Tom Vilsack and Money
David Yepsen totally misses the lede in his blog post about Tom Vilsack dropping out. He notes that Vilsack was spending $500,000 a month in overhead and he couldn’t continue to afford running for President after only raising one million dollars in the fourth quarter of 2006. The real story is why Tom Vilsack was spending $500,000 a month that he didn’t have. We had previously pointed out that Vilsack’s “dilemma is how he will raise enough money to remain viable for the next year. After all, it doesn’t matter if you’re rock solid if you’re flat broke.” But when your monthly overhead is higher than your reported cash on head, that’s not good budgeting at any time–especially a year before the caucuses. If Vilsack hadn’t hired so many staffers so quickly, he’d probably still be a candidate today. He took a gamble that the money would be there to pay all of the people he hired. He was wrong. It was a high-risk, high reward approach to running for President. It didn’t work out. And that’s why Tom Vilsack dropped out.
1 comment February 23rd, 2007
