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In an echo of its 2006 article about her Senate re-election campaign spending, the NY Times finds Hillary Clinton donors are concerned over her campaign's spending. Some of the line items that emerged after her campaign finance report was published: $100,000 in party platters and shovels for Iowa caucus parties (where Clinton placed third - and where it did not snow), $25,000 in hotel rooms at Las Vegas' Bellagio, $275,000 to a South Carolina firm "that was supposed to turn out black voters for her" (Barack Obama won SC by almost 30%) and $267,000 for adviser Howard Wolfson's January fee.
Joe Trippi, veteran of Howard Dean's 2004 campaign and an adviser to John Edwards, tells the Times that Clinton erred by relying on few core donors to contribute the maximum amount, $4,600, which means she couldn't go back to them, whereas Obama has many donors making smaller contributions.
Trippi also observed, "Everything was the best. The most expensive draping at events. The biggest charter. It was like, ‘We’re going to show you how presidential we are by making our events look presidential.’...she ran a campaign like they were staying at the Ritz-Carlton." Well, not exactly the Ritz - though they spent $5,000 at the Four Season in Las Vegas.
The Times has a graphic showing how money is spent by Clinton, Obama, John McCain and Mike Huckabee - and how much they have on hand; Obama has $10 million more than Clinton for the rest of the primaries. And Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf says, "It’s easy to be critical, but had she won Iowa, none of this would have mattered. It wouldn’t have mattered what she spent because money would have come pouring in."
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Is this Gothamist's attempt to get people to feel sorry for her?
McCain is have some campaign finance problems of his own with the FEC.
McCain opted in to the public finance system for the primaries last year, meaning his campaign would get $5.8 million in public matching funds in March. Now that he's effectively the Republican nominee he wants out because the system entails a spending limit of $54 million through the end of August. So the McCain campaign sent the Federal Election Commission a letter earlier this month saying that he was opting out. But McCain can't tell the FEC that he's out of the system, he can only ask.
Of course, that's a slightly different problem than having wasted over $100 million dollars as the presumptive front runner and then crashing and burning.
wow, just read that Hillary spent $30 million on her Senate re-election bid in 2006. $30 million? I seriously can't remember anyone running against her.
I can't even remember who was running against her. Wikipedia says John Spencer, the former Mayor of Yonkers and that he got 31% of the vote- which I find pretty incredible since I don't even recognize his name.
Yeah - the $30 million in Senate re-election spending is a foreshadowing... the angle of the 2006 Times article was "Why did she spend so much when her re-election was a shoo-in?"
And I'd be surprised if people reading this article about Clinton's presidential campaing spending would feel sorry for her. If anything, it's more like, what the hell? Then again, hindsight is 20/20, though this is almost playing out to be Giuliani-esque in its follies.
They saved it for the last paragraph of the Time article but I was thinking it all along: nobody questions how the winners wasted their money.
The truly interesting point of the article is how the Clintonites thought it would be over by the end of January. Contempt for the other candidates and the voters came back to bite them.
this is classic Clinton "I'm entitled" attitude
She's pays her consultants millions and stiffs small businesses. What a great leader she is.
Clinton's desperation is really starting to look ugly.
She's now suggesting Obama is using Karl Rove tactics, based on mailings that suggest, as Obama has said in debates, that her health care plan would force people to buy in, and that she was a champion for NAFTA as first lady.
"Enough with the speeches and the big rallies and then using tactics right out of Karl Rove's playbook. This is wrong, and every Democrat should be outraged," she said. Clinton challenged Obama to "meet me in Ohio, and let's have a debate about your tactics and your behavior in this campaign."
what a joke.
read and judge for yourself.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/02/23/clinton.mailings/index.html
They were spending money like there was no tomorrow because Clinton thought it would all be over by February -- she'd be the nominee and that was that. Only thing was she forgot to check with the voters. For all her talk about being "ready on day one", the way she's run her campaign shows she's obviously not ready.
She's got this sense of entitlement that is sickening. I didn't use to hate her, but after her tactics the past few months (trying to get FL and MI to count, her marginalization of caucus states, her husband's semi-racist remarks, etc) I can't stand her. She represents more of the same Washington bullshit -- just the continuation of the Bush-Clinton dynasty.