One of the two top fund-raisers, a longtime Kerry ally, compared the senator to Edmund S. Muskie -- the former Maine senator who lost the 1972 Democratic nomination despite high expectations -- in noting that Kerry's campaign raised $7 million during the first three months of 2003, yet is expected to net only $2 million to $3 million in the final quarter.

"I'm dying out there," said this Kerry fund-raiser, a veteran Democratic moneyman who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "There was so much excitement about John Kerry early on, and now there's none."

"There are more important things going on in the campaign than fund-raising," [Kerry's finance chairman Alan] Solomont said...

Some fund-raisers attributed their struggles to doubts among Democrats that Kerry has a solid game plan to win the nomination, with one citing the South Carolina primary as a case in point ... Kerry chose that state over Massachusetts to officially launch his campaign Sept. 2. Yet Kerry has not visited South Carolina since Sept. 12, and while he said on Dec. 18 that he would return to that state soon, his current schedule has him in Iowa and New Hampshire through Jan. 9. The campaign also recently moved two paid staff members from there to Iowa, reducing his number of South Carolina paid staff to five. A recent American Research Group poll of South Carolina voters, meanwhile, puts Kerry in eighth place out of the nine Democrats, at 2 percent -- one point behind former senator Carol Moseley Braun and one point ahead of Kucinich.

Hours later, [Dean supporter] Phillip G. still toils for Master Dean, slammed into another leaking breach in the creaking wall that is the denial of the Dean campaign.