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With anti-Bush sentiment at fever pitch in the Bay Area, a fund-raising frenzy for Kerry sweeps both the masses and the classes. And even some Republicans.
by Diana Kapp
A word to the wise: Pick up the pace while strutting around town in your latest summer slides. Friends Peggy Knickerbocker, a Bay Area food writer, and Davia Nelson, one of NPR’s Kitchen Sisters and a movie casting director, are approaching women wearing new styles, asking, “Have you given to Kerry yet?” The shoe horses are challenging local stylistas to suffer this season and send the money to John Kerry instead. Their sole concession: If you buckle and do buy those sling-backs, at least send Kerry matching funds.
Sound over the top? Not in the Bay Area, where in recent weeks, legions have been Kerryokeing, JABing (Jog Against Bush), and getting baked to beat the prez. The Raging Grannies, a group of 80-year-old rockers, won the first of a series of Kerryoke contests. Among the philanthropic heavyweights, Richard Goldman, a lifelong Republican, has been speaking publicly about his vote for Kerry, even reading an open letter to Bush at a prize ceremony in April condemning the president’s environmental record.
As if that wasn’t enough, even tweens are in on the act. One in Berkeley turned her 12th-birthday party into a “Boot Bush Back to Texas” bash, with the birthday girl and guests going door-to-door for Kerry. Says Gail Slocum, Kerry’s San Mateo grassroots fund-raising team leader, “It’s like the old Chinese saying, ‘Let 1,000 flowers bloom.’ I’ve never seen a groundswell this strong—and many are people who have never voted.”
Owing to a Deanization of politics, which proved that thousands of $100 checks can fill campaign coffers, new campaign finance laws prohibiting “soft money” donations, and an urgency to, as veteran fund-raiser Susie Tompkins Buell puts it, “get that crazy man out of the White House,” people here have been seized with fund-raising fever for Kerry. Brook Byers, the health-care VC who helped rake in $2.9 million for Kerry, reports that “in 2000, it was ask, then follow up, follow up, follow up. Now, people are calling me to ask where to send the check.” This populism is a radical departure for Democrats from previous years, in which $2,500-a-plate dinners thrown by captains of industry were the norm (although this still holds for the Bush camp). Knowing that another Kerry vote in a state virtually ceded by the Republicans is irrelevant, the newly politicized are chartering buses to get troops to swing states, while trip-hop-rock bands like ZONK stump between sets.
And that’s just what’s happening among the masses. Major donors are still writing hefty checks—but to 527 organizations (named for the tax code that created them). In a post-campaign-finance-reform world, 527s have become players because they are the only means of amassing supersized donations, with over $130 million raised thus far. Unconnected to the official Kerry campaign, 527 groups like MoveOn.org Voter Fund and the Media Fund can accept unlimited donation amounts—which are then used to fill the airwaves to counter the Bush ad blitz and drive voter registration and turnout. Not surprisingly, Republicans are crying foul, claiming 527s circumvent the ban on large contributions legislated by the McCain-Feingold act.
Still, the donations pour in, from $50 checks to Music for America to millions to the New Democrat Network. “I feel if I don’t do everything I can, my kids should never forgive me,” says Deborah Rappaport, who, with her VC husband Andy Rappaport, has given $3 million to 527s mobilizing voters in key states. “I tell my girls I’m investing their inheritance.”