Well, when exactly did the Swift Boat ad stuff start?
It started days after the convention. And it put us in a tough strait, I think, because of the decision, and in my view the mistake, that we made of accepting public funding. And by the way, since this is kind of an inside thing I am going to crawl a little bit further inside this. Another thing that happened, that not a lot of people have paid attention to, but I think has also had a huge impact, which was that the two campaigns were given the same amount of money to spend. It was about $76 million. Now in addition to that there was another pool of funding — they call it 441a(d), the provision of the code that says you can coordinate expenditures through the national party. But the campaign can control those expenditures. They can be coordinated through the national party. You got about another $15 million in advertising spending than a national party can do on behalf of presidential nominee of that party. So, total, we are talking $91 million — $76 million to the campaign, another $1
