[If the Bushits sign up 1000 pioneers for the next election -- which seems very conservative, since it seems so much a surer bet -- then under their new minimum, that will be 1000 pioneers x $200,000 each = $200 million right there -- which is already more than anyone in history has ever had for a presidential campaign -- except George Bush last year. And yet they'd only have 1000 people they really had to worry about when they made policy, out of a country of 300 million -- and that's more than they worry about now.]
[This has got to be one of the tiniest ratios of plutocrats to plundered of any plutocracy in history. Only Russia in the 90s offers competition.]
Financial Times, May 20, 2003 The Pioneers Ride Again James Harding
George W. Bush is a wealthy man and scion of a powerful family. The core strength of his fundraising machine has been to identify even wealthier Americans and, by tagging and tracking their efforts, pump tens of thousands of people for donations.
Four years ago, the campaign team in Austin meticulously nurtured its donor network. It identified leading fundraisers: lawyers, lobbyists, oil tycoons, financiers and business executives. Most came from Texas. They were called "the Pioneers".
Each Pioneer pledged to raise at least $100,000 from individual contributions. Some promised to generate much more.
Under the campaign finance laws of the time, individuals could each give up to $1,000. So an extraordinary group of well-heeled supporters of Mr Bush went to work, calling their friends, sending memos to colleagues at work and hosting swanky events to elicit the $100,000 or more promised.
Mr Bush's finance executives kept close tabs on the operation. Each Pioneer was given a tracking number, so that each cheque he or she had garnered was duly credited.
Craig McDonald of Texans for Public Justice, a non-profit group that tracks the influence of money in politics, says: "Most modern campaigns have regional fundraising people. What was extraordinary with Bush was, they bureaucratised it. They took it to a new level of sophistication."
It is a refinement likely to prove particularly well suited to the new environment created by campaign finance reform. The target of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, the legislation signed last year and sponsored by John McCain and Russ Feingold, was "soft money" - given from companies or unions to political parties. The McCain-Feingold legislation outlaws it.
The source of Mr Bush's political riches has been "hard money" - individual donations to particular candidates. In the past, the contribution limit for each person was $1,000 per candidate per election. Under the new law, the contribution limit has been raised to $2,000. This means that those people whom the Pioneers approached four years ago can give double for the Bush re-election campaign. (In fact, each individual will be able to give $4,000, as the primary election and the general election are treated as two separate events.)
The muscle of the Pioneer network is such that for the Bush 2004 campaign the president's political advisers are raising the bar: Pioneers are being asked to pledge a minimum of $200,000, according to Republican party consultants.
The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act went into effect the night after the mid-term elections, November 6 2002. But it has been held up in the courts by challengers questioning the constitutionality of some of its provisions. It awaits the final judgment of the US Supreme Court. But the legal challenges have served only to give a fuller picture of the Bush fundraising operation, the big corporate names enlisted for funds and the rewards for their support.
When the Bush campaign reluctantly revealed the Pioneer scheme in July 2000, it listed 212 pioneers. They included some well known figures from the corporate world: Ken Lay, the former chairman of Enron, the bankrupt Houston energy trader; Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, the insurance mogul who chairs American International Group; Sam Fox, chairman of The Harbour Group, the leveraged buy-out specialists.
This month, a lawsuit prompted the Republican party to disclose a further 312 Pioneers, among them Sandra Stein, a lawyer leading the litigation against Enron and Mr Lay; Charles Hurwitz, chairman of the Maxxam Corporation, whose logging business and failed savings and loan make him the target of both environmentalists and corporate activists; and Chuck Watson, the former chief executive of Dynegy, the energy group.
The chief reward for fundraisers has always been access. But some have gone on to play prominent roles in the US government.
Mr Bush appointed 19 Pioneers to US ambassadorships, including the embassies in Austria, Portugal, the Netherlands, the Czech and Slovak Republics and Ireland. Two were given seats on the president's foreign intelligence advisory board.
Two Pioneers have entered Mr Bush's cabinet: Tom Ridge, homeland security secretary, and Elaine Chao, secretary for labour. Of the 212 initially revealed, 43 were offered public roles.
When he ran for president in 1999-2000, the then governor of Texas was the first important candidate to choose to opt out of the federal funds system during the primaries.
The US government offers matching funds - up to $250 for each donor - on condition that the candidate stays within a spending limit. The Bush campaign calculated it could raise enough to dispense with public funds during the primaries and, as a result, be free to spend as much as possible.
Mr Bush has chosen to do the same again for the 2004. He is banking on his Pioneers.