Thursday, February 07, 2008
As the New York Observer notes, "calling for debates is something you do when you're behind." So is loaning your campaign money. Still, I think HRC is a long way from finished. Obama's edge may be that his contributors haven't been maxed out, but the fact that he did so well in the caucus states this week suggests to me that he has an advantage that other "insurgent" (if that's the word) candidates for the nomination have not had in the past-- he plainly has strong organizers working for him. Jessie Jackson made it as far as he did without a lot of money (although he had some of A & mine). Dean had a ton of dough, which Joe Trippi spent like he was managing John Connally's campaign. It would be interesting to see a study tracking fund raising over the course of primary seasons from, say 1980 to date-- it seems to me that the money often runs out before the momentum does, and that, as a general proposition, the managers of presidential nomination campaigns to a pretty dreadful job of husbanding their resources, but I could be wrong. The 1984 Mondale-Hart contest is being held up as a template for what is going on this year-- I'd be curious about how the money came in and how it was spent in that year in particular.
// posted by Bill @ 12:28 PM 
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