PAGING THE RED ARMY:

Edwards, Kerry Were Barely Solvent Last Month (Thomas B. Edsall, February 22, 2004, washingtonpost.com )

New campaign finance reports show that the two leading candidates for the Democratic nomination were barely solvent at the end of January heading into a prospective $50 million-plus ad blitz by President Bush.

Bush, whose reelection drive is the richest in American history, ended January with $104.4 million in the bank, nearly 100 times as much as the net balances of Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the Democratic front-runner, and Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), Kerry's leading challenger for the nomination.

"We will never catch up," said Michael Meehan, Kerry's spokesman, noting that so far in February, Kerry had raised $5 million.

Bush is gearing up to weaken the Democratic nominee well before the general election starts, using a tactic that proved highly effective for President Bill Clinton in 1996.

Clinton, using unregulated large contributions of "soft money" the Democratic National Committee collected from unions, corporations and wealthy individuals, spent an estimated $30 million during the summer months on ads portraying Republican nominee Robert J. Dole in a harsh and negative light. Dole had no money to launch a counterattack.

Republican pollsters who tracked Dole's favorability said that in areas where the anti-Dole ads ran, the public's view of Dole deteriorated significantly, making it more difficult for him to mount his general election campaign in the fall.

With a base of $50 million, and perhaps significantly more, for spring and summer television commercials, the Bush campaign plans to spend at least 167 percent of what the Clinton campaign did eight years ago.

We've just seen how two months of basically unanswered attacks were able to soften up a popular president's poll numbers, now we'll get to see how an unknown senator fares after six months of being defined by Karl Rove.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 22, 2004 8:33 AM