Infospigot: The Chronicles

Just for context: A brief note in a Washington Post story reviewing the fund-raising landscape (and how Kerry has been dumping lots of his own money or assets into the campaign):

In a signal of the danger for the Democratic nominee, President Bush reported $99.1 million in the bank as of Dec. 31, nearly seven times as much as the top five Democrats had together.

And Bush, who’s just tuning up for the race, spent more money than anyone: $33 million (to big spender Dean’s $31 million) through Dec. 31, 2003.

The Federal Election Commission just certified the latest batch of matching funds for candidates accepting public money for the campaign (Dean, Kerry, and Bush aren’t among them).  One surprise (to me) is that Lyndon LaRouche (the “forgotten man’s candidate”) has qualified to receive a million bucks in matching funds. A million.

A site I hadn’t heard of before, PoliticalMoneyLine (referred to in a Times story this evening), has new details on Dean’s fundraising and spending. You can buy details of the most recent reporting period (October through December 2003) for 25 bucks, or pay $2,500 to get the full run of PolitcalMoneyLine and the FECInfoPro database for a year.

The top story on The New York Times site right this minute is the shakeup in Howard Dean’s campaign: Joe Trippi out and a Gore lieutenant in. But the news I found most interesting was the mention of Dean’s finances: He raised $41 million through Dec. 31 (the excellent OpenSecrets.org is worth checking, though it currently posts reports only through Oct. 15, 2003) and has spent it all; the Times says he has $4 million or $5 million on hand, the cash raised since the first of the year; the Washington Post reports the cash situation prompted the campaign to skip further TV advertising in next week’s primary states.

So where did that mountain of Internet money go? The campaign reportedly spent $9 million-plus on TV advertising so far. What about the other $32 million? What combination of plane leases, candidate and staff housing, salaries, broadband access, toner and Dunkin’ Donuts runs adds up to that? I’d love to see the books, out of sheer curiosity.

Most likely, all the campaigns spend money fast, since the name of the game is gettng results now; and this isn’t the first time a promising candidate has burned a big bank balance with little to show for it. But to read that most of the capital is used up already and that the campaign will survive only with another big round of donations carries a whiff of the worst of the dot-com bust: We’ve got such a hot business plan/candidate, we need a big hit of venture capital/contributions right now. It’ll be awhile before we see results, but the upside could be huge. And then you wind up with office suites full of nice computers and furniture to sell for 20 cents on the dollar. Not that that’s where Dean & Co. is headed, necessarily. You can’t avoid the feeling, though, that investors just got word their stock is sick.

A scathing Talk of the Town piece on Bush’s State of the Union speech in this week’s New Yorker:

“… Bush’s only serious (that is, expensive) domestic program, as always, is yet another mammoth tax entitlement for the rich and the superrich. The new plan would make permanent his earlier tax cuts, which, in a gimmick designed to make future deficits look less terrifying, were scheduled to expire in 2010. This new round of relief for the unneedy, like the previous three, is to be financed (though the President didn’t mention this part) by confiscating the Social Security trust fund, curtailing federal activities that benefit society at large, and borrowing more trillions — taking out a fourth mortgage on the future, payable to foreign creditors. …”