send to a friend | print | comment

The Knox camp gives us a spending number—Will it matter?

A while ago I interviewed Tom Knox and asked him how much he was willing to spend on his Democratic run for Governor. Knox, the wealthy Philadelphia businessman, wouldn’t give me an exact number, but made clear that his threshold was high, around $30 million.

Well, his campaign has given friend-of-the-site Alex Roarty more specifics, with campaign manager Josh Morrow saying his boss will spend between $20-25 million on the race.

Look, there’s no question that money is going to make Knox a formidable candidate, probably more so than most Democratic insiders give him credit for. And especially if Jack Wagner and Dan Onorato are tearing each other apart in Pittsburgh, Knox could find himself going unscathed much longer than some might expect.

The question is, will the money matter enough for Knox to win? Here, I am very conflicted. Our Middle Ground blogger Laura Vecsey recently wrote on the advantages that come with Knox’s vast fortune. But I wonder if she’s giving his campaign just a little too much credit. The challenge obviously won’t be spending. The challenge will be translating that into a cohesive message that sells.

And it’s here that I sense a reticience among the Knox camp to define him and his candidacy too early. Unlike other candidates—most of whom, I’ll concede, have the bully pulpit of elected office—Knox has scarcely been in the news. His fundraising has been slow. His party outreach is minimal at this early stage. All of this has led some Democratic insiders who don’t take Knox seriously to ask me, flatly, “What is Tom Knox doing?”

I put this question to Morrow recently. Now that Morrow is done managing the losing campaign of Philadelphia District Attorney candidate Dan McCaffery, he is clearly back full-time with Knox. And he batted back the perception that his boss hasn’t been doing anything. He ticked off a list of some areas Knox has visited recently, including Pittsburgh, Harrisburgh, Scranton and Lancaster.

“It’s not like we’re not out there,” Morrow insisted. “Tom is doing something that most people running for Governor aren’t doing, which is he’s actually listening. He’s going around and listening to people.”

So as time goes on, I increasingly get the perception that this “listening-tour” attitude—and his relative media silence—is actually quite intentional. Knox isn’t exactly the most charismatic politician when it comes to dealing with voters directly. And it’s widely accepted that one of the reasons Knox couldn’t win the Philadelphia mayoral race in 2007 was because he went on TV too early, built up big poll numbers and fizzled once people had time to attack him. Morrow alluded to this in an earlier interview, too.

So watch out for that first Knox commercial. He could buy it anytime. Frankly, he’s got enough money that he could probably stay on the air in some fashion from now until Election Day 2010. But it’s clear that’s not the best strategy. So whenever you see him on TV, that’s when we’ll know the campaign is ready to define the millionaire as the candidate.

But I have a feeling that might not come for a while. As the only officially declared candidate, he’s probably thinking, “What’s the rush?”

June 14, 2009 at 12:27 pm

--Dan Hirschhorn

Tags: Tom Knox

comments

comments [2] | post a comment