Bush Fund-Raising Team Finds $70 Million Doesn’t Go Very Far

Jim Paul has had some uncomfortable conversations since Texas Gov. George W. Bush lost his stride as the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination.

“What’s your boy going to do now?” several big contributors have asked Paul in recent weeks.

“It’s like a horse race for these people,” said Paul, manager of the minor league El Paso Buzzards hockey team and longtime Bush supporter. “They’re saying, ‘We put our money on this guy and what happened?’ ”

Reassuring worried contributor-investors is not something Paul and the other 181 Bush Pioneers--volunteers who have raised at least $100,000 each for the governor’s campaign--thought they would need to do.

Pioneers Strive to Keep Money Spigot Flowing

It was this unprecedented fund-raising network that quickly helped make Bush the best-financed presidential candidate ever, leading some to think he was invincible. And now that their candidate has officially spent more than $50 million--some observers put the total closer to $60 million--of his record-breaking $70-million war chest, the campaign is likely to turn to them again.

Their mission is tougher now that Bush has lost three primaries and some of his sheen. In addition, three-quarters of Bush’s individual donors gave him $1,000, the maximum amount allowed by federal election law, and so cannot give more. Nevertheless, the Pioneers are confident they can keep the money flowing.

“There’s no question that a lot of low-hanging fruit is gone, so you climb higher in the tree,” said Bradford Freeman, general partner with a private equity firm in Los Angeles. A Pioneer, he is also Bush’s California finance chairman.

Rep. Jennifer Dunn (R-Wash.), a member of Bush’s national finance committee and his Washington state chairwoman, said the campaign does not need to tell its financial foot soldiers to reengage because “it’s just obvious” more money is needed.

Pioneer Jorge Arrizurieta said he and his business associates at Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Huizenga Holdings Inc., are busier than ever trying to shake the money tree for Bush.

“I wake up every day thinking I have to raise more for the governor,” Arrizurieta said, adding that the recent losses have kept the fire burning under him. “These open primaries have been expensive. The campaign spent more money than was planned.”

Arrizurieta, who is in charge of government relations for his firm, which owns the Miami Dolphins and 45 auto dealerships nationwide, said his pitch has not changed since Bush’s primary losses.

“We’re selling the opportunity to be part of the winning team,” he said, with only a slight catch in his throat.

Although contributions in January slowed to the relative trickle of $1.6 million, the campaign’s finance chairman, Donald L. Evans, said they will pick up in March after the big cluster of primaries has passed.

“There’s much more money to be raised,” said Dunn, who is one of just 14 Pioneers who are women. She has already raised about $400,000. “We’ll bring in those dollars to make sure he has the money he needs to run the campaign he wants.”

Arrizurieta, who helped put together a fund-raiser in South Florida last summer that reaped $700,000, is working on another fund-raiser scheduled for March 23 in West Palm Beach.

The candidate plans to attend several fund-raisers in New York, New Jersey, South Florida and Wyoming. Bush’s wife and famous parents will also headline events in the coming weeks, Evans said.

These will be the first fund-raising events this year attended by Bush, who has been focusing his attention on collecting votes rather than cash. His ability to do so was a credit to the Pioneers who helped him achieve his goal of raising money early so he could spend it during the compressed primary season during the first 2 1/2 months of the year.

Other Pioneers say the unexpectedly strong challenge to Bush from Sen. John McCain of Arizona has tarnished the governor’s image and made their job more difficult.

David Horowitz, founder of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in Los Angeles, said early on he found it “easy to sell Bush.”

He raised $115,000 by sending a letter to contacts encouraging them to buy $1,000 seats at a Century Plaza fund-raiser last June.

“[But] after New Hampshire, I started hearing, ‘What has he done with the money we gave him? He doesn’t seem to be doing much with it,’ ” Horowitz said.

And Horowitz tried earlier this month to sell tickets to a fund-raising luncheon at the Bel-Air home of Robert Day, chairman and CEO of Trust Company of the West. But he failed, even though the event was headlined by former President Bush.

“People in Hollywood find McCain very attractive. That’s a fact of life,” said Horowitz, a conservative writer and activist who focuses on the entertainment industry.

Horowitz said centrist Republicans, which describes most of his contacts, also were turned off by Bush’s recent make-over.

“He’s been pushed somewhat to the right, and people in Hollywood and myself were not especially happy with the prominence of people like Pat Robertson. The Bob Jones [University] incident hurt too,” he said.

While Horowitz and Paul have heard a lot of grumbling from contributors, other Pioneers say McCain’s primary victories have only increased their commitment to Bush. They would not dream of switching allegiances because they do not trust McCain to represent their interests in Washington.

Whether they are venture capitalists in San Francisco, corporate lawyers in Texas, lobbyists in Washington or investment bankers in Los Angeles, Bush’s Pioneers want a Republican who can win the White House and who, more than anything, will champion their business interests.

Most Pioneers seek to weaken or erase federal regulations. Many of them want national tort reform, like the kind Bush spearheaded in Texas, to protect their businesses from expensive lawsuits. Others hope for access to the big man in the White House; some dream of presidential appointments. Dunn, for her part, wants a president who will sign the tax-cutting bills she crafts rather than vetoing them as President Clinton has.

At least 34 of the Pioneers work in financial services; 33 are lawyers or lobbyists; 24 are in real estate and development; and 10 work in the oil and gas industries, according to a computer analysis by the northern Virginia-based independent Campaign Study Group.

Three Pioneers are lawyers at one Houston-based corporate law firm, Vinson & Elkins.

“Business as a whole, whether it’s automotive or financial or any other industry, is supporting the governor’s candidacy for the general reasons that he is a pro-business candidate and a very outspoken critic of obstacles that hinder the growth of business,” said Arrizurieta. “There’s no better form of economic development initiative than tort reform.”

Freeman defended Pioneers who back Bush because they believe he will help their businesses.

“If somebody is saying: ‘I want to help George Bush to be president because I think he would be good for my industry,’ there’s nothing wrong with that,” he said.

The Pioneers are scattered around the country, but slightly more than a third of them, 63, are from Texas.

Some Pioneers have given substantial amounts of their own money to the Republican National Committee and GOP candidates over the last decade. Thirty-three of the Pioneers have given the Republican Party and its candidates more than $100,000 over the last decade, and eight of them have contributed more than $400,000 over the period, according to the Campaign Study Group.

But at least 16 of the Pioneers had never before contributed to a federal candidate.

Many of the Pioneers had known Bush for years and were confident of his appeal. Freeman, for instance, met Bush 20 years ago through his business partner Ronald Spogli, a business school classmate of Bush’s who also is a Pioneer. Those who hadn’t known Bush were won over by his charm and pro-business politics during intimate gatherings at the Governor’s Mansion in Austin.

After Bush pitched them on his vision for the future, his money men collected their pledges to help him finance his campaign.

The Pioneers then kicked into gear, reaching out to business partners and employees, longtime Republican stalwarts and supporters of the Bush family, friends on their Christmas card lists and, sometimes, total strangers.

Freeman was flying from Minneapolis to Los Angeles last summer when he noticed that his seat mate, a money manager, was enthralled in a book.

Novel Way to Appease Talkative Seat Mate

“So I asked him to come to an event in June. I told him, ‘If you commit to taking five seats, I won’t talk to you for the rest of the flight. If you don’t, I’m going to talk to you for the rest of the flight,’ ” recalled Freeman. “I got the five grand from him. It was remarkable. It came in about a week.”

Other Pioneers also saw money pour in at a breathtaking pace.

“I have never had the number of people who want to come to the events that we have experienced for Gov. Bush,” said Howard H. Leach, a wealthy San Francisco investor and veteran GOP backer. “Every event we had in Northern California exceeded our capacity.”

Leach’s calls and letters quickly brought more than $500,000 into Bush’s coffers, according to a fund-raising consultant.

Evans refused to divulge how much of the campaign’s $70-million kitty is credited to the Pioneers. But since some Pioneers have raised several times the $100,000 qualifying amount, the group clearly has raised much more than $18 million.

Democratic fund-raising master Terry McAuliffe was so impressed by their take that he called Evans to congratulate him.

“I am in tremendous awe and respect for the amount of money they’ve raised,” McAuliffe said.

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Times researcher Sunny Kaplan contributed to this story.