There's an excellent quote this morning by GMU public policy professor Mark Rozell in Anita Kumar's Washington Post article, "McAuliffe's Fundraising: High-Dollar, High-Mileage." Talking about the huge amounts of money Terry McAuliffe has raised for the Democratic Party and Democratic candidates in the past, as well as his current fundraising efforts for his own Virginia gubernatorial campaign, Rozell says that "McAuliffe's money will allow him to spend more on outreach and advertising and will probably not hurt him in the primary." Here's the money quote, so to speak: :)"All they can do is complain," Rozell said. "The reality is if they could do it, they would."Exactly right. What politician would NOT raise tons of money if they COULD raise tons of money? For instance, in 2006, I remember George Allen criticizing the seriously cash-strapped Jim Webb for raising money from "Hollywood movie moguls." That criticism never stuck to Webb. If anything, it backfired, as it was so silly and not at all what people cared about. This time around, my guess is that Mark Rozell is correct, that all other candidates can do is "complain" about Terry McAuliffe's prodigious fundraising, but that in the end it "will probably not hurt him in the primary" since everyone knows that any candidate would do the same exact thing "if they could."
P.S. We'll find out by April 15 how much money the candidates raised from January 1 through March 31.
