|
Democrats Beat Bush
at 2nd Q. Campaign Fundraising;
Mainstream
Media Ignore Positive News for Democrats, Report Bush Crushed Individual
Candidates
Rob Kall OpEdNews.com
Individually, none of the 10 declared and undeclared democratic
presidential primary candidates came close to matching the money George W.
Bush raised-- a reported $34 million. But add them all up and it looks like they either beat him or
came very, very close. Not surprisingly, interviews and internet searches,
including google news for any
coverage of this positive aspect of the Democractic campaign failed to
find any mainstream media that reported this alternate "spin"
from the story that was primarily reported that Bush's fundraising was far
more than what any single Democrat raised.
While all the numbers are not finally tallied or reported yet, based on
estimates from other news sources, particularly the Washington Post, AP
and CNN TV news, combined with our own contacts with the Dean, Kucinich
and Mosely-Braun campaigns, and off-the-record-remarks for several of the
other campaigns, it appears that eight of the nine declared candidates
raised over $35.2 million. Al Sharpton's people could not be reached and
Wesley Clark's draft Clark website says he's raised $80,000 in addition.
Even if the sum comes up ten percent short, which appears unlikely, the
number is still very impressive, considering that the Bush promotion team
has been touting the size of their numbers. If nine separate, mostly
struggling and underfunded “maybes” can raise an amount comparable to
what Bush raised, then Bush is in for much more of a fight than he
expected. The money raised appears to be supporting polls which show that
Bush against any Democrat only gets 50-52% of the vote.
The biggest success story came from the Howard Dean campaign, which put
on a massive email blitz in the final hours of the quarter, sending out
flurries of emails. And it worked, with the campaign raising 7.5 million
in the second quarter. This massive win for Dean, passing the rest of the
candidates by at least 50% has been engineered with internet strategies
that go far past any of the other candidates. A study of the other eight
candidates websites found a dearth of internet oriented approaches to
building a volunteer netowrk, communications, fundraising at most of the
sites, with nothing but requests for email addresses at most.
The Dean campaign's success at grassroots fundraising, with 59,000
people contributing an average of $112 each sets a new record for
candidate primary fund-raising.
Debra DeShong communications director for the Democratic National
Committee told OpEdNews.com, "More people across America are
responding to the democratic message. When you add up the donations to all
of our candidates we more than beat Bush. This is the message we’ve been
putting out."
At the time of the writing of this article we were unable to find any
mainstream media coverage of the DNC's perspective. Associated Press (AP,)
in a report focusing on Joe Lieberman's campaign, said, "Bush's
fund-raising tour, combined with donations through the mail and Internet,
produced at least $34.2 million for his bid in just six weeks, far more
than any of his Democratic rivals have raised. The Washington Post, in an
editorial, said "...all the Democrats pale in comparison to the $34.2
million and counting amassed by President Bush in just a few weeks."
Deshong commented on Republican fundraising. "As we’ve said in
the past and will continue to say it, at the end of the day, the
republicans will have more money than us but it won’t matter. Because
George Bush broke every fundraising record in the last campaign and we
still won the campaign, still got more popular votes."
This article is based on the estimates reported in the Washington
post, AP and CNN for Gephardt, Edwards, Graham, Lieberman and Kerry.
We were able to reach the Kucinich campaign where, while they were not
finished counting, they were happy to report that they'd raised over half
a million dollars in the last week alone. Ambassador Mosely Braun's
campaign reported that they'd doubled the funds that were raised in the
first quarter.
Rob
Kall rob@opednews.com
is publisher of progressive news and opinion website www.opednews.com and
organizer of cutting edge meetings that bring together world leaders, such
as the Winter Brain Meeting and
the StoryCon
Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story. He has also
been co-developer of several software programs, and inventor of one of the
most widely selling biofeedback devices. This
article is copyright by Rob Kall, but permission is granted for reprint in
print, email, blog, or web media so long as this credit is attached
Other
writings of Rob Kall
|
