Joe Trippi has seen a lot in his years – no, decades – working on presidential campaigns.

But his last campaign, Howard Dean’s 2004 bid, may have meant more to the way presidential campaigns are run than any of his previous six.

“We shook things up a little bit,” Trippi, who served as national campaign manager for Dean. “It changed everything.”

Trippi told a Dole Institute of Politics audience Tuesday that Dean’s use of the Internet as a way to organize people whom candidates had previously ignored or marginalized transformed Dean from a governor with little name recognition to the Democratic Party front-runner.

The use of the Internet as a campaign tool was, and in many ways still is, unprecedented, Trippi said. It wasn’t just a change in media, such as the change from radio to television.

It gave people power.

“Television took us all out of the process,” he said. “We now have the ability to wreak havoc on a political system that isn’t serving people very well.”

It all became evident during Dean’s startling rise to power. The former Vermont governor had never run a truly competitive race before, Trippi said – he was appointed governor when his predecessor died and then won handily with almost no Republican competition.

So when the campaign started with seven people and just about $98,000 in the bank, Trippi doubted the campaign’s chances, he said.

But then Trippi decided to implement an idea he had a decade before while working with an Internet-based stock trading board. The idea, he said, was that people would reach out to help strangers if their cause was something they believed in.

The Internet, he said, gave the campaign the power candidates working within the system didn’t tap into.

“If we did not have the Internet, we wouldn’t have even existed,” Trippi said.

Within months, the presidential push had expanded from about 400 core volunteers – youths, mainly – to more than 650,000 people donating money that totaled nearly $56 million, breaking former President Clinton’s fundraising record during his re-election bid in 1996.

But more than that, Trippi said, it brought people together in a way traditional campaigns can’t. People would post house meetings and blogs on the Dean Web site, discussing issues that were important to them.

To foster that kind of discussion, Trippi imagined it had to come from regular people, not from preplanned, scripted presidential campaigns that often struggle to inspire people.

“The leaders are not going to do it. We have to do it,” he said.

Sure, Dean’s campaign struggled down the stretch, ultimately failing because of mistakes by both Dean and his staff, Trippi said.

But Dean’s rapid rise still beat the political odds as a relative outsider with a young staff and slim funding. The Internet changed everything for him, and likely will change everything for generations of presidential campaigns to follow.

“This,” Trippi said, “was the biggest miracle ever in presidential politics.”