Kerry, to be sure, ended up collecting more than $12 million during the first six months of 2003, the most of any Democrat and close to matching the pace that he had forecast at the Patricof breakfast. But measured by the quarterly reports to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Kerry's position in the fund-raising derby was analogous to that of Mo Udall, the liberal Arizona congressman who kept finishing second in the 1976 primaries. Each time around, the Kerry number prompted oh-yeah yawns from the political cognoscenti, who were galvanized by the dramatic narrative line coming from another campaign. At the end of the first quarter, John Edwards won the headlines with his ability to belly up to the bar with the trial lawyers. And on June 30, Howard Dean became the big story. The once impecunious Dean had for the first time in political history miraculously found a way to harness the small-contribution power of the Internet. The tectonic plates had shifted, the continents had moved, and never again would campaign finance be viewed solely through the old-fashioned prism of who had the largest group of proven Democratic fund-raisers in his corner.
But for all the justified fascination with Dean's web-slinging exploits on the Internet, the relative financial competitiveness of the Democratic presidential race was also due to another far less ballyhooed factor. Yes, it is time to talk about the landmark 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign reform bill. I will concede that those who are obsessed with the details of campaign reform are like nineteenth-century devotees of Esperanto as a universal language. There may not be many of them, but their passions about the topic are so intense that they are best avoided at cocktail parties. But in all the abstruse debates that surrounded the legislation and its subsequent Supreme Court review, little attention was devoted to a minor provision that made all the difference for the Democratic hopefuls.
A drum roll if you please, maestro. McCain-Feingold increased the maximum legally permissible individual campaign contribution in a primary campaign from $1,000 to $2,000. That seemingly innocuous double-your-pleasure-double-your-fun numerical change probably kept Dick Gephardt, Lieberman and even Edwards in the race. Do the arithmetic—a candidate can now harvest twice the campaign cash from the same two hours spent in a Fifth Avenue living room or at a beach house in Malibu. For a presidential contender who must put all his begs in one ask-it, the implications are enormous. Most of the 2004 Democrats, especially in the early stages of the campaign, depended on contributors who could "max out" with a single check. During the first three months of 2003, both Gephardt and Lieberman received more than 85 percent of their funding in increments of $1,000 or more. The new $2,000 limit illustrates the truism that a rising tide lifts all candidates. Taken as a group, the Democratic hopefuls in the first quarter garnered roughly an additional $10 million in $1,000-plus contributions that would have been impermissible under the old law.
The rule of thumb is that a White House hopeful needs to raise at least $15 million (not counting federal matching funds) in 2003, though mileage may vary based on driving conditions. This change in the contribution limit makes it likely that most, if not all, of the serious Democratic contenders will make it. (Bob Graham—who was supposed to rake in more money in his home state of Florida than Disney World—is likely to prove to be the conspicuous exception.) Never before in modern political history have this many presidential candidates entered the fall before the primaries with the financial resources in place to seriously joust for the nomination. The financial terrain of a presidential campaign will never be level, but this $2,000 wrinkle has dramatically lifted the barriers to entry that have blocked generations of underfunded White House dreamers.
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Jesse Unruh, the rotund leader of California Democrats during the 1960s, famously declared that "money is the mother's milk of politics." Applying Unruh's colorful metaphor to the 2004 Democratic hopefuls might make John Edwards the most ardent proponent of breast-feeding. All the presidential candidates needed money, but Edwards craved it with single-minded intensity. Invisible in the polls, inexperienced in Washington and innocent of long-standing ties to traditional national fund-raising networks, Edwards banked on a dramatic breakthrough in the early money primary. Nick Baldick, Edwards's campaign manager, confided in mid-December 2002 that the strategy for the first quarter was to risk neglecting the early caucus and primary states to concentrate exclusively on fund-raising. "Trips to New Hampshire are helpful for Kerry because he already has a support base there from Boston television," Baldick said. "But people there don't know who we are."
What the North Carolina senator had going for him was the willingness of his fellow attorneys to take him on appeal. The dirty little secret of the Democrats, explained to me by a leading fund-raiser, is the narrowness of the party's financial base. Without the mainstream business support of the Republican Party, the Democrats disproportionately depend on just three groups: Jews, unions and trial lawyers. But wealthy litigators have traditionally bought their way into the Democratic Party through "soft money," the fat-cat five- and six-digit donations that were banned by McCain-Feingold. When it comes to rounding up campaign checks the old-fashioned way, in bunches of $1,000 and $2,000, trial lawyers were as inexperienced as a fledgling law-school graduate arguing an appeal before the Supreme Court. "At our first law-firm event, we got every type of check," said Eileen Kotecki, who oversees Edwards's fund-raising, in mid-January. "I had to explain that a law-firm check or a numbered account is not going to work. It has to be a check from your personal account." (This may partially explain why an Arkansas law firm is under federal investigation for allegedly illegally reimbursing its employees for their donations to the Edwards campaign, which returned $10,000 in questionable funds.)
Nothing—not even following the house-beautification doctrines of Martha Stewart—is more labor-intensive than early political fund-raising in a presidential campaign. Every free hour of every day carries a price tag of, say, $5,000. Big-ticket donors are not satisfied to merely see the candidate in a living-room setting; they also demand five minutes of his time to privately press their views on Iraq or, in Edwards's case, the iniquities of tort-reform legislation.
Scorning sleep and hitting the road the moment the Senate ended pressing business, Edwards spent more time with lawyers than a CEO facing criminal indictment for insider trading. Part of what carried him forward was an unflagging optimism. "I'm going to do everything in my power to get your support," he explained to me, "but you're not going to get every vote and you're not going to get every fund-raiser. If that man or woman doesn't work out, you go on to the next one with equal energy." Every night, whether traveling or home in Washington, Edwards would call Kotecki and ask, "Eileen, how much money do we have? We've got to be number one."
That quest led to Jeffrey Anderson, a fifty-six-year-old trial lawyer with his own firm in San Antonio, who contributed $2,000 in March to the Edwards campaign. Anderson, who admits that he could end up voting for Bush in the general election, met the candidate at a Sunday afternoon reception organized by his friend and fellow lawyer Frank Herrera. Anderson and Edwards chatted for about five minutes about foreign policy and their shared concerns about the drive to cap medical-liability settlements. There was no hard sell; money was never mentioned. But afterward, Anderson sent his check to the campaign via Herrera. "Mr. Edwards is an interesting individual," Anderson explained. "I find if you meet with individuals personally, you get a better feel for their charisma or their knowledge and sincerity than if you see them in sound bites or orchestrated ads."
Let's follow the daisy chain of mutual obligation back to Herrera, the host of the fifty-person San Antonio event that netted $45,000 for Edwards. Herrera, sixty, was recruited by high-powered Dallas trial lawyer Fred Baron, the financial chairman of the Edwards campaign, with whom he had worked on several lucrative asbestos cases. Although he had never met the candidate, Herrera was already committed to Edwards: "It was an easy choice for me because obviously he is in the same profession I'm in." The son o
f an auto mechanic from Edna, Texas, Herrera was also attracted to Edwards's hard-scrabble heritage. So when Baron called to urge him to host an Edwards fund-raiser, Herrera recalls, "I leaped at the chance because I had not had the chance to visit with him personally."
No stranger to the political money circuit (he held a six-hundred-person Democratic event featuring Bill Clinton before the 1998 congressional elections), Herrera possessed the three essential qualifications of a successful fund-raiser: a large Rolodex, a willingness to work the phones to call in favors and a jaw-dropping home. With just two weeks to prepare, Herrera sent out two hundred faxed invitations (mostly to lawyer friends) and made about one hundred follow-up phone calls. "They know that if I'm calling two or three times a day," said Herrera, "I'm calling for a political reason."
Part of the allure was the house: 10,000 square feet, with a living room the size of a basketball court, set on ten acres in Hill Country Village, just outside San Antonio. The Edwards campaign prefers events in private homes, since the host can legally spend up to $4,000 on food and decorations without any of it counting as a campaign contribution. So the Herrera home was filled with fresh flowers and the caterers set up a Mexican lunch of beans, rice, fajitas and tortillas. After meeting privately with Herrera and former San Antonio mayor and Clinton cabinet member Henry Cisneros (who later endorsed Kerry), Edwards spoke for fifteen minutes and then worked the crowd, with his host standing next to him making the introductions. For Herrera, the success of the event was defined by a number: He exceeded his target of $40,000.
At the end of a fund-raising quarter, when contributions must be reported to the Federal Elections Commission, it is traditional for campaigns to announce their totals well in advance of the official release of the information by the FEC. All day Tuesday, April 1, political junkies waited for the Kerry camp to release its pace-setting number. Tiring of this Alphonse-and-Gaston routine a little after 4:00 P.M., the Edwards campaign sprung its surprise: $7.4 million. Not until the following afternoon did the crestfallen Kerry team issue a press release headlined, "John Kerry Tops $7 Million for First Fundraising Quarter."
John Edwards got his wish; he was number one. But never did a presidential candidate owe so much to a single occupational group. According to a Washington Post analysis of the Edwards filings to the FEC, the senator received a whopping 55 percent of his money from individuals who identified themselves on disclosure forms as lawyers. (That figure does not count spouses and adult children of attorneys nor does it include real-estate developers, owners of plant-watering services and other vendors with business ties to law firms.) If the Edwards campaign had an unofficial slogan, it might well be "Torts 'R' Us."
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For all his medical training, Howard Dean rightly describes himself as a "technophobe." As Vermont governor, he did not begin using e-mail until late 2001, and through the early months of 2003 he traveled without a computer. While rivals such as Lieberman were wedded to their BlackBerry wireless handheld consoles, Dean made do with a cell phone, though he sometimes had trouble playing back recorded messages. In short, Dean began his presidential bid with about as much chance of being the darling of the Internet as Chance, the simpleton gardener, played by Peter Sellers in Being There, did advising presidents. But then virtually everything about the Dean crusade seemed to be based on serendipity. The candidate, who is also not a TV fan, happily adopted the suggestion of an early supporter to call his campaign "Dean for America" without having the foggiest notion that the slogan was borrowed from The West Wing.
Dean's original approach to raising money resembled that of every other Democrat, except that the sums he was questing after were far more modest. In late January 2003, I attended one of Dean's initial fund-raisers, a low-key reception held at the Washington home of former Clinton cabinet secretary Christine Varney, where the stated but timorously enforced price of admission was a $500 contribution. Speaking to this room filled with curious but mostly uncommitted veterans of the Clinton administration, the candidate artfully delineated the Dean difference. "Now I'm going to tell this group of insiders, who know a lot about politics, why I can win," he declared. His reasoning can be boiled down to a single argument: I'm from outside the Beltway. "If you're from Washington," he said, with a slight sneer audible in his tone, "you get trained to nuance all your positions so that they appeal to as many people as you possibly can...Your biggest claim to fame is that you can say that you introduced a bill."
But governors, Dean declared without having to directly invoke Clinton's pedigree, march to the beat of a different drummer. "If you're a governor, you get paid to offend people," he said, getting a small laugh. "You get paid to make very tough decisions. I don't think we can possibly beat George Bush unless we have as an alternative somebody who's direct, somebody who knows who they are and who is comfortable with their message." Drumming the point home, Dean declared, "I don't think you can win with Bush Lite. As Harry Truman said, 'If you have a choice between a Republican and a Republican, the Republican is going to win every time.'" (Bigger laugh.) Afterward I chatted with former Clinton strategist Harold Ickes, who expressed the conventional view that while Dean was impressive, he probably could not raise enough money to be competitive.
Really? Four months later, I was listening to Dean fund-raising director Stephanie Schriock giggle at the memory of her job interview with the candidate. We were sitting in her office in the Burlington headquarters, which was filled with odd bits of political memorabilia like a 1984 Walter Mondale for President poster (a token of her Minnesota roots) and dominated by a wall chart detailing every fund-raising event planned for the second quarter. Like many of her fund-raising counterparts in other campaigns, the blond, enthusiastic thirty-year-old Schriock is a recent alumna of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. Recruited by Dean media consultant Steve McMahon, with whom she worked on an abortive Senate race in Oklahoma, Schriock finally sat down with the Vermont governor during the Democratic Governors Association convention in Austin, Texas, right after the 2002 elections.
What was, in hindsight, the comic moment came when she asked Dean, whose most expensive re-election race had cost $1 million, how much money he hoped to raise. "We're looking at $10 million," he said, probably exaggerating for her benefit. Schriock bluntly responded, "If we only do $10 million, we lose." That confident answer clinched the job. As Schriock recalled, "I really think he was expecting me to frown and say, 'Uh-oh, that'll be tough.'"
Schriock could laugh about that conversation now that it was the end of May, since the campaign was then on pace to raise more than $7 million during the first half of 2003. (The final total turned out to be more than $10 million—Dean surpassed his most optimistic projections for the entire campaign seven months before the Iowa caucuses. And the money kept rolling in throughout the summer.) But in late 2002, Dean was in financial terms akin to the Duchy of Grand Fenwick declaring war on the United States. Kerry and Edwards chartered jets for their travels, while Dean traveled coach. Even in the spring of 2003, after a late-night fund-raiser in Manhattan, Dean thought nothing of cramming into a rented sedan with his aides for the five-hour drive back to Burlington. Getting ready to leave New York around 10:00 p.m. on an April evening, Dean was shocked to discover that his staff had rented a Cadillac, albeit at a bargain rate. "How much did we raise today?" he asked grumpily. Only after hearing the five-digit total did he grudgingly say, "Well, okay."
Dean was outpacing his mainstream rivals because he had tapped into that half-forgotten vein of Democratic campaign cash: cause money. Even with Dean's passionate dissent from war with Iraq, it took a while for his own campaign to fully grasp the financial implications of his maverick candidacy. "On March 1," Schriock recalled, "I thought we were going to do $1 million in March. That said, neither Governor Dean nor the campaign manager [Joe Trippi] thought we'd do $1 million." While other campaigns desperately raced to impress the press with their first-quarter fig
ures, Schriock confessed that "we had no expectations for March 31." Reflecting this otherworldly approach, the Dean campaign actually scheduled its first $1,000-a-person fundraiser for April 1 in New York, the day that the books opened for the second quarter.
It is funny how a new means of communication is often used to replicate the emotions that accompanied the technology that it replaced. The Dean campaign's first Internet breakthrough—the moment that in political terms equaled Alexander Graham Bell shouting into a primitive telephone mouthpiece, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!"—was built around something as ordinary as a postcard. On March 27, the campaign sent out to the 30,000 supporters on its e-mail list a retro-style facsimile of a having-a-wonderful-time-wish-you-were-here Vermont vacation greeting complete with a mock twenty-three-cent stamp. The postcard featured an old-fashioned, almost-full mercury thermometer that looked like it was borrowed from a 1950s local Red Cross fund-raising campaign. "Dear friend," the printed text read. "We're close to our goal, but we need your help. We're only $83,000 short of our target for the first quarter FEC deadline." Small public radio stations beg for $83,000, not serious presidential campaigns. But the results from this modest mass e-mailed appeal were dramatic enough to justify an IPO. Dean collected $400,000 over the Internet in just five days.
Even in late May, when I spoke with Schriock about Internet fund-raising, she projected the slightly nervous tone of a 1920s aviatrix about to attempt a cross-country flight. "Someday just like direct mail, it's going to be a science," she said. But right now, she admitted, there was just too little of an on-line track record to hazard a realistic second-quarter projection. Working in tandem with Internet sites such as meetup.com (which orchestrated heavily publicized monthly gatherings of Dean supporters) and MoveOn.org (a Democratic activist network), the campaign had seen its e-mail list swell to more than 100,000 addresses. Yet no one in the Dean domain—not even Trippi, the Internet-obsessed campaign manager who had worked in Silicon Valley—fully grasped the stunning fund-raising potential of the list. They were all like high-school science students who had thrown a bunch of volatile chemicals into a beaker and had no idea if they were going to spark a chain reaction. As the evocatively named Zephyr Teachout, a former death-penalty lawyer who now oversees Internet organizing for Dean, put it, "The learning curve for all of this is extraordinary."
Shapiro, Walter - One Car Caravan - On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In Page 8