Too many ambitions, too little money. Too much politics, too little business sense. That sums up the main problems faced by Air America Radio as it struggles to reorganize under bankruptcy protection.

Some excerpts from the Dec. 18 NYT story:

At the root of its problems, some critics and competitors say, has been an inability to negotiate a middle path between its political mission and its business.

“It’s my feeling that they really put this together without broadcasters,” said Stuart Krane, a former ABC Radio executive who is the president of Product First, which owns the program of a liberal talk-show host, Ed Schultz. “If you have a healthy business, then your agenda will be put forth.”

Air America ran into financial trouble within days of its appearance on March 31, 2004, when it turned out that its original chairman, Evan Cohen, did not have the backing he said he did. Weeks later, Mr. Kelly, a former owner of Midwest radio and television stations, stepped in to take charge of the board. At the end of 2004, he ceded the chairmanship to a new investor, Rob Glaser, chief executive of RealNetworks.

Some people at Air America assert that, under Mr. Glaser and the team he put in place, the network was top-heavy with management, inept at selling ads, unwilling to make program compromises that veered from the liberal message and overstaffed with more than 100 employees when two dozen would have sufficed.

“What they did for $45 million they could have done for $10 million,” said Sheldon Drobny, an investor with a contentious relationship with the network. Mr. Drobny and his wife, Anita, longtime Democratic activists, are credited with the idea for Air America.

The network has run through a stream of operational executives. Danny Goldberg, a music executive who served as chief for about a year before leaving in April 2006, said the problem was “a big gap between the ambitions of the company and the funding available to accomplish those ambitions.”

“There was no way to manage around that gap,” he said. “Either lower your expectations or raise more money. No one wanted to change the ambitions.”

Faced with constant money woes, the board considered a takeover by the Democracy Alliance, a loose group of moneyed progressives, including George Soros, who had pooled resources to support projects they considered worthy. But the group ultimately rejected the appeal, because “Air America needed to do certain things to make it a more attractive business,” Mr. Kreeger said.

Mr. Kelly said he was disappointed that rich Democrats did not step up to support the network’s political goals. On fund-raising calls, he said, he was often turned down because the business plan was too risky.

He agreed that the network over-spent, “out of enthusiasm for what we were doing.” But he said it also “inherited so many difficulties not of our own making.”