Word: impac
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...mount a serious campaign next winter, a candidate must raise more than $3 million this year. Already potential contributors are scouting the field; in Phoenix this weekend, 36 Democratic donors who have formed a group called Impac '88 met to discuss uniting behind one candidate early on. Meanwhile, skeletal campaign organizations were adding expert meat to their bones. Babbitt last week became the first Democrat to form a full-fledged campaign committee. In the past fortnight senior strategists also took posts in the campaigns of Kemp, Du Pont, Gary Hart and Richard Gephardt...
Dollars, not delegates, are what draw candidates to this band of 40 veteran fund raisers, who have the ability to raise several million dollars by mid-1987. Some of Impac's members want to unite behind one Democrat by next spring. Even if only, say, half of the group were to stay together, Impac's endorsement would give an early edge -- financial and psychological -- to the candidate of its choice. In the large field now forming, only one prospect, New York Governor Mario Cuomo, starts 1987 with a respectable treasury. "We would love to have their backing," says a strategist...
That is the goal of one of Impac's founding members, Nathan Landow, a Bethesda, Md., real estate developer who chairs the party's 1988 convention- site-selection committee. A man fond of speaking in large sums ("We could pledge $6 million to $8 million in a minute"), Landow, 53, looks the part of a big moneyman with his gold Rolex, monogrammed shirt and perpetual tan. More important, Landow delivers: he collected $1.25 million for Walter Mondale...
Most of Mondale's financial team eventually joined Impac '88, and other party fund raisers were invited to participate. Impac's members are veteran Democratic centurions, centrist in outlook and combative in style. By shopping for a contender as a group rather than waiting to be wooed two or three at a time, Landow & Co. hope to win more clout in shaping the candidate's campaign. But what they want most of all is a winner...
Nearly all those susceptible to the 1988 itch have had at least one session with the group (Lee Iacocca declined the invitation, and Jesse Jackson, unpopular with Impac members, has been ignored). Even Mario Cuomo, who has avoided the Iowa-New Hampshire trail so far, found time for a quiet talk with Landow and a breakfast with Impac in Washington...