Money Money Money

Candidates running for president passed a milestone on March 31. On that day they had to begin the process of filing forms that will tell the world how much money they have raised.

As is perhaps almost always the case with something like this, some things happened as expected: Senator Clinton raised more money than anyone. She raised 25 million dollars. And she has 10 million dollars left from her senatorial campaign. Even I can do that math—she has 35 million dollars. And, as expected, she won the first money primary. Also as expected, the Democrats raised more money than Republicans. And, as expected, most of the top tier candidates and many of the others, raised enough to stay competitive.

Inside the Numbers

As is perhaps always the case with something like this, there were a few surprises. Senator Obama won the laurel of “beating the expectations.” He gathered 24 million buckaroos. Senator Obama has more good news. He had nearly 100,000 donors. Many have not given all they can. This shows he has an incredibly large base of financial supporters—perhaps the largest in history.


There is some disconcerting news for Senator Clinton. Senator Clinton started the money primary with the names of 250 thousand donors. She got money from 50 thousand of them. Many have given all they can give for the primary season and for the election in November 2008. Quite a bit of the money she has now she can’t be spend unless she gains the nomination. It also means that she doesn’t have as wide a base of economic support as Senator Obama has.


Republican Mitch Romney also did much better than expected। He raised over 23 million. One of the better lines of the week certainly goes to the McCain staffer who said that Romney earned 7 million for every per centage point he has in the polls. You probably can do that math—though he raised a lot of money, Romney is not doing that well in the polls—last week he was lagging at 3 per cent.

Romney had other problems this week. He not only goofed. He flip-flopped in a way that made others think of John Kerry. While attempting to court the votes of hunters, Romney said he was a lifelong hunter. Turns out the facts suggested that he did not own a registered gun and he may have only been hunted twice in his life. The prompted Joan Vinnochi a columnist for the Boston Globe to opine, “Leave it to Mitch Romney to shoot himself in the foot with a gun he doesn’t own.”

Had Senator McCain been running four years ago and raked in what he did this year, he would have smashed records. As it is, his 12.5 million placed him way back in the heap and forced him to reconstitute his financial apparatus—polite talk for taking his advisors to the woodshed.

There were a few other surprises. Governor Richardson of New Mexico, did better than expected. He brought in 6 million dollars.

Why Money is Sooo Important

Money is a necessity to play the games of politics today. It buys that all important television time. It allows candidates to buy advisors and top of the line technicians. These things are incredibly important.

Money also conveys a legitimacy. If a candidate is still very much in the running, then s/he is likely to be successful raising more money. The converse is also accurate. And if a candidate runs into a controversy, the money usually stops coming in. The candidate needs a reserve to keep the campaign going until it the winds of controversy die down.

Money also serves as a status symbol. It is a giant advertisement to show how viable a candidate is. As with everything in politics it is good to match expectations; it is even better to beat them. And when someone like Obama, who has to contend with an experience deficiency, can get money from 100,000 donors, well performances like this go a significant way to erasing the stigma’s that hang around less experiences pols.

The oversimplified bottom line of all this is that all the major contenders passed muster. They all have enough to fight another day. They all have enough to spend the money they have to spend to by the airtime they need to purchase.

Money as a Predictor

Excepting 2003 when GW didn’t play the money game—he didn’t have to—in the last two election cycles, the candidate who raised the most money during the quarter we just completed, went on to win the nomination of his party. In 2000 Bush and Gore won the contest. In 2003 Kerry did.

It is now appropriate to write this: it’s early, and having money is not the same as spending it well.

In 1979 and 1980 former Governor John Connally seemed to have all you needed to be the Republican nominee. He was experienced, he was articulate, he was conservative, and he had raised a lot of money. After months of campaiging and he burned through 11 million dollars—and earned the support of one delegate. He got the message and withdrew from the race. Mrs. Ada Mills has since been immortalized in political trivia lists as the “11 million dollar delegate.”

In 1996 Phil Graham won the money primary but ran such a sloppy campaign that he withdrew before the New Hampshire primary.

Having all this money in politics probably does some good things. It probably goes a significant way to discourage Gore and Kerry from entering the campaign. For the Democratsm, this is a good thing. They have plenty of A-list candidates. They don’t need the complicated playing field made even more complex by the subtraction by addition that comes from either of these veterans joining the fray.

For Americans in general, talking about money is a great deal easier than talking about the issues. So these quarterly reports give the pundits in the country at least a week to talk in highly serious and often nuanced tones about the campaign without having to dance around something tricky like the issues.

The Horserace

If the race for the nomination is a lap around a horse track, we aren’t even at the first turn yet. Still a few comments may be made.

The Republican field is a mess. Conservative Republicans are a constituency in search of a viable candidate. McCain who was thought by many to be the front runner is not. The front runner, Guilanni has a host of personal (all those divorces) and political problems (his leftish stands on abortion, gays, and the environment). Independents leaned heavily toward the Democrats in the 2006 midterms. Unless the Republicans put together a credible candidate who can unite the party, independents will not have many reasons to lean toward he Republicans in 2008.

Senator Clinton’s hope of a smooth walk to the nomination have hit some significant bumps. She leads in many polls and according to many pundits clearly has the inside track. But her desire to be the inevitable candidate has not panned out. Many remain uncomfortable with her personality. Senator Obama certainly has the charm, momentum, and, yes the charisma, to be a very credible candidate. He is an impressive campainger, and recently has made it obvious that he is a very impressive fundraiser. He introduction to the American people is going well. But he will have to maintain his momemtum as he becomes more specific about his positions on many issues. The pundits often try to count Edwards out. His candor about his positions on many issues—especially health care—and his classy appearance with his wife after her cancer returned, vaulted him back onto the A-list. And he still leads in Iowa.

Some of the Bad News

It is interesting how little commentary there was this week about the perils of having so much
money involved in this year’s contest.

Having all this money in politics won’t pass any smell test.

Many suggest it is far better to have private dollars in political campagins. It keeps public dollars out of it.

I couldn’t disagree more. Let’s take a quick tour of how much this private money is costing us.

The Democrats have long collected money from teacher’s organizations. And for years the Democrats have not pushed to have substandard teachers fired. Nor have Democrats pushed to make it easy for people with experience and talent to become teachers in public elementary or high schools. This is ridiculous. You could win the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Pulitzer Prize in Literature, and be a celebrated lecturer, but still have to jump through a hundred hoops to teach English in a public high school. This too is ridiculous.

The Republicans (and plenty of Democrats) are so completely in bed with the oil companies that even when the oil companies are doing very well, legislators throw tax breaks and other incentives their way—which allows oil companies to earn even higher profits. Exxon/Mobile made a record $36.13 billion in 2006.

For a variety of reasons, and campaign money is one of them, very few politicians will speak out against high-ticket defense department expenditures. Few politicians are speaking out about the abuses within the Defense Department. This is one of the many factors that prevented the US armed forces from being as prepared as it should have been to fight an insurgency. An insurgency depends not so much on high tech and gold plated weapons systems. An army that hopes to succeed against an insurgency does need simple, relatively inexpensive technology like body armor. And it needs anti-guerilla training.

An independent commission reported last month that ninety percent of all National Guard units don’t have the equipment or the training they need to perform in battle.

In reports to Congress, the Government Accountability Office stated that $1.2 billion in supplies shipped to Iraq couldn’t be accounted for. It also identified $35 billion in excess supplies and equipment. One hundred million dollars in airline tickets were never used. Ninety-four per cent of Army National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers experienced problems with their paychecks in 2004. The Defense Department’s Office of the Inspector General declared the department hopelessly “un-auditable.”

The Government Accounting Office discovered that Defense Department contractors underpaid federal taxes by around 100 million dollars. Less than 1% of that—under $700,000 has been collected.

Just five years ago, the Pentagon's top five weapons systems were estimated to cost $291 billion; today the estimate is nearly twice that, $550 billion.

The F-22 Raptor fighter is the poster child du jour for Defense Department’s financial responsibilities. The cost per plane rose 189 percent—$125 million to $361 million. Development time has increased more than two years. Despite all this, the Pentagon has paid $848 million in bonuses to the lead contractor.

The worst part of this sad saga is that the public has been so docile. Public initiatives to bring some sanity to Defense appropriations have not succeeded. Public initiatives to get private money out of the election process also have fallen short.

Years ago there was an advertisement for engine oil. It explained the problems car owners risked if they did not change the oil in their cars regularly. The advertisement ended with a cartoonish character saying, “You can pay me now, or you can pay me later.”

Clearly, when it comes to the horrific effects of spending private money in public elections, Americans clearly have decided to pay the piper later.




Line of the Week

From the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, “Observational evidence from all continents and most oceans shows that many natural systems are being affected by regional climate changes, particularly temperature increases.”

Admittedly they would have gotten a lot more attention if they had written it up something like this: Yo, you dumb earthlings. End this idiotic debate about whether or not there is a thing we call global warming. No, don’t soften the image of it all by calling it “climate change.” People are warming a planet that very much liked the temperature the way it was before industry and automobiles and homes starting dumping so much garbage into the air. Thousands, perhaps millions of people are gonna die because of this. Entire ecosystems will vanish. It is likely that hundreds of animal species and thousands of plant species are going to become extinct. Some coastline cities will, over time, be flooded, and a lot of people who live in-land will soon have beachfront property. Things we are doing now won’t do as much as throwing a snowball into Washington to stop it. It’s time to take names and kick ass.

Idiot of the Week

The US news media for not giving enough attention to the report issued last Friday from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.