Biography: No life experiences are "all bad" or "all good". Candidates need to package their life experiences as a narrative that accentuates the positive and acknowledges and contextualizes the negative.
Jon Powers received a lot of publicity for his work in War Kids Relief, a charity organization he founded. It was a noble failure. Powers was unable to get congressional funding for WKR, and faced with a rotten security situation in Baghdad, it was clear that private donations wouldn't suffice for the effort. Powers made a dangerous trip to Iraq, some kids were helped, and the whole effort made him realize that WKR wasn't going to be the way he would make an impact. So he ran for Congress.
That last paragraph is my spin on the effort, gathered from reading media accounts and listening to a Powers' appearance on a Kevin Hardwick's radio show. It wasn't Powers' initial story His campaign website made it sound like WKR was a going concern. His opponent nit-picked at that story until WKR became a negative. If Powers had acknowledged WKR as a learning experience and impetus for running for Congress in the first place, he'd have been better positioned to respond to those attacks.
Media: Don't ignore opposition blogs. Use them to prepare your rapid response.
I first read about the War Kids Relief story on a conservative blog months before the story surfaced in the media and in Jack Davis' attack ads. Yet the Powers campaign took a long time to formulate an ineffectual response to the attacks once they hit the traditional media.
When a blogger posts a negative story, one of two things has happened. Either someone from an opposing campaign has fed it to them, or, worse, some individual looked at your campaign's storyline and poked a hole in it. Some negatives are pure haterade, but the WKR negative was an important indicator that Powers' story had a few holes in it.
Update: The story surfaced five months ago, as Cincinnatus at Monroerising points out.Endorsements: meh.
Endorsements are good for garnering media attention and for influencing low-information voters. Low-information voters don't vote in primaries.
Fundraising: Money in the bank is is just a bunch of pictures of dead Presidents.
Powers didn't spend a lot on the primary, presumably because he needed some of that money to challenge well-financed Christopher Lee in the general. This is pure Monday-morning quarterbacking, but I'll bet he wishes he had spent a little more of the $900K that he raised.
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