That's not to say he won't win in 2008. A good bet is that he will. But the pressure to spend some money to shape his message will be too great to pass up. That statement is based on a study of past political campaigns that featured candidates with similar ideas whose idealism almost always gave way to practicality.

The notion that a candidate can resonate with voters by shunning the unseemly aspect of fund raising and campaign spending is not new. Others have flirted with the no-frills, no-fund campaign idea. But they either lose or change their minds late in the campaign and begin the inevitable spending frenzy.

When Enid Greene defeated Congresswoman Karen Shepherd in a rematch in 1994, she might have won because of the issues: that Shepherd voted for President Clinton's tax increase, that she was "too liberal" for Utah and that Greene had boarded Newt Gingrich's Contract-With-America ship that swept Republicans into office throughout the country.

But she also won because her campaign had purchased virtually all the available TV time in the final weeks of the campaign, allowing her to become as recognizable as Ivory Soap.

When Democratic Salt Lake County Commissioner Randy Horiuchi was running for re-election against political neophyte Gene Whitmore, he had about $75,000 in the bank going into the final weeks of the campaign.

Most of his campaign advisers suggested he donate that cash to charity as a magnanimous gesture, as he surely didn't need to spend it to win.

But that was the Contract-With-America year and Horiuchi sensed he would need it in the end. He spent the money and barely held on to win. Fellow Democratic Commissioner Jim Bradley lost that year, as did most Democrats.

Clearly, Huntsman is sensitive about his personal wealth and wants to send a message of his frugality and commonality. Last year when he ran, he told reporters he wanted to fund his campaign with small donations from many contributors to demonstrate a grass-roots effort. He did not want to spend his own money. But in the end, he put $275,000 of his own money into the campaign, as well as a considerable amount from family sources.

As anyone who has followed the career of Karl Rove knows, success and nobility are not synonymous in politics.

Some Democrats, searching desperately for an issue that might catapult them to a rare victory in Utah, have attempted to paint themselves as the pure "of-the-people" choice by keeping a distance from the corruption of campaign pocket-stuffing. They have done so to show a stark difference from the Republican incumbents whose political war chests obscenely bulge with special-interest money.

Such tactics have never worked.

A few years ago, Democrat Greg Sanders held a press conference announcing he would not accept any political action committee money in his campaign challenging Republican Congressman Jim Hansen.

Sanders, basically, was never seen or heard from again.

In 2000, Democrat Bill Orton was challenging Gov. Mike Leavitt, who was running for a third term. Leavitt that year had been booed at his own state convention and was forced into a Republican primary election by political unknown Glen Davis.

Orton, like Sanders before him, announced he would accept no PAC money, hoping to make his "high-road" approach to politics an issue against the fund-raising and spending binges of Leavitt.

Leavitt beat Orton by about 15 percentage points. But other Republicans, like Sen. Orrin Hatch, won by much larger margins and many Democrats were angry at Orton for not raising and spending more money in his campaign against the governor, who they felt was vulnerable.

When Democrat Pat Shea ran against Hatch in 1994, he tried to make campaign spending an issue and attempted to get Hatch to agree to spending limits. It didn't work because nobody cared how much Hatch spent. His face and name repeatedly drummed into voters' brains by all the TV ads were more compelling than the esoteric notion of spending limits.

Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson wanted to demonstrate a similar noble approach to politics by pledging to keep his campaign spending to a certain limit. He later broke that pledge, but voters didn't care. They elected him in a landslide.