It's all too easy though for a political campaign to run into such difficulties-because here the financial is an aspect of the personal. The moment a candidate puts his name forward is also the time when a large number of political friends and well-wishers decide they want to be a part of the action as well. And their wide-eyed eagerness can cause far more problems than the challenges thrown by the opposing camps.
Some of the money will represent a form of insurance-paid by those with money to spend and a desire to associate themselves with success-if the candidate wins. Others--less rich or more mean--will produce small sums but an equal expectation of access to the candidate of the moment. Very soon the hapless campaign manager will find himself having to adjudicate between these competing claims.
Mario Cuomo once said that while governing was prose, campaigning was poetry. It may seem like that when listening to Senator Obama in full flow-but the reality of campaign management is hardly a question of the easy and unpremeditated flow of iambic pentameters.
A campaign brings these qualities to the fore-because it's the moment at which a number of people decide that it's time to defer all the hoping, to forget the frustration, and press the button for action. In these circumstances it can seem perfectly reasonable to spend tens of thousands of pounds on advertisements—as Mr Hain's team did. Anyone who opposes the profligacy will then seem a traitor to the cause or even a fifth-columnist planted in the midst of those who consider themselves to be preparing for government, access and influence.
Steve Morgan, who ran the latter stage of the Hain campaign, is a Welsh PR operator of some standing. He's also rather proud of his mastery of political strategy—a skill which will have been tested in his previous career of professional campaigning on behalf of Al Gore in 2000 and then John Kerry in 2004. With that kind of track-record of success he was not perhaps the obvious choice to run Peter Hain's campaign.