The numbers are starting to trickle in on the Democratic candidates' fundraising totals this quarter. (Speaking of numbers, let Teresa Nielsen Hayden point you towards healthy, educational fun with ancient mathematics.) The leader of the pack this quarter seems to be none other than your friend and mine, Howard Dean, MD. The good doctor took in over $7 million this past quarter, including over $800,000 in a single day on 30 June. Online. One of the things about Dean's campaign that excites me so is this potentially new model of fundraising he's using. Instead of trolling around to businessmen and lawyers and PACs and corporations for handouts, Dean has been getting his support, in many, many small parcels, from ordinary Americans. President Bush has raised about a hojillion times more by now, and will raise many hojillion times more before the election, it's true, but, like most candidates, his is whore money. Bush's financial support comes from the sort of people who can afford to drop $20,000 to give him the secret plutocrats' handshake at a dinner (where, of course, the working poor are used as furniture). With this sort of money coming in, Dean has proven himself to be a serious candidate: Dean is a bling-bling deity. He is also owned by his grassroots supporters. It's true. Without his activists not only would he have no campaign and no publicity, he'd have no money. He needs us. He is in our power. I like that in a candidate. I like that a lot. A whole lot. Bush is owned by big business. Most candidates of either party are. Dean, on the other hand, is owned by his posse.
I find this pleasantly socialistic.
Let me digress a moment, as it is Canada Day and all...The amount of money being spent on the presidential campaign here in the US is absolutely amazingly obscenely absurd by Canadian standards. As of a year ago, Sheila Copps had raised barely $50,000; bear in mind that the next Prime Minister will be chosen this November, so July 2002 would be roughly as far before the Liberal leadership conference as we are from the US presidential election now. Paul Martin, the lucre-heavy nabob, as of November had pulled in just over $1,000,000. (Canadian, of course.) Bush, on the other hand, is talking of amassing $200 million. The amount of money spent on US campaigns is disgusting, and will remain disgusting for the forseeable future.
I thought of trying to Cruise for Dean at Sunday's Pride march and rally, but some clever customers had beat me to it. There was a sizeable party of Dean partisans marching in the parade, and a whole Dean booth set up in Volunteer Park at the shindig following. Homosexuals, by and large, are enthused about Dean.
Even Andrew Sullivan has nice things to say about him, or at least not entirely nasty things. Which helps to demonstrate, I think, the sort of broad support Howard Dean could, with the right campaign, muster, should he gain the Democratic nomination. Unlike most of the other Dems, he's got a demonstrated ability to rouse and enthuse lefties like me and get us out working the streets. You might reply that Ralph Nader in 2000 had a bit of that, and look where it got him. (It wouldn't, alas, get Kucinich much further.) And you'd be right. The left can't swing an election in the US on its own, even though, in my humble opinion, the left is right, and everyone else is, well, wrong. (Yay socialism!) Dean can appeal to a wide spectrum of voters, however. He can court the NRA. He's not anti-business. He can reassure fiscal conservatives, with talk of balanced budgets and so forth. He can even wring grudging words of faint praise from intellectually-bankrupt Bush-whored sham pundits with nothing of substance left to contribute who still can't stop talking. Dean has something for everyone. Who knows, it might even help him out to play the gay card. Not actively. Dean's very supportive of gay rights, and asking him to be more outspoken on that point would be unlikely to bring him greater support and might turn off some of the less liberal potential voters. But he's made his position clear, that he is for equal rights. What if he were to confront Bush on the issue? Bush has been awfully, weaselly careful not to take a really firm stand on anything gay. He's refusing to involve himself in Frist's calls for a constitutional amendment forbidding gay marriage, just as he tried to steer clear of Santorum's man-on-dog fracas before. Bush still tries to pretend he's compassionate, you see. At the same time, he has to keep his Religious Reich freakshow happy, too. If someone could maneuver him into taking some firm unequivocal position, he'd risk alienating elements either of the center or the right: either the Average Joes would see exactly what a right-wing tool and creep Bush actually is, or the Fundies would yell bloody murder about him straying from the Holy Path. Either way, it could only harm him.
Just a thought.
Posted by aloysius at July 01, 2003 11:14 PM | TrackBack |