A Week Awash in Money and Vitriol Portends Warfare in 2004

What does an election look like when the country is profoundly polarized over a president’s performance and priorities? In political skirmishes from Essex Junction, Vt., to Beverly Hills, the last week has provided an unusually concentrated preview. And this early look points to a campaign that will be clamorous, contentious, and very, very expensive.

The most important backdrop for campaign 2004 is the partisan chasm in attitudes toward President Bush. In polls, more than 90% of Republicans say he’s doing a good job. Typically, less than 25% -- sometimes less than 20% -- of Democrats agree. That’s the widest partisan gap over a president’s performance in the history of modern polling.

This polarization means lots of Americans are passionately committed to reelecting Bush, and a comparable number are equally dedicated to unseating him. What the last few days have demonstrated is that when emotions are this high, the dollars available for political causes are almost endless, despite the new campaign-reform law meant to slow the flow of money into politics.

Bush last week continued his march into the financial record books by collecting some $3.6 million at fundraisers in Newark, N.J.; Pittsburgh; Baltimore; and Dearborn, Mich., cities hardly known to be high-dollar hotbeds.

Such lucrative receipts in such modest surroundings suggest he might well exceed the unprecedented $170 million his campaign set out to raise when it opted out of the public finance system earlier this year. If the Bush campaign decides it needs more, does anyone doubt that Republican donors will provide it? Meanwhile, the money is flowing in almost as fast to the Republican National Committee.

It’s easy to explain the GOP’s fundraising success because Republicans now hold all the levers in Washington and their low-tax, antiregulation agenda makes business executives reach for their wallets even before they’re asked.

The bigger surprise, which moved into the floodlights last week, is how much money is flowing into Democratic coffers. The Democratic National Committee is lagging badly behind the RNC because the Democrats were more dependent on the unlimited soft money contributions the reform law banned.

But former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean has shown an alchemist’s touch for converting the grass-roots Democratic anger at Bush into gold; Dean has raised so much money from small donors that he’s followed Bush out of the public finance system.

And money is pouring into other Democratic causes riding the same current of opposition to Bush. That was the real message of the meeting in Beverly Hills last week between some 200 Hollywood liberals and the leaders of America Coming Together and the Media Fund, two new groups respectively aiming to mount massive get-out-the-vote and advertising campaigns against the president next year.

Ellen Malcolm, the president of America Coming Together, says she initially hoped to raise $75 million, but the response has been so strong that she’s increased her target to $95 million; The Media Fund wants to collect $80 million. The same passion that’s allowing Bush to drill deep in Dearborn is letting Democrats break the bank in Beverly Hills.

With so much money available, the two sides are already beginning advertising offensives aimed not at the Democratic primaries but next November’s general election. Last Wednesday, MoveOn.org, the online liberal advocacy group, announced it was pouring $2 million into a flight of ads in battleground states such as Ohio and Florida criticizing Bush over his push for billions of dollars to reconstruct Iraq.

Just a day later, the Club for Growth, a leading conservative political action committee, announced it had launched a $100,000 ad buy in Iowa and New Hampshire attacking Dean over his call for repealing all of Bush’s tax cuts.

Don’t bet on this being the last word from either group; MoveOn, now nearing completion of an initial $10-million fundraising drive to buy anti-Bush ads, says the response from its members was so strong it will solicit them again next year to fund comparably sized war chests. The Club for Growth has also proven it has deep pockets, and plenty of other groups on both sides are likely to join the fray over time.

Polarization is shaping not just the scale of the 2004 campaign but the tone.

Ed Gillespie, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, went to Dean’s backyard last week in Essex Junction to renew his charge that the Democratic presidential candidates are engaging in “political hate speech” against Bush.

That is itself a bit overheated, but there’s a kernel of truth in Gillespie’s indictment: with Democratic voters so angry at Bush, the 2004 contenders have lost almost all restraint (not to mention perspective) in their denunciations of him. Last week, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry said Bush “has pursued the most arrogant, inept, reckless and ideological foreign policy in modern history.” Even Tom Wolfe doesn’t squeeze that many adjectives into one sentence.

Still, Gillespie’s outrage would be more credible if the RNC had ever objected when conservative power players like Jerry Falwell and money man Richard Mellon Scaife promoted lurid conspiracy theories linking Bill Clinton to murder, or if anyone at the RNC had complained last week when Rush Limbaugh described the Democrats’ Beverly Hills meeting as a gathering of “Left Coast Hollywood Kooks.”

Or, for that matter, if the RNC itself wasn’t running ads accusing the Democrats of “attacking the president” because he is “attacking the terrorists.”

In this environment, subtlety isn’t likely to be a big winner next year. More likely, the next 11 months will look a lot like the last seven days, with polarization providing the resources and the rationale for unrestrained political warfare that divides the country even further.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at www.latimes.com/brownstein.