Earlier this summer, the McCain campaign began running their “celebrity” ads, which, in a neat bit of messaging jujitsu, effectively turned Obama’s popularity into a question about his experience. Former Washington Post writer Sridhar Pappu summed up the genius of the ads thus:
Whatever one might think of the ad’s execution, as far as the McCain campaign was concerned, it at exactly the right time for exactly the right purpose: To plant seeds of doubt in the summer that will grow into a full-scale assault — turning a candidate’s greatest strength into his weakness — by the first leaves of fall.
Aside from Obama’s popularity, his other great strength as a candidate is his seemingly limitless fundraising. Obama’s candidacy has been the closest thing to a license to print money that politics has ever seen. So much so that, after explicitly endorsing public financing, Obama flip-flopped and decided to forego public financing for a shot at raising unlimited amounts of campaign cash. At the time it looked like the smart, if not exactly principled, move.
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Now, it looks like this other great strength in fundraising is turning into a major weakness. The
New York Times reports that the Obama campaign is describing recent fundraising efforts as “
extremely anemic” and looks to fall far short of its goal of raising $450 million between the campaign and the DNC.
McCain, on the other hand, is sitting pretty. The campaign finished August with a cool $100 million in the bank between the campaign and RNC, and that’s before $84 million in public financing. The campaign is now forbidden from raising any more money, but can lean on the RNC’s consistently good fundraising. The McCain team has a comparatively modest fundraising goal of raising another $100 million through the RNC in the next two months.
Miraculously, with about $300 million expected to come in, this should put them on rough fundraising parity with the Obama campaign. It also means that, despite the fact that the McCain campaign has been vastly overspent in previous months, all the Obama money spent up until now doesn’t amount to much of anything.
With over 2,000 paid staff, Obama campaign’s overhead dwarfs McCain’s. And while the size of Obama’s campaign is unprecedented, so is its burn rate — the campaign has been known to spend as much as
$42 million a month. The Democrat has been spending millions more on ads than his Republican rival — and to questionable effect. To cite just one example: through the beginning of August, Obama spent $5 million on ads in Florida to
McCain’s nothing. And yet McCain has
consistently led in the state. With McCain narrowly leading in most national polls, every dollar Obama has spent on advertising up to this point is effectively moot.
Further, McCain has been able to rely on the RNC to augment the campaign’s fundraising, whereas the DNC’s fundraising has been lackluster — having been outraised by the RNC in this election cycle by more than two-to-one. What’s more, according to the
latest figures, the DNC has already spent most of the money they’ve raised — some 96 percent of it. The DNC sank $55 million into staging the convention alone. And despite gutting the Pepsi Center in Denver to install a stage set-up that would make Pink Floyd blush — and renting out Invesco field (where the Democrats literally hired Britney Spears’ stage crew) — the Democratic convention was dominated by talk of a rift between the Clintons and the Obamas, and the lackluster veep pick of Joe Biden ensured that the traditional post-convention bounce lasted only a few days.
