The
Boston Phoenix is rummaging into Dean's financial numbers released from Q4 of 2003, and they show some of the mis-steps of the Dean campaign. And remember, this is
before the deluge of TV advertising that nearly bankrupted the campaign in January. Apparently, for those further cash-in numbers will be in the next FEC filing.
Among the spending:
the campaign spent $2.6 million on direct mail from October through December -- including more than $900,000 paid to Whistle Stop (deputy campaign manager Andrea Pringle is a partner at Whistle Stop Communications).
Of the $5.1 million Dean spent on media for the three months almost $4.5 million was bought through Trippi's agency (which garners a percentage of the ad buys). That figure certainly increased in January -- giving Trippi a nice windfall of commissions to cushion the blow of losing the actual campaign.
Direct Mail and TV consultants cashing in on presidential campaigns is not atypical. Joe Trippi and Andrea Pringle were not engaged in anything different than other Presidential campaigns experience. Bush, like Dean, also ended the 4th Q of 2003 with a "spectacular" expenditure of nearly $20 milllion dollars, yet how many stories have you read about that? The biggest problem here is that Dean's campaign has been about ordinary Americans giving $50 bucks to a campaign. They expected something from that giving, something extraordinary, not the ordinary cashing in.
Now, while the above bothers me, they pale in comparison of disturbance to the fact that John Kerry himself bought his resurgence on the back of Dean's poor strategic decision:
The pivotal moment of the campaign may have come on November 8th, when Dean made the controversial decision to opt out of the federal matching-funds program. Doing so meant that he could ignore the spending limit of roughly $44 million for the primary campaign. At the time, the campaign was taking in about $5 million a month in donations -- way more than any other candidate.
Dean's decision, however, gave John Kerry the political cover he needed to opt out as well, which he did six days later (after first firing his campaign manager, Jim Jordan, and replacing him with Mary Beth Cahill). This allowed Kerry to pour millions of his own money into his faltering campaign. He spent $11,420,725 in the final three months of 2003.
And, isn't it ironic that Dean's campaign is now stuck at about $44 million in its having raised? And yes, dear reader, the two items of interest in this diary are related.
All that failure of the campaign manangement aside, Howard Dean has been awesome. The only candidate to call the media to the mat, while he was the frontrunner (see David Podvin, The Scream.
Would that Howard Dean is one day President. But as for Trippi and Pringle, I would like a refund.