Before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, Howard Dean spent over $32 million.<\/p>\n
That may sound pretty bad, especially considering he lost both, but here’s a tidbit that’s even worse: George W. Bush’s campaign spent almost $34 million<\/a> — and, as Ezra mentioned<\/a>, he doesn’t have any GOP opponents<\/i>.<\/p>\n I can understand how Dean spent so much money. He’s in a tough five-way race for a presidential nomination, he has a huge staff, has had to travel repeatedly with a lot of that staff, and has been broadcasting expensive advertisements non-stop for months. Moreover, since he withdrew from the public financing system altogether, Dean could ignore the spending caps most of the other candidates had to abide by.<\/p>\n But really, how did Bush spend nearly $34 million in a primary-phase of the campaign when he doesn’t even face a primary challenge? I saw report explaining that the money was basically spent on infrastructure — setting up offices, printing up campaign materials, sending out direct mail, etc. But $34 million worth?<\/p>\n I know conservatives think the Bush administration spends too much in the federal budget, but it sounds like Bush’s real problem is spending too much of his campaign budget. I hope he can keep this burn rate up for a few more months; the Dems will benefit if Bush’s record war chest has dwindled a bit by the summer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, Howard Dean spent over $32 million. That may sound pretty bad, especially considering he lost both, but here’s a tidbit that’s even worse: George W. Bush’s campaign spent almost $34 million — and, as Ezra mentioned, he doesn’t have any GOP opponents. I can understand how Dean […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}