The book reminded me of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (Trippi admits that it influenced him a lot). Trippi might not be as good a writer as Thompson was (who is?), but his book is certainly an interesting read and I want to share my thoughts on it.
1. Trippi got the 2004 Bush campaign wrong, when he thinks that it was all "transactional politics". Of course, Bush raised money from and catered to big companies like Halliburton. But apart from expensive TV ads, it was also plain grassroots campaigning that won him the general election.
2. Trippi was the first person to predict that Tom Bradley was going to lose, even though exit polls expected him to win. However, Trippi never once mentions (what was later to be known as) the "Bradley Effect" (the fact that voters won't admit in an exit poll that they did not vote for a black candidate, which causes the actual result to differ a lot from what the exit polls predict). Maybe that's because Barack Obama did not suffer from this phenomenon.
3. It's scary to see how the news media eagerly reports negative stories about a candidate (which were handed to them by other campaigns) just to have the exclusive rights to these stories.
4. Trippi is a bit naive to think that Google is not evil at all. In fact, Google gathers a lot more information from its users than it needs to run its tools. I know, I was thrilled when I saw the new Google Wave and blogged about it. However, since Wave is a server based service, Google can monitor the content of every single Wave. The data that they gather already could be used to make a lot of money on Wall-Street. Thanks to tools like Google Analytics and Gmail, Google can "sense" if there is something going on at a company. It could use that knowledge to either buy or sell that company's stock.