Here we have the least popular president in history closing out an 8-year run. He’s a white, male, Republican, Conservative, Christian from Texas. So what better solution than to hype the next candidate, who is also a white, male, Republican, Conservative, Christian from Texas?

George Bush rode into office with a lot of online flamers who claimed to be the poor, scrappy underdogs while actually being the voice of the mainstream, too. How dumb do we have to be to fall for it every four years?

A solid $4.5 Million was spent on printing & mailings to NH (despite the statements of a 50-state campaign it was ALWAYS a NH centered effort).

Another $1.5 Million was spent on those ATROCIOUS early ads (yup, someone saw the word “sucker” on a certain campaign manager’s forehead — that’s what happens when you put BIG money in the hands of inexperienced people.)

The rest — well some was spent on air-time buys, and on transportation, printing, signs, salaries, office rent and equipment, etc. $500K here, $500K there and you can eat up a couple of million pretty quickly you know.

So at the end of the year all they had left was the “extra” $8M that was never intended to be raised. THAT (plus most of the $5M raised this year) got spent on making the new (less atrocious but still useless) TV ads and one radio spot, and the subsequent airtime and other campaigning on the February 5th states.

So that about sums it up. It basically all just got squandered on advertising and staff by a bunch of people who didn’t know ANYTHING about advertising (and apparently not much about staffing either).

One could WISH that they had spent say $2M on hiring a Good PR and Media Relations firm, or at least a few hundred grand for a serious professional PR PERSON. (Or heck, offer Frank Luntz a cool $1M in cash behind the scenes — say a numbered Swiss bank account? — so he would monkey his FOX focus groups FOR Ron Paul instead of against him. You know, just to outfox Fox, that would have been bittersweet.)