The .com Candidate
As I have said before, I think the media was too harsh on Dr. Dean for his post-Iowa speech last week. However, I do find it troubling that his campaign as managed to burn through money as wastefully as an overhyped dot.com. $41 Million dollars gone?, as the Times reports:
After raising $41 million in 2003, far more than any of his Democratic rivals, Dr. Dean spent so much on television and on the ground in Iowa and New Hampshire that campaign officials said they were only confident of having enough money to compete through next week.
The campaign has upended its advertising strategy. Dr. Dean, who last June was the first candidate to advertise, is now the only major candidate to be off the air right now, and his strategists said Wednesday night that they were in no hurry to return. They confirmed last weekend that they had gone dark in every state but New Hampshire so they could reassess Dr. Dean’s electoral chances and then flood advertising in those states they believed he could win.
I doubt that he’s going to have the money to make it to California.
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And now for something completely different, my Asian female friends and I have joked for years about the “Last Stop” theory. While reading Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex this week, I actually saw the first print reference to this phenomenon, in a conversation between a Japanese American woman and a hermaphrodite (who she thinks is a man):
“My gay-dar went off completely.” Julie was shaking her head. “I’m always suspicious, being the last stop.”
“The last what?”
“Haven’t you ever heard of that? Asian chicks are the last stop. If a guy’s in the closet, he goes for an Asian because their bodies are more like boys’.”
david bang
January 29, 2004 @ 8:54 pm
Being not an insider one cannot assess the extent of the monetary mismanagement that the Dean camp embarked upon during the time prior to the causus kickoffs. That being said, there must be some underlying logic to the current strategy of reassessment and planning that has nothing to do with the money, or lack there of. I think, and this is completely in my head and unsubstantiated, that the new campaign manager, forgot his name, “Nell” perhaps, is not new to this game and the money “issue” could be just a ploy to buy some time until a new image for Dean is crafted and a new strategy for the campaign composed.
But not to mitigate the money issue, with most of those $41 million having been raised through cyberspace, and with Mr. Cyberspace aka Trippi gone, you might be right about Dean coming short of Cali, where I feel Dean could’ve done extremely well.
Very funny book you are reading. Asian boys rule! Kidding.