Let’s call it the big bat.
We all know that first the Dean campaign, then the Clark campaign, and then to lesser extents the other Democratic presidential candidates and now even House candidates have used the web to haul in large sums of money from small donors.
But the big test won’t get started until a month or more from now.
Let’s say John Kerry wins the nomination. I think that’s overwhelmingly likely. But in this case I’m just using the assumption to sketch out a hypothetical or rather plot a sensible course of action. I’m not trying to prejudge the outcome of what’s going to happen over the next couple weeks.
One of the biggest factors in this upcoming race has always been what would happen in the spring and summer of this year. The game plan goes something like this …
After the Democratic primaries are over, the eventual winner would have spent a lot of money winning the nomination. And that nominee-to-be would probably be pretty near the spending caps he or she had had to agree to to get matching funds.
That means that for all intents and purposes the Democratic nominee would be out of cash and probably out of luck till the general election phase began after the conventions. That’s when a new round of public funds would come in and the spending caps would reset.
Right about that time, though — in early spring — President Bush will be able to go on the airwaves with the equivalent of campaign commerical carpet bombing and bludgeon the Democratic nominee while he has no funds to fight back.
A milder version of this happened in 1996 when an unchallenged Bill Clinton went on the airwaves early and took advantage of the period when Bob Dole had no money to respond. But the war chest President Bush has been able to amass is far, far larger. What’s more, like Kerry, he’s opted out of the public system for the primaries. So he can spend as much as he wants.
(As it happens, I think that going on the air early for Clinton in 1996 just put the icing on the cake. That was never going to be a close election. This, on the other hand, is definitely going to be close.)
Now, assuming Kerry’s the nominee, one part of the equation has already changed: if memory serves, Kerry opted out of the public financing system for the primary phase of the campaign. So he can spend as much as he can raise.
But he still won’t have anywhere near as much as President Bush will have in reserve.
That’s where the big bat comes in.
How well will the Kerry campaign — and the rest of the Democratic party, broadly construed — do in the middle-months of this year raising small-donor cash online to keep President Bush from unleashing all his fire power while Kerry has no way to fire back?
We’ll return to this question later with some thoughts on how they might go about it.
