Some of us like John Edwards’s populist tongue and position papers, his wonderful family, his southern charm, and the brickbats he tosses at corporate power, while acknowledging that Edwards has a cubic centimeter of chance (unlike Kucinich, who has none) to crack through the first-in-the-nation caucus next January in Iowa (where in ’04 he placed a surprise second to John Kerry) and become a contendah.
But we’ve seen that movie (and its formulaic sequels) before. It’s the quadrennial blockbuster where a big-money Democratic front-runner tramples the more attractive but under-funded alternative. When, in 1988, Jesse Jackson emerged as the last candidate standing between Michael Dukakis and his doomed nomination, Jackson, among other disadvantages, didn’t have the millions of dollars it would have taken to ride an insurgent candidacy through to winning the Democratic National Convention.
Even if Edwards does crack through in Iowa, he won’t have the resources to finish the race, and the coronation of Clinton as nominee will go according to script. I’m very sorry to say that, because the primacy of money is one of the main reasons why previous presidential campaigns made many of us want to ignore this one.
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On Tsunami Tuesday, there will be primaries in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Utah, plus caucuses in Alaska, Colorado, New Mexico and North Dakota.
At that point, 1242 of 4363 Democratic National Convention delegates will have been chosen, but a nominee will need 2182 delegates to win the nomination. And the front-runner Clinton, assuming she’s still standing, will likely face just one viable rival in the expensive media war to come in the states that follow. It was in this round when Dukakis bested Jackson in '88; it’s also when Walter Mondale dispatched Gary Hart in '84, Bill Clinton raced past Jerry Brown in '92, Al Gore beat Bill Bradley in '00, and Kerry stopped Edwards in '04. The last front-runner standing with the most money has always won in the recent Democratic nomination battles. (Bradley began with a slight money advantage over Gore, but by March, Gore had raced significantly ahead in terms of available campaign funds.)
Following that pattern, Clinton, who, in the first half of 2007, raised $53 million and emptied her US Senate campaign chest to add another cool $10 million, would easily best Edwards (who raised $23 million during those same six months) in the second wave of primaries and caucuses.
Today, Clinton has $45 million in the bank versus Edwards’s $13 million. That gap will likely increase significantly by January. All the major candidates have sufficient funds for parity on the airwaves and on the ground in early Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. But by the time Tsunami Tuesday comes along, on February 5, the wealthier campaign — presuming its candidate did not stumble badly in one or more of the first four states — will likely begin to pile up delegates and trampoline through the February and March contests toward the nomination. Game over.