Democrats Are Jarred by Drop In Fundraising

A Washington Post story that I bookmarked on Friday and did not get back until today - I had to take the day off due to the latest developments in the post divorce wars and my need to evaluate what to do to end the nightmare - looks at the Democrats' reaction to the drop in fundraising that they have experienced. While the Washington Post story tries to blame the drop on big business, I suspect that the real cause is the disgust of Democrats who elected Obama president and gave the Democrats control of both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives only to see Obama and Congressional Democrats utterly squander the mandate that they were given to effect change. Instead, we have seen the lunatic rump of the ever increasingly irrelevant GOP calling all the shots. Here are some story highlights:

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Democratic political committees have seen a decline in their fundraising fortunes this year, a result of complacency among their rank-and-file donors and a de facto boycott by many of their wealthiest givers, who have been put off by the party's harsh rhetoric about big business.

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The trend is a marked reversal from recent history, in which Democrats have erased the GOP's long-standing fundraising advantage. In the first six months of 2009, Democratic campaign committees' receipts have dropped compared with the same period two years earlier.

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As the battle over President Obama's effort to overhaul the health-care system reached a fever pitch this summer, the three national Republican committees combined to bring in $1.7 million more than their Democratic counterparts in August. The pair of Democratic committees tasked with raising money for House and Senate candidates -- and doing so at a time when the party holds its strongest position on Capitol Hill in a generation -- have watched their receipts plummet by a combined 20 percent with little more than a year to go before the November 2010 midterm elections.

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Democrats said a struggling economy is only partly to blame for the poor fundraising performance and acknowledged a more perilous problem: satisfaction among activists that the party now holds the White House, 60 votes in the Senate and 60 percent of the House.

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House Democrats have seen donations to the DCCC drop 16 percent, with individual contributions more than 25 percent off their 2007 pace. But party leaders saw a 50 percent increase in small-dollar donations in August, after what they hope was a wake-up call to liberals who watched endless cable news footage of conservative protesters dominating town hall meetings. "Our supporters around the country realized they have a fight on their hands," Van Hollen said. "People are rallying."

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The bottom line is that people are asking why support the Democrats and Obama when given a mandate they lack the courage and balls to do what they were elected to do. Stated differently, why throw good money after bad given the Democrats failure to deliver.