Daschle blows warchest, comes up empty

Today's edition of Roll Call has a story headlined "Daschle’s Five-Year, $9.5M Spending Spree." Excerpt:

From Jan. 1, 1999, to Dec. 31, 2003, Daschle spent $4.6 million from his personal campaign account, the highest total of any of the 34 incumbents up for re-election in November.

He also disbursed roughly $4.9 million during that time period — $870,000 in 2003 — through Dedicated Americans for the Senate and House, his leadership committee. ...

Dick Wadhams, campaign manager for former House Member and current Daschle challenger John Thune (R), however, questioned whether the Senator’s spending has yielded any tangible results.

“It must be embarrassing to have spent $4.6 million even before we got into election year 2004,” said Wadhams. “The poll numbers remain remarkably the same as they have for a couple of years.”

...

Overall, Daschle spent $813,000 on direct mail and phone bank efforts from 1999 through 2003.

Daschle spent another $687,000 on consulting fees to a variety of companies including Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, the campaign pollster; Struble Eichenbaum Communications, Daschle’s media consultant; and Media Strategies, the firm that places television buys for him.

Media Strategies received $350,000 in 2003 and another $78,000 between 2002 and 2001.

Karl Struble, who has handled media strategy for Daschle since 1984, received $218,000 for production costs last year.

Recall that Karl Struble is the author of a piece that appeared in Campaigns & Elections magazine discussing how he manipulated the local media to print negative stories about the opposing candidate and then using the headlines generated as "validators" for their attack ads. It looks like it's going to happen again.

Recall also that Daschle had Greenberg Quinlan do some polling and focus groups in the state a year ago to measure how bad the damage was after his infamous comments on the eve of the Iraq war, as reported in the New York Post.

Anyway, back to today's Roll Call piece:

Details aside, the fundamental question regarding Daschle’s expenditures is whether the nearly $10 million he has spent has significantly changed his standing in the race against Thune.

Daschle spent all of this money in an attempt to bluff John Thune out of running. It didn't work. Now the Daschle campaign is reeling and casting about for a new strategy in light of the latest polling. Watch for them to go viciously negative very soon.