2004 Elections: Democratic Party Contenders

Maybe he's just looking for a momentum swing.

Without having looked at any polls, I would guess that a) he's closer to winning Wisconsin than to winning any other primary state, b) he feels that to rescue his winner image, he needs to keep up with Clark and Edwards and win a primary somewhere, and c) he threatens to quit in an attempt to emotionally blackmail his followers into donating some extra money.

thomas

that c) is just a tad cynical, no?

One note re: Feinstein and California -

California is firmly in the Dem column and VP would be a big expenditure for no gain; Washington and Oregon would be a more needed gain.

The Western states (non-coastal) have few delegates and are decidedly Republican, a throw away.

No one ever said that the VP and Pres had to agree, the VP is to pull votes. It has been pointed out many times that Edwards is running for VP, still looks that way to me.

I believe it is either Edwards or Graham out of Florida, maybe Clark or Ford - the most needed large Dem states is the South - secondly, Penn/Ohio/NJ/Ind/Ill/Wisc corridor.

What do you mean -- cynical of me to guess it, or cynical of him to do it? The idea occured to me because we have a greenish, pretty good newspaper here in Germany called Die Tageszeitung. Every five years or so, they run into big financial problems. In response to these problems, they put out long series of advertizements in which they tell their readers in no uncertain terms: "Get us 10,000 more subscribers until the end of this quarter or we'll be out of business." It has always worked. They always got their 10,000 subscribers, and more.

With that in mind, it strikes me as eminently plausible that Dean might try a similar blackmailing strategy. What has he got to lose at this point?

The most recent Badger Poll, though headlinined as shpwing a decline of Bush the Youngers support in the state, doesn't bode well for Dean, as indicated by this, from yesterday's The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel


Unscientific, of course, but I note I've seen only a couple of Dean bumperstickers around here, and no Dean yard signs, while those for Kerry, Edwards, and Clark are in evidence, seemingly in that order. Of course, this is Northwest Wisconsin, which is more conservative than the more populous southern part of the state, with its large cities and the preponderance of University of Wisconsin campuses. While the state gave a small margin to Gore in 2000, it was due almost entirely to the urban vote, with the rural, and particularly the Northern, counties going for Bush. Apart from Eugene McCarthy in '68, Wisconsin's Democratic Primary winner has gone on to the party's nomination every time since WWII. Wisconsin has gone Democratic in every National Election since 1988, though not by any huge margins.

Interesting is that Edwards is pushing hard in the rural areas, with lots of townhall meetings scheduled, and that Kerry and Dean appear to be concentrating mostly on the Milwaukee Metro area - along the Lake Michigan shore from Kenosha up to Greenbay, and in the Madison area, with no appearances scheduled up in this corner, nor none that I'm aware of over in the Northeastern area, either. TV ads are ramping up, too, with Kerry and Edwards seeming to be spending the most, again, by just my own unscientific survey.

Will you be voting in the Wisconsin Democratic primary, timber? :wink:

Oh, yeah ... I'm gonna vote. Sharpton's counting on me

Seriously, though,



Dean e-mail to Wisconsin supporters:

And all this time I figured you for a Kucinich man... :wink:

Naaah, Kucinich is too short to be President.

This is interesting, however:

*falls over*

*sputters incoherently*

Well. Let's just pretend we didn't see that.

Fairly typical, actually. In Iowa, too, Edwards worked the small towns, the factory-towns, the rural area, West Iowa, like crazy, aiming to get all the caucuses that noone else was paying much attention to. It seemed to have worked for him ...

There was this one report that was all hung up to an anecdote: the reporter had come across a slighlt eccentric meeting-host, who showed him his life-work: a huge map of Iowa, with a list of all the towns and villages. He'd graded each town on a scale of X in terms of how attractive and pretty a place it was, and colourcoded them on the map - blue (say) for the uglier towns, red for the nicer towns. The reporter quickly observed that the division pretty much summarized the respective campaign efforts: Edwards (and Gephardt, also) had been systematically working the blue towns, while Kerry and Dean had mostly stayed in the red towns.

It was one of the things that took me in for Edwards and Gephardt ... ;-)



Political geek question: I noticed on the electoral map that there's this zone of land, this strip along the Northern Wisconsin lake-coast, from Duluth (?) in the West eastwards, that is staunchly ("yellow dog"?) Democrat, has been for decades. I looked in the atlas, but couldnt see anything specific that distinguished it from inland zones, that are mostly Republican. Looked overwhelmingly rural, few coastside (fishing?) towns. Whats the story with these, whats behind this bit of political geography, do you happen to know? (This woman who had his newspaper obituary rail against Bush, or what was it, a few months ago was from there too).

thomas

Yes, I meant cynical of you to word it in the manner you did. The choice that candidate (or anyone in his position) faces is either to just quit or 'let's give it one last big push'. Emotional blackmail hardly constitutes the single possible mindset or intention.

Now, if you'd like to apply the term to TV evangelists, fire-alarm salesmen, or my ex-wife...fine.

I figured this was gonna happen. Kerry is assembling a juggernaught for sure. From this point on, contesting the nomination with him is likely to be little more than a waste of time, money, effort, and resources. This is the first, and possibly will be the only, endorsement with any weight at all. It is a crippling blow to Edwards, IMHO, who was the only other possible recipient. The game will probably carry into March, but just a matter of form and stubborn refusal to accept defeat. By Tuesday night, barring stunning upset, the issue of The Nominee will for all practical purposes be settled.

Money miscalculation left Dean spent
Money miscalculation left Dean spent, to Kerry's good fortune
It's Wisconsin or wipeout for Howard Dean.

Having blown through $41 million, the Dean campaign announced in an e-mail early Thursday that the beleaguered candidate must win the Wisconsin primary Feb. 17 to continue. Even if he prevails there, Dean's dream of corralling the nomination seems as improbable as Janet Jackson making the "best dressed" list.

Yes, it's been a strange year for the Democrats, and maybe Dean can miraculously replace Harry Truman as the symbol of political resurrection. But Dean may have sealed his fate last fall by believing too passionately in the fundraising power of the Internet and yielding to financial hubris.

Three months ago, well on his way to setting Democratic Party presidential fundraising records, Dean asked his donors to make a strategic decision. Dean announced an Internet plebiscite on whether he should emulate George W. Bush and opt out of a federal program that matches individual campaign contributions in exchange for a candidate abiding by an overall spending limit until his party's convention.

Dean asked his supporters: Should he spurn an estimated $19 million in federal matching funds? Or should he abide by the $45 million overall spending limit, "giving the Bush campaign a spending advantage of $170 million, which they will use to define and distort us"?

The outcome of the Internet balloting was as preordained as a North Korean election. The vote was overwhelmingly in favor of Dean becoming the first Democrat to reject the federal matching-funds program. But even though the choice was advertised as a way for Dean to compete with Bush, this decision had the unintended consequence of saving John Kerry's campaign from insolvency.

In early November, Kerry was almost tapped out. At a New York dinner party featuring several major Kerry fundraisers, backers of the Massachusetts senator confided that virtually no one in the nation's financial capital was willing to invest in a candidate who had cratered in New Hampshire polls.

Kerry, thanks to the real estate that he jointly owned with his heiress wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, always had the option of leaving the federal matching-funds program and lending his campaign money. But the negative press coverage and attacks from his rivals that would have accompanied this desperation gambit probably would have doomed Kerry's candidacy.

That's why the Kerry campaign decided in advance that the only way the candidate could get away with dipping into his personal resources was if Dean rejected matching funds first. Things played out as anticipated: When Kerry loaned his campaign more than $6 million in December, this stratagem was presented as a necessary response to Dean's free-spending ways. Instead of dodging brickbats from campaign reformers, Kerry was able to run TV ads in Iowa and New Hampshire decrying special interests at a time when he was the first Democrat in modern history to pay for his own presidential campaign.

What if Dean had accepted the estimated $19 million in federal matching funds and abided by the overall $45 million limit? Rather than going for broke in Iowa and New Hampshire, Dean would have been forced to practice the kind of fiscal discipline he attacks the Bush administration for abandoning. Knowing that he would be bumping up against the spending ceiling, Dean would have almost certainly kept enough money in reserve to pay for TV commercials for the Feb. 3 primaries and caucuses.

Roy Neel, Dean's newly appointed campaign manager, tried to justify the campaign's spending strategy in an interview. "Why do you raise all this money in politics?" he asked rhetorically. "You don't raise it to put it in bank CDs." Referring to his review of the campaign's books under predecessor Joe Trippi, Neel said, "I haven't seen any gold-plating or enormous waste."

But another campaign, that of Wesley Clark, has been quietly setting a precedent for frugality. In all other presidential campaigns, media consultants are primarily compensated by receiving a percentage (traditionally 15%, but often negotiated down) of the total spent to buy ad time. But Joe Slade White, Clark's ad maker, agreed to work for a flat monthly fee of $75,000, plus production costs.

By insisting on a flat fee, the Clark campaign saved more than $1 million that it could then invest in more TV time, according to attorney Leslie Kerman, who negotiated the contract last fall.

"We only established this flat-rate principle after we narrowed it down to two or three media consultants," Clark campaign chairman Eli Segal said. "Needless to say, they were not happy about it, but they saw the campaign as a unique opportunity."

Political campaigns operate in a chaotic environment that defies rational economic planning. Still, campaign donors have a right to know that their money is going to win the nomination and not to enrich the consultants.

Newest Bush approval ratings - this time from an Associated Press poll conducted by Ipsos-Public Affairs. Feb. 2-4, 2004.

Again, a record-low for Bush since his term started - and a drastic slump in the past month.

Feb 2-4/04

Approve 47%
Disapprove 50%

Jan 5-7/04
Approve 56%
Disapprove 42%

Dec 15-17/03
Approve 59%
Disapprove 39%

If those trends holds up until November and Bush turns out to be a one term president, this'll probably be one of the happiest years of my life as an American.

There's a nearly 35-40% negative Bush vote that will not change. Too offset that, the pro vote is almost as high. The absolute division has never been as high as it is today..........

Someone I know saw the clip on their local news in North Carolina of this:



Charlotte News-Observer

She said Edwards was fantastic. He just laughed at the disrupters.

I think that this lesson in how to handle hecklers with grace and humor; in short, to make them wish they never bothered, is another example of what I like so much about John Edwards.

I am beginning to think that a Kerry-Edwards ticket sounds pretty good...

A mention was made earlier: Edwards isn't young; he's 50. (realjohboy sighs deeply).
Run the numbers: If Mr Bush wins a second term, Edwards would be only 54 in 2008. And a seasoned hand at campaigning. If the Dems win with Edwards as veep, he could run on his own at the age of 58 in 2012.
BTW: Reagan turned 93 today. No other es-president ever lived longer. I wonder who is now 2nd. -rjb-