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Wednesday, November 05, 2003
Caught between a spending block and a hard place, presidential candidate Howard Dean takes a tough decision and places it in the hands of 600,000 of his supporters. It's a bold move, a smart move, and probably the right one to make.
At the end of each financial quarter, if you want your campaign donations to be equally matched by federal funds, you need to stick to certain rules. The big one: campaign spending must be capped at around $45 million until the Democratic convention next summer. Needless to say, George Bush doesn't need to follow this rule. In the 2000 campaign he rejected federal matching funds and spent more than twice as much as Gore, who stuck to the spending cap. Bush is obviously going with the same game plan this time around, expectedly pulling in almost 200 million dollars with individual $2000 donations and $1,000 a plate dinners. It puts Dean in an awkward position, almost a victim of his own success. Early on, he figured he'd need the matching funds, but his growing popularity means he might be able to raise more money without them. He'd be the first Democrat to reject the rules since they were enacted in 1974, post-Watergate, and he'd be under severe pressure to raise as much money as matching funds would have brought him. Putting the decision up for a vote among his supporters will not only help deflect criticism from other Democratic candidates (who will no doubt use this to jump on Dean even more than the desperate confederate flag flap), but it will also put some of the fundraising pressure back into the voters hands. If the people decide to forego the funds, then the people will need to donate the difference. Makes sense. There's not much doubt about which way this will go... Dean fans (myself included) will want him fighting Bush on a level playing field, and won't want money to decide this race (like last time?). Critics will cry "waffle!", but most of them will be crying it out of jealousy. They only wish they had the momentum that Dean has, they only wish they were faced with the same decision. I'm guessing if they were, not only would they reject the spending limit, and the matching funds, they'd probably decide to do so behind closed doors, with campaign advisors, and certainly not on the internet, with thousands of us. Ballots should arrive in our inboxes tomorrow morning, voting lasts until midnight Friday, and results will be announced on Saturday. Click here to read more.  |
 neil halstead live in cambridge, ma on november 14th, 2008 previously: joy formidable - boston 2011 recent posts on the 'nac...
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