corruption of the republic “holds that a national government dominated by special interest lobbyists paying huge sums in campaign cash for access to the corridors of power is unacceptable.”

If only one of the parties has the courage to break away from this corrupt system, for the sake of my party, I hope it is the Democrats.

The broken system we now operate in works to the Republican Party’s advantage. As lobbyists and corporate interests gain more power— Washington becomes more remote to our citizens, and a more remote central government becomes more despised by the people.

“For Jefferson, the more remote government became and the more dependent the citizen became on elected representatives, the less republican the government and the greater the danger of corruption, narrow self-interest, and the erosion of democratic rights” according to Hart.

Jefferson was right.

The answer to corruption and narrow self-interest— anathema to a republican ideal of the common good— is not to dismantle the government and let the marketplace solve our problems. The answer is to empower the rightful owners of our government, the people, to take it back.

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Joe Trippi wrote the following column which appears in today’s Wall Street Journal. Please comment and let us know what you think.

Only the Grassroots Can Save The Democratic Party

By Joe Trippi

The staggering defeat of the Democratic Party, and its ever-accelerating death spiral weren’t obvious from the election results. Two factors masked the extent of the party’s trouble. Without the innovation of Internet-driven small-donor fund-raising and a corresponding surge in support from the nation’s youngest voters, John Kerry would have suffered a dramatically larger electoral defeat. And the true magnitude of the Democrats abject failure at the polls in 2004 would have been more clearly revealed.

Mr. Kerry raised nearly half of his campaign war chest over the Internet. He was so successful at online fund-raising that he actually outspent the Bush campaign in this election. But it was the outsider campaign of Howard Dean, reviled by most of the Democratic establishment, which pioneered the use of the Internet to raise millions in small contributions; Mr. Kerry was just the beneficiary as the party nominee.

And it was the risk-taking and aggressive Dean Campaign that forced the risk-averse Kerry campaign to opt out of the public financing system.
Had that decision not been forced on Mr. Kerry, he would have been badly outspent by George Bush; he would not have been competitive at all throughout the long summer of 2004.

Mr. Kerry’s lead among young voters hid just how bad Election Day really was for Democrats. In the 2000 election, voters between the ages of 18 and 29 split their votes evenly; nine million each for Mr. Bush and Al Gore. But in 2004, two million more voters in this age group turned out to vote. And while Mr. Bush won the same nine million votes, 11 million voted for Mr.
Kerry. But when we set aside his two million new younger voters, the true disaster of 2004 is revealed. In 2000, Mr. Gore and Ralph Nader won a combined total of 54 million votes. This year Mr. Kerry and Mr. Nader got 53 million (ignoring the two million new young voters).

It turns out that Mr. Kerry was a weaker candidate than Mr. Gore. Mr. Kerry lost so much ground among women, Hispanics, and other key groups, that the millions in Internet money, the most Herculean get-out-the-vote effort in party history, and the largest turnout of young voters in over a decade, could not save him. Had the young voters stayed home, the sea of red on the electoral map would have grown to include at least Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and New Hampshire-perhaps one or two more.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bush, received 50 million votes in 2000, and 59 million in 2004. He added nine million votes. That is because Karl Rove had a plan and the Bush campaign stuck to it. There is no doubt that they executed it brilliantly. But the problem for Democrats is not Mr. Rove; it is that they’re doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. That’s the definition of insanity.

* Since the Democratic Leadership Council, with its mantra of “moderate, moderate, moderate,” took hold in Washington, the Democratic Party has been in decline at just about every level of government. Forget the Kerry loss.
Today the number of Democrats in the House is the lowest it’s been since 1928. Democrats are on the brink of becoming a permanent minority party. Can the oldest democratic institution on earth wake from its stupor? Here are some steps to pull out of the nose-dive:

* Democrats can’t keep ignoring their base. Running to the middle and then asking our base at the end of the campaign to make sure to vote is not a plan. It sure hasn’t worked. And to those who say talking to your base doesn’t work-Read the Rove 2004 playbook!

* Democrats must reconnect with the energy of our grass roots. One of the failures of the DLC was that its ideas never helped us build a grass-roots donor base. As a result Democrats held a lead over Republicans in only one fundraising category before this election cycle: contributions over one million dollars. That shows how far the party had strayed from grassroots fundraising before the Dean campaign. We must build a base of at least seven million small donors by 2006. With the Internet it’s possible. But it can’t just be about the money, it also has to be about ideas.

* The one thing we learned in the Dean campaign was that the 30 or so people in Burlington, Vt., were not as smart as the 650,000 Americans who were part of our campaign. Instead of a DLC in Washington, Democrats should be holding Democratic Grassroots Councils in every county. Democratic National Committee members in each state, along with the state party, should host and moderate these meetings to help develop ideas that come from the people, instead of the experts in Washington.

* A party that ignores the needs of state and local parties is doomed. We must begin to invest aggressively in states we continually write off in national elections. If we don’t, the decline of the Democratic Party in these states will continue until we are non-existent. It’s already occurring in many southern states.

* In a world in which companies like Wal-Mart pay substandard wages with no real benefits, our party has got to find innovative ways to support organized labor’s growth. A declining union membership is not good for the country, it’s not good for working people, and it certainly is not good for the Democratic Party.

* The Democratic Party has to be the vehicle that empowers the American people to change our failed political system. We all know the damn thing is broken. Democrats should lead the way by placing stricter money restrictions on candidates than the toothless Federal Election Commission does. A party funded by contributions from the people can do this. A corrupted and corroded party cannot. The Democratic Party shouldn’t wait for campaign-finance reform-it should be campaign-finance reform.

* Finally, What is the purpose the Democratic Party strives for today? What are our goals for the nation? You couldn’t tell from the 2004 election. The fact is, very few good ideas come from the middle. Ideas in the middle tend to be mediocre. Political consultants have become adept at keeping their candidates in that safe zone. But the time has come to develop bold ideas and to challenge people to sacrifice for the common good. Experts will tell you that you can’t ask the American people to sacrifice individually for the common good. Those experts are wrong-it’s just been so long since anyone has asked them.

Mr. Trippi, who managed Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, is a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School and an MSNBC commentator.

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MSNBC has a great team of reporters trying to keep you informed — but they can’t be where you are.

During the last week of this year’s election MSNBC tried something different. We started to take reports from Citizen Journalists and MSNBC posted real reports from citizens across the country on our blogs, and talked about many of your reports on the air. It was an experiment that worked. 4,000— yes four thousand— Citizen Journalists filed stories and helped MSNBC cover the election from every angle, including yours. Those “CJ” reports collected over 500,000 hits on our site.

This week we are going to make Citizen Journalist a regular part of MSNBC’s coverage of events large and small. We will put most of the stories you file up on our Citizen Journalist Blog, and take the best reports and talk about them on the air.

I said many times that MSNBC has a great team of reporters trying to keep you informed— but they can’t be where you are— and they can’t see the things you see.

Consider one or more of these as your “official assignment”:

Assignment 1: The war in Iraq.

When reporting, you might want to ask, “How does the fighting in Fallujah affect, if at all, my hometown? Are former neighbors of yours now fighting in Iraq? How has their deployment affected their families/ my family? What have you seen? How have you and others been responding to the Iraq war? Does Bush’s re-election change peoples’ attitude toward the situation in Iraq?

Assignment 2: Travel safety and security.

While on your travels for the upcoming holidays, what have you observed about our nations roads and ports? Did you feel safe when you walked through your airport? Many states are still on high terror alert levels, and security is always a concern.

Assignment 3: Your Thanksgiving visit home.

We’ve been reading a lot of e-mails from viewers about how many impromptu political discussions have bubbled up in dinner conversations amongst friends and family. This holiday may be no different. Are you living in a blue state traveling home to a red one? Was there a difference in culture or atmosphere between the place you live now, and the place you once called home? Are your previously apathetic parents/siblings/cousins now actively involved in the political process?

So over the Thanksgiving Holiday we hope you will join our growing group of Citizen Journalists and file your story. It can be a real piece of news, a story you think we’ve missed at MSNBC, or you can simply tell us what you are thankful for in this season of Thanksgiving.

Some people send in stories, others who are handy with a camera, have sent in pictures that help to tell the story visually— but let your creativity go— if you have a knack for animation have at it and send it in!

We are all experts at something, so if you see a story you know something about or can add something in terms of helping people better understand the story or better understand why something is happening. Send us your insight.

The Internet is empowering individuals to share information, news, and insight in a way that no other medium has empowered the individual in the past. At MSNBC we want to continue an experiment in Citizen Journalism that we started a few weeks ago and embrace the change the Internet can bring to the way we report things— and that experiment starts with you.

So sign-up today, start breaking the news, telling your story, or take the picture that helps make the story clear to the MSNBC community.

And I’ll do my best to get the best stories on the air to MSNBC’s viewers.

Can bottom-up Citizen Journalism add something meaningful to the way a story is reported? I think so, and MSNBC is willing to experiment with it and see if we can make it happen right here.

That’s something I am thankful for as we near the Thanksgiving Holiday.

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