They sit there dutifully on the stage during the debates, largely ignored by the moderators and the cameras. The polls show they trail the two leaders, Clinton and Obama, by huge margins. So why are people hoping one of them will pull an upset?
Curiously the answer lies in the very phrase that has served as the title of this series, “Follow the money.” A perusal of the finances of these candidates provides a sharp contrast to those of the front runners. Maybe it is why they are behind. Maybe it is also why they just might pull off that upset.
John Edwards
The surprising thing about John Edwards is that for a former vice-presidential candidate he trails a distant third in the money race. Edwards’ anti-corporate, two Americas message propelled him onto the national stage in 2004, only to find himself co-opted by a Kerry campaign that neutralized him the way John Kennedy neutralized Lyndon Johnson.
Edwards could have been–and maybe still could be–the Howard Dean of 2008, but his staff and the candidate himself seem to have little understanding of how to run a Dean-like campaign. With Dean neutralized at the Democratic National Committee, there will be little chance of direct help from the Dean camp. Meanwhile Dennis Kucinich’s overwhelming victory with Dean’s Democrats for America, means Edwards will get little help there.
The key to understanding Edwards’ fate lies in the blogosphere which enthusiastically supported Dean. In 2004, the blogs were upstarts that gave voice to millions of people who felt marginalized by the likes of the folks who live in their Eagle’s Lairs and by the triangulators who dominated the Democratic Party machinery. But now these upstarts have become media moneymakers who like the mainstream media aim for the mediocre middle, mouthing phrases like “electability.”
As for liberals and progressives, true to form they have spent more time finding compelling reasons not to like any of the candidates to the point of where some of them inexplicably want to draft Al Gore, the candidate who has no one but himself to blame for 2000 despite the prevalent myth of the stolen campaign. Liberals and progressives also are caught up again in single issue crusades and a lack of defining common principles. George Lakoff’s framing solution seems like a distant dream.
A reason Edwards has not caught on with liberals is that his once powerful “two Americas” message has become muted and replaced by a campaign that has trotted out a phone-book thick list of programs and proposals. What Edwards stands for has been buried under mountains of paper. So Edwards remains in third place because he has neither money nor grassroots support. He is rapidly on his way to becoming a text book example of how not to run a campaign.
Edwards’ donor list as posted in opensecrets.org reflects his campaign’s lack of a center.
Despite this, Edwards remains locked in a virtual dead heat with Clinton and Obama in Iowa. Since the Iowa caucuses require that after the first round those supporting candidates with less than 15% of those attending must drop out, those voters will hold the balance of power. Given that supporters of Kucinich and Richardson are no lovers of Hillary Clinton, and Chris Dodd and Gravel are nonfactors in Iowa, the speculation is whether these voters will go to Edwards or Obama.
Edwards may be the one candidate for whom Iowa is a make-or-break state. Should he come in third, the anti-Hillary vote will go to Obama and the media will get the race they have been trying shove down our throats during the debates.
Bill Richardson
If Obama is the Hamlet candidate, Bill Richardson is the Rodney Dangerfield of the Democratic field. For whatever the reason, he just doesn’t get any respect. Where the press gushes over Hillary Clinton as possibly the first woman president and Barack Obama as the first African American to occupy the White House, there has been little hype about Richardson as the first potential Latino chief executive.
Where Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden have earned credits for their experience, the press has given little attention to Richardson’s impressive resume. Where Kucinich and Obama are portrayed as outsiders, Richardson is the only outside-the-beltway alternative. This prompted Richardson to respond to a Kucinich attempt to tar the entire field as casting the wrong votes about Iraq and the Patriot Act with a comment that Richardson was a governor and had no part in any of those decisions. On stage Richardson has been both articulate (he always seems to have an answer with built-in bullet points) and one of the few to have a sense of humor.
What Bill Richardson lacks is money and a message. Whether due to a simple fact that he has not attracted the big donors or his own self-professed commitment to remain above the money game, Richardson’s donor list–along with that of Dennis Kucinich–represents probably the one least likely to scare off those of us who worry about the impact of people like Sumner Redstone.
Where Hillary Clinton looks out calculatingly from the Eagle’s Lair of her Cash machine benefactors and Obama can’t make up his mind whether to press the elevator button and join her and John Edwards is wandering around outside with his team of lawyers, Richardson’s donor list has the feel of a genuine alternative candidate.
When you peruse his list, you do not have the fear that America’s largest lobbying firm or biggest law firm will elbow their way into decisions nor do you see hedge fund and nuclear power companies. If that Iowa voter I ran into worries about whose pockets each candidate is in, Richardson does not seem in anyone’s pocket.
That is his strength, but he has been unable to leverage it into a higher percentage in the polls. With Hillary Clinton now opening as many headquarters in Iowa as there are McDonalds, Richardson could turn this to his advantage, but seems unwilling to pull the trigger.
On stage Richardson can have thoughtful answers, but what do they add up to? I quizzed a few people in Iowa about Richardson and they agreed they had been impressed with him in the debates, but when I asked for specifics they could not give any. Even more telling, when I asked what Richardson stood for, none of them could tell me. I put readers of this post to the same test.
Dennis Kucinch
Dennis Kucinch is the candidate who refuses to go away and by refusing to go away, he may just hang in there until the end. Kucinich’s Energizer Bunny quality–he can’t even seem to sit still in the debates–comes from an important characteristic–he seems to be the only one in the field with a palpable sense of purpose. You can quarrel with his sometimes self-righteous attitude, but no one will ever accuse him of triangulating or mincing his words. A typical Kucinich response was his answer to the Las Vegas debate question about why he was the only Congressional candidate to vote against the Patriot Act. “I read it,” he said.
Where Hillary Clinton projects an almost aristocratic air, with a not too hidden chip on her shoulder, Obama plays Hamlet, and Edwards and Richardson have no message, Kucinich leaves little doubt about his positions. My son who has spent some time inside the Beltway, draws an interesting analogy: Kucinch is the Ralph Nader of 2008. Both share a similar earnestness, are decidedly anti-establishment, and have a certain “I am right” attitude.
Kucinch’s earnestness has attracted many former Deaniacs who might have gone to Edwards or Richardson. That accounts for his showing in the Democrats for America poll where he walloped the field.
The Kucinich donor list may well be the purist off all the candidates. Next to Mike Gravel’s, it is also the smallest. No need to worry some law firm or lobbyist or Wall Street corporation will call the shots, because you won’t find anyone like that on the Kucinich donor list.
Kucinich shares another characteristic with Dean–his large percentage of small donors. Depending on which estimate you use, Kucinich’s percentage of small donors ranges from USA Today’s estimate of 68% to 70% by votegopher.com. This is easily the highest figure for any Democratic Presidential candidate.
Unfortunately, unlike Dean, he has not been able to enlist large numbers of these small donors. In fact, his fundraising trails where he was in 2004. I have a theory on this–he does not have the techies to support such an effort. His web site is probably the worst of the major candidates and even contains some embarrassing coding errors, one of which I uncovered while trying to download a photo of the candidate. The filename extension was .jpg.jpg.
Kucinich also faces the same online problems that plague John Edwards and Bill Richardson. With the blogging world changed and now under control of blogs that are but extensions of big media (the biggest so-called progressive blogger even writes for Newsweek, the second biggest probably spends more money per week on her blog than Kucinich does on his campaign), the likelihood of a repeat of the Dean miracle is highly unlikely.
There seems little doubt that Kucinich will stay in the race until the end, just as he did in 2004. If the networks don’t kick him off the stage as they did Mike Gravel, he should make things interesting.
The Bottom Line
Kucinich, Edwards and even Obama raise fundamental questions about the future of American democracy. Money has always played a major role in campaigns, but to quote a remark Bill Moyers made almost two decades ago, today “it doesn’t just talk, it roars.” With money now the major determinant of winners and losers, it raises the serious question of whether any candidate with liberal egalitarian principles can win.
Since writing The Strange Death of Liberal America, I have become more aware that I perhaps underplayed the importance of money in putting Liberal America in intensive care. The voter in Iowa did have it right when she said we need to know who is bankrolling the candidates so we know who will really be pulling the strings.
I ran into Jeff Blodgett, who once served as Paul Wellstone’s chief of staff, at a function not long ago. We talked about Wellstone’s famous triangle of politics, policy and grassroots organizing. We seem to have forgotten the last one. If we look back on elections in the last decade or so, the real upsets have occurred because of grass roots organizing. There is Dean, of course, and Wellstone himself.
Dean showed that the Internet can greatly enhance grassroots organizing, so now each candidate has a Dean-like area on their web site to link supporters. But this is only part of what Paul Wellstone meant, for true grassroots organizing comes from the bottom up.
When I wrote my series on the great speeches of William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman the phrase that popped up again and again–almost as if these men were channeling one another–is “bottom up.” As I thought about this, it occurred to me that is what is missing from this crop of Democratic candidates. Hillary Clinton’s “experience” is nothing but a code word for top down. None of the others seem to get it.
The important thing is that there is still time. Millions of what I have termed “Principles Voters” are waiting to hear words like these:
In January 1946 I repeated what I thought the Government should do, and I have repeated it time and again since that time-and I haven’t changed a bit. I am still the Democrat you nominated in Chicago on the Democratic platform of 1944, and I am still for Roosevelt’s New Deal.
I have told the people that there is just one big issue in this campaign and that’s the people against the special interests.
The Republicans stand for special interests, and they always have.
The Democratic Party, which I now head, stands for the people–and always has stood for the people.
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