My father is firm supporter of whatever Democrat steps up to the plate, but he has a major problem with the election:
"There's only one number that matters, and that's two hundred million."
Am I posting this diary to suggest that Bush's eventual $200 million war chest doesn't matter? No, but I also don't think it's as cracked up as originally thought.
Let's engage in a little fuzzy math. Based on the price of doughnuts, pizza, and ground transportation, let's guess that a paid volunteer costs roughly twenty dollars a day (I'm basing this on my experience as a paid volunteer for Tim Johnson in 2002). Let's think that Bush hires roughly 20,000 volunteers for the last hundred days of the campaign.
20,000 volunteers x $20/day x 100 days = $40 million dollars, all billed to the Bush campaign.
That's one-fifth of their entire funds, and that's just on canvassers. I'm not including campaign management, paid staff, plane transportation (for staffers, not Bush), political consultants...
That racks up pretty quickly. And let's not forget TV ads, which cost exponentially more than paid volunteers on the ground.
By contrast, Dean (or Clark to a lesser extent) will have armies of unpaid volunteers that are willing to canvass for their candidate and not have to take a dime from the campaign. The example of writing handwritten letters to undecideds is, to me, the most cost-effective idea that any campaign can put together: these letter-writings happen at the meetups, at which the individuals pay for the transportation to and from there. All the campaign does is pay for the envelopes and stamps.
Now, I know this is a biased audience, but what would you trust more: a handwritten letter from someone you can mail back, or a tv ad/mass-produced direct mailing from a campaign?
Personally, I'd trust the handwritten letter.
Bush may have a large war chest, but he doesn't have many Hessians to use the weapons in that arsenal. That and Hessians don't come very cheap, especially nowadays.