MAJORITY DREAMS

Bush Plays It Fast, With Hard Money (DAVID E. ROSENBAUM, 6/29/2003,. NY Times)

By early next March, Democrats will probably have settled on a nominee for president.

At that point, with no opposition in the primaries, President Bush's re-election campaign is expected to begin spending the massive amount of money it is raising to paint an unfavorable picture of the Democratic candidate in voters' minds and to establish the terms of the fall contest in a way that benefits the president.

It is almost certain that the Democrats will not have the money to respond. "They will be flat on their backs," said Scott Reed, an experienced Republican consultant who is not involved in the 2004 presidential race, "tired from an exhausting primary campaign, still at each other's throats and completely broke." [...]

But Mr. Bush is forgoing matching money, so there will be no limit to what he can spend. His campaign says it plans to raise $170 million, almost twice what Mr. Bush had in 2000 when he also refused matching money and faced stiff primary opposition, and many times more than any other candidate has ever spent. [...]

Because Mr. Bush plans to accept public financing for the general election campaign, he can use the money he is raising only between now and the Republican National Convention in New York in September 2004.

"It's a bonanza for them," said Tony Coelho, who for a time was Al Gore's campaign manager in the last presidential race. "There's no way they can spend this amount of money just for themselves."

Mr. Coelho said he expected the Bush campaign to contribute millions of excess dollars to Congressional campaign committees and state and local Republican parties to be used to improve the party's position in Congress. "What they want to do is not just target Bush's re-election but also make the Republican Party the majority party for the rest of the decade if not longer," he said.

The big thing at this point is for the Party to avoid the Reagan/Clinton mistake of not running on any agenda. You need to make your landslide look like an endorsement of the things you want to get done--in Mr. Bush's case, counter-revolutionary entitlement and tax reform--whether it is or not. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 29, 2003 6:24 AM