Lieberman Paddles Against Dean Flow
Democratic Rivals Revise Strategy in Expectations Game
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By Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 2, 2003; 11:55 AM
At 10:30 Monday night, I received an urgent message from Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) to contribute money to his presidential campaign before the midnight reporting deadline for the second quarter.
Lieberman was not the only candidate sending last-minute e-mails. But considering how he underperformed in raising money in the first quarter of the year, and considering the high expectations placed on him as a front-runner, his message carried a certain urgency.
"Our campaign is within thousands [of dollars] of reaching our goal for this quarter," the Democratic hopeful implored. "If we weren't so close to our mark, I wouldn't ask you with such urgency. We must meet this goal by 12 midnight (Central time) tonight. If you haven't given yet, take a moment and contribute right now..."
Of course, I was just one of 30,000 or so people who received this e-mail.
Lieberman was not trolling for dollars in cyberspace at that time of night because a few thousand dollars here or there would help him buy more ads in New Hampshire or hire more staff in Iowa. No, this was about the expectations game--that quarterly, election-time exercise, beloved in Washington, when candidates reveal how much loot they've hauled in and the pontificators explain what it all means.
This is serious business: Money ain't everything, but in politics, it's a lot. Political observers play close attention to second-quarter fundraising as a sign of a candidate's strength, and raising lots of money early becomes even more important this year given the early, compressed 2004 primary schedule.
Yet in many ways, it's a game as well: The publicity generated by the stories about the fundraising is as important as the fundraising itself. Money begets coverage, which confers respectability and status
Lieberman's staff on Monday indicated that it planned to count every check before it announced publicly their second-quarter results. Fair enough. Technically, they don't have to reveal anything until July 15, when they are required by law to report second quarter results to the Federal Election Commission. (Truth be told, the second-quarter picture won't be completely clear until that point.)
In their restraint, the Lieberman folks implied--and reporters inferred--that the campaign had not done as well as it should have. And it set about much speculation about whether Lieberman--who is leading the field in most national polls--is in trouble. After all, the presidential nominating contest is more a series of state elections than one big national election. And in that regard, the guy who is generating the heat in the early states of Iowa and New Hampshire is former Vermont governor Howard Dean.
Interestingly and not surprisingly, Dean was announcing his money total while Lieberman was still counting. On Sunday afternoon, nearly 36 hours before the second quarter books needed to be closed and 17 days before the FEC reporting deadline, Dean rushed to release his figures, even as the checks were still coming in.
"Governor Howard Dean, M.D. announced he has surpassed all expectations and raised $6 million in the second fundraising quarter," the Dean campaign press office wrote in an email to reporters on Sunday afternoon. "The fundraising total surged from 3.2 million dollars to 6 million dollars in just eight days. Over 21,000 people have contributed to the campaign this quarter. Of the $2.8 million raised these past eight days, over $2 million came from Internet contributions. On Friday, June 27th, the campaign raised over $500,000 in a single day online."
The Dean camp followed with an updated press release on Monday hours before the second-quarter deadline.
By the end of the day on Monday, it was clear that Dean would raise more than $7 million for the quarter, and in all likelihood lead all of his Democratic opponents in fundraising for the quarter.
The campaign also understood that reporters would find that tidbit irresistible and produce stories about Dean's surging campaign. And in fact, that theme--Dean's "people powered" surge--dominated political talk on Monday, with stories in such newspapers as The New York Times and The Washington Post, saturation coverage on the cable news networks, before-the-first-commercial-break coverage on the nightly network news and breathless commentary on the National Journal's Hotline and ABCNews.com's The Note.
By refusing to release its numbers, the Lieberman campaign made it impossible for reporters to directly compare the senator's effort to Dean's success. Lieberman's numbers will come out soon, of course. But at least for now, his campaign has avoided the direct comparison pieces while the fundraising story is still hot.
And in that regard, both Dean and Lieberman played the game as well as they could.
Two-Man Race or Wide Open Field?
Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s (Conn.) presidential campaign announced today that it had raised "$5 million and counting" for the second quarter, which ended on Monday. Privately, campaign officials had been telling reporters in recent days that they expected to raise around $4 million for the quarter. The $5 million figure puts Lieberman in the same range as Sens. John Kerry (Mass.) and John Edwards (N.C.) and Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.) for the second quarter. The campaigns are still crunching numbers, but it is likely Lieberman will still trail Kerry, Edwards, Gephardt and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean in total fund-raising for the year.
The problem for Lieberman is that he needed to have a really good quarter since he raised only a little more than $3 million in the first quarter well behind Kerry, Edwards and Gephardt. Dean raised about $2.6 million in the first quarter. (For the first quarter numbers, see Center for Responsive Politics Web site.)
Lieberman faces a perception problem. Having run on the 2000 ticket with Al Gore in a campaign that received more of the popular vote than Bush received, the expectations for Lieberman are high. He has no excuse for not being a frontrunner. And now that Dean is firmly ensconced in the first tier, someone else has to fall out of it. Is it Lieberman? There's only so much room at the top, after all.
This week, Kerry's staff began arguing that it's a two-person race between Kerry and Dean, which is better than a four-way race between Kerry and a bunch of other people. Kerry's haul for both quarters this year is more than $13 million-tops among all candidates.
"This election is like the stock market," said Kerry spokesman Chris Lehane in his typically colorful style. "There are some that are blue chip stocks, there are some junk bonds and there are some are high-tech stocks. The junk bonds never really get off the ground. And the high-tech stocks soar high before crashing. I'll leave it to others to figure out who fits in those categories.
Lehane continues: "For Dean to have moved up he had to walk by a couple others. I think right now it is sort of a Kerry and Dean race."
Not so fast, say the folks at the Edwards and Gephardt campaigns, who insist they are very much in it. In fact, if there's one common theme among the campaigns (other than Kerry's, that is), it's that the fundraising numbers prove it's a wide-open contest.
"It's going to be a long race," said Jamal Simmons, a spokesman for Sen. Bob Graham (Fla.), who will report $2 million to $3 million raised in the quarter. "No one has a firm grasp on a leadership role here. It's a long time before the first votes are cast, and they won't be cast on how much money was raised but by having a message and organization to amplify it."
Privately, there was a lot of chatter about Dean and Lieberman.
One rival campaign official had this to say of Lieberman: "He's got some real questions to answer. It's going to be really difficult for him. It's been difficult enough for him to explain a rational for his candidacy. Now it's going to be even more difficult for him to do that without sufficient financial resources."
In perhaps a sign of his emergence, rival campaigns were loath to give Dean much credit.
"The people who like Dean don't understand what he's really about it," said one rival campaign official. "I mean that people who are for him are for him because of what he's against, not what he's for."
Give Dean His Due
The Dean phenomenon is real. What we don't know yet is whether it is long-lived or just a reaction to something happening in a snapshot of time.
The Dean camp stayed busy e-mailing on Tuesday, exploiting their momentum for maximum effect. A press release that went out Tuesday afternoon noted that the campaign had raised its second quarter estimate to an extraordinary $7.5 million, with nearly 60,000 people contributing an average of $112 between April and June. More than 45,000 of those people contributed online.
"When we said last week during the governor's announcement that 'You have the power,' we had no idea just how much power our supporters had," said Campaign Manager Joe Trippi. "They are people participating directly in their democracy, and doing whatever they can to help us take our country back-giving $20, $30, or $50. This is People-Powered Howard."
As recently as a few weeks ago, Dean was lumped in with the Rep. Dennis Kucinich, former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun and the Rev. Al Sharpton as a second-tier candidate. But Dean's poll numbers are improving in important states, he's raising money like mad and the buzz--an intangible, but equally important standard--is moving his way.
If Dean can get a handle on his negative attributes--lack of preparation, snippiness--he may be the guy to beat in the Democratic primary.
"That's amazing!" said Democratic media consultant Dane Strother, who just learned of Dean's fundraising numbers on Tuesday after returning from a fly-fishing trip to Montana. Strother, who is unaligned in the presidential contest, continued: "Howard Dean is the only guy who knows exactly why he's running. And he's connecting. He's got all the momentum."
Clearly, Dean has tapped into a segment of the population that feels ignored by the media and powerless in a country politically dominated by Republicans in Washington. They feel that the party's leaders--including the leading presidential candidates from Congress--have been too accommodating toward Bush and seemingly oblivious that despite the GOP's slight electoral edge, this is still a country divided almost evenly between the parties.
"One of the chords Dean is striking is that he opposes very clearly Bush's foreign policy," said Zack Exley, an organizer for the liberal moveon.org's political action committee. "He is attempting to put forward a different kind of foreign policy. Other candidates are differentiating their policies from the president's, but not like [Dean]. But I think the energy Dean is able to mobilize (is) that there are a whole lot of people out there who passionately oppose Bush's policy and are terrified of the direction he's taking the country."
University of Maryland political science professor Ron Walters, who worked on Jesse L. Jackson's campaigns in the 1980s, put it this way: "The mood is such that there is a frustration about the 'me too' Republicans in the Democratic party. I think Democrats are in a mood coming out of the 2002 cycle to lift someone up into leadership who is a real Democrat and second is a fighter."
But others in the party see Dean as a less than desirable leader--one that will lead the party to certain defeat if he's nominated.
"It is no accident that Clinton was the first Democrat to be elected and re-elected in six decades," said Al From, founder and CEO of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. "Dean shown he has been able to energize the base, but that's not the only thing you need to do. The liberal base is important to our party. You also have to be able to reach out to the swing voters who are also important to our party and you have to have to win ...When we've had the most 'pure' candidates we've had some of the biggest defeats."
From also argued that money is only one measure of how a candidate is doing. "If money was all that mattered, we would have had president John Connolly and president Phil Gramm," he said.
But Walters says the DLC model is obsolete.
"The tectonic plate has shifted even from Clinton," he said. "The DLC may be out of sync with the rest of the country by the time this [election] rolls around. I think the barriers to third-way politics are palpable now. People are looking for clarity, and the DLC's argument is a defensive one."
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