Hi. This is my first diary entry, so be gentle. I'm writing this in response to various posts that people have made to the effect that no one who doesn't accept matching funds can win. I should say at the outset that I hate the idea that we now have to defend the idea of abiding by campaign spending limits. Nonetheless, I want a Democrat to win as much as anyone, so I am playing to win. So here goes.
First, and most obviously, everyone here already recognizes that whatever happens, no Democratic candidate can raise as much as George W. Bush. So we will be outspent regardless.
Second, there are 527s and their ilk. I will leave it to others to sort out what they can and cannot do to help, but I assume it's not nothing.
Third -- and this is really the reason I am writing -- I think that the spending caps are much less damaging to Clark than they are to other candidates, for a simple reason: he got in later. By Sept. 31, Dean and Kerry had spent around $13 million, and Edwards had spent almost $10 million. Clark, by contrast, had spent a little over $100,000. (Figures from OpenSecrets.org.) I'm sure Clark has been spending money as fast as anyone (with the possible exception of Dean) since then, but the fact remains that every other candidate had already spent quite a lot of money before he spent any at all. In addition, whatever you make of his decision to skip Iowa, it clearly saved him several million additional dollars, which are therefore freed up for other spending, whether during or after the primaries.
This means that if those candidates other than Dean and Kerry spend money at the same rate as Clark, they will reach the spending caps when he still has millions of dollars left to legally spend. And this in turn means, first, that insofar as money makes the difference in the primaries, it's likely to be the money Clark can raise, as opposed to the spending caps; and second, that he can legally spend ten million more dollars in the period between Sept. 31 and the convention than Edwards, and third, that the likelihood that he will actually raise enough to bring the caps into play is smaller than it would be for the other candidates, since less of it was raised (and spent) earlier. The downside of this, of course, was that Clark missed out on whatever opportunities there were to gain support before last September, but this does not seem to have crippled him.
If you want to compare Kerry to Clark, then, I think you need to factor this into the mix, and also ask yourself how likely it is that Kerry will raise enough money to blow the spending caps. I mean: the reason Dean declined matching funds was because he had enough money to do so, but Kerry's reason seems to have been that he couldn't maintain his campaign without mortgaging his house, and therefore had to violate the rule against giving your own campaign more than $50,000. So it is unlikely that he actually has in hand enough money blow the spending caps. And the fact that he has declined matching funds makes this problem worse, not better. By going for Kerry for this reason, you'd have to gamble that he turns into a fundraising powerhouse. I'm not sure I see that happening. Your mileage may vary, of course; and I'd be interested to see whether or not anyone else thinks this view holds water.
