"Hillary Clinton is failing the test as a manager"

[ProSense]

Where Did All the Money Go?

Fri Feb 22, 4:19 PM ET

The Nation -- Protestations of competence notwithstanding, Hillary Clinton is failing the test as a manager. After starting her campaign with tens of millions of dollars, she was jolted to learn that she was out of money, the mother's milk of politics, as California's late Jesse Unruh called it.

The suddenly milkless Clinton was forced to make the campaign a $5 million loan. Apparently, she knew nothing about the campaign's financial situation until it had gone broke. And today the New York Times reports her major donors are beginning to question what's been done with their money.

Did this campaign have a budget? If not, why not? If it did, was it poorly constructed? Or did people running the campaign simply overspend? Anyway you slice it, the money mess throws into serious question her ready-on-day-one executive ability.
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So far, Obama seems able to manage money better and raise more of it faster than Clinton, who has had the lobbyists, special interests and the Democratic Party's bull elephants lined up from the word go.

He has out-organized her in the precincts; his videos are incomparably superior; his television and mail is better; there is no comparison between his ability to recruit and use volunteers and hers; his people are masters of the iInternet, of the art of the advance and of political logistics.

Obama's oratory and inspirational power would have lost in Illinois had he not been able to bring it to the voters through superior organizational, tactical, administrative and inventive ability. Somebody is ready on Day One and it isn't Hillary.

Wolfson $266K/mo and Penn $10.1 million, not much left for the little guy:

Small Vendors Feel Pinch of Clinton Campaign’s Money Woes

By MICHAEL LUO
Published: February 23, 2008

It was just $2,492.63, a pittance, really, alongside million-dollar television buys and direct mail drops.

But with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination enduring a rough patch, Peter Semetis, the owner of a deli and catering business in Lower Manhattan, had been following the news and growing increasingly worried that he was not going to be paid for the assorted breakfast trays, coffee, tea and orange juice he had provided the campaign for an event in mid-December.

“I’m afraid of her dropping out of the campaign and me becoming a casualty,” Mr. Semetis said.

So on Thursday, he went to small claims court and filed suit. Mr. Semetis, 53, said he was hardly a political pundit but like others across the country, he had become caught up in the election in the last year and was able to offer some analysis. “There is potential for her to lose Texas,” he said — an assessment not at odds with the polls — “which would pretty much force her to quit.”

Mr. Semetis catered a Clinton event, a rally she did not attend, at the offices of District Council 37, the public employees’ union, on Dec. 15, charging the campaign $2,300, plus $192.63 in tax. Officials promised him that his business, Sale & Pepe Fine Foods, would be paid by check or credit card in a couple of weeks. After a few weeks passed, he started calling to see about the holdup.

Often he never reached anyone; other times he was told that his bill had been put through to the campaign’s headquarters in northern Virginia.

Unbeknownst to Mr. Semetis, Mrs. Clinton was navigating some dire financial straits. She was having a dismal month of fund-raising while spending a million dollars a day to battle Senator Barack Obama. She finished January essentially in the red, with $7.6 million in debts, and she was forced to lend her campaign $5 million.

It was when news broke about Mrs. Clinton’s loan earlier this month that Mr. Semetis became positively alarmed and started calling the campaign almost every day.

“The fact she’s lost 10 states in a row has increased the phone calls,” he said.

After a reporter from The New York Times contacted the Clinton campaign on Friday, Howard Wolfson, Mrs. Clinton’s communications director, said a check to pay Mr. Semetis had been put through the day before, and he furnished a copy of the check, dated Feb. 21, as proof.

When asked to explain the delay, he said only: “We do our best to pay our vendors in a timely fashion.”

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[KittyWampus]

1. Wolfson, a quarter million a month?

[Barack_America]

2. They should cut Wolfson's and Penn's pay and pay their vendors instead... n/t

[ProSense]

4. Yeah, to

feed the press easily debunked spin!

[tekisui]

8. Just to be an asshole.

[C_U_L8R]

3. Staying at the Four Seasons

will guarantee you are out of touch with ordinary people

[ProSense]

5. What's amazing is that she spent almost the same amount of money as Obama, but

only focused on half the number of states.

[Debi]

23. I don't see any of her supporters on this thread defending her fiscal irresponsibility

[catgirl]

6. At least he's getting paid (the deli vendor)

I imagine the Clinton campaign is besieged with similar calls these days. And more and more
vendors in similar situations will talk to the press. It worked for this guy.

[psychopomp]

12. Sen. Clinton's campaign fails to pay small business owner, who then files a suit in small claims

court. Will somebody tell me why we would want Team Clinton managing the affairs of our nation?

[Debi]

22. How many places won't file law suits and just pass the loss on to their customers?

Why should we have to pay more because the Clinton campaign can't manage their money?

[doni_georgia]

7. Who's over the finances of the campaign?

That's what I would like to know. Does she have someone whose job is to budget money? She should have a financial officer in the campaign to oversee spending. This is not something the candidates themselves usually oversee. A well-run campaign delegates authority and plans for each scenario. Having two major campaign strategists who have conflicting beliefs on how a campaign should be run is the first problem with this campaign. My guess is, though, that other positions in the campaign have been neglected and left up to local organizations. I would like to see a run down of each campaign - how many paid staffers, how many different positions, etc. It would be easy with such a list to see where the problems originated.

When I graduated from college, I wanted to be a campaign strategist - eventually. I worked for many campaigns in lesser capacities throughout the 80s until I returned to grad school. The good campaigns had an easy to follow chain of command - and let me tell you, the candidates themselves did not have to bother with any of the details of the day-to-day management of the campaign. I also worked for some god-awfully disorganized campaigns. These were typically the ones where the candidates themselves tended to micromanage everything and did not delegate appropriately.

[Adelante]

9. This is what Debi's been talking about in Iowa

So many vendors, including small business people, wondering where their money is.

[Debi]

10. Here

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x4697277

Penn and Wolfson can wait 6-8 weeks for their pay. A Pizza shop, small school district, Boys and Girls Club can't.

The Clinton campaign's financial priorities are all messed up - pay the rich and stiff the poor? :crazy:

[Adelante]

11. They finally paid this guy in NYC

When he filed in small claims court. Maybe that's what has to be done in Iowa - or are there already court claims there?

[Debi]

13. Yes - and I'm sure some will try

but some will write it off and let us Iowans share in their loss (raising our prices to make up for the Clinton's stiffing them).

Checking into some of the bills they were paid AFTER the filing almost as if the campaign was trying to show more cash on hand and HOPE the media wouldn't look at the debt.

If the small school districts and food vendors not getting paid wasn't bad enough - I think the staff not being paid (at least not being paid on time)pisses me off the most. (Mark Penn could have held off - the 20-year-old college students needed that money).

[K Gardner]

16. This is terrible, Debi. I'm really stunned to see this all laid out.. thanks for the info.

[Debi]

17. I really didn't do anything - the Clinton campaign did it by not paying their bills

Think, if they would have chosen to NOT pay Penn or Wolfson and instead paid the vendors/staff sure they'd have the same amount of debt but at least the little guy wouldn't have gotten screwed.

Obama has only $1.1 million in debt and the majority of that is owed to three large vendors. All staff was paid and all but two Iowa groups were paid. (one outstanding bill was $15,000 to the US Cellular Center for an event and I'm just betting it's been paid now AND $700 in phone bills which make sense because Obama kept several of their offices open through the February 5th primaries....and obviously paid the rent/staff in the process).

It's not just the cavalier attitude the Clinton campaign has toward paying their bills that gets me - it's about who they hire to make sure the bills get paid. Obama obviously has staff he can trust to take care of the all important little details.

[Stephanie]

18. Did you say they didn't pay the staff in Iowa?

Seriously? Those kids didn't get paid?

[Debi]

20. Look for yourself

http://query.nictusa.com/pres/2008/M2/C00431569/D_DEBTS_C00431569.html

Hopefully somewhere between January 31 and today they got paid - we'll find out when the February FEC report gets filed - however that will just mean that someone else didn't get paid x( (and some of the bills are from this summer - Iowa State Fair? Held in August)

[ProSense]

19. That's messed up. Thanks for the link. n/t

[Debi]

21. Thank you for putting up the story -

I'm glad the media is realizing who is getting stiffed while the wealthy folks are still getting paid.

[Scurrilous]

14. Kick

:thumbsup:

[K Gardner]

15. This is an astounding indicator of total incompetence. What about the middle class

business owners she talks to much about who are struggling with these services provided/not paid for? I notice the Valet and Air Charter businesses have been paid but small businesses and city coffers haven't. The list was honestly too long to scroll through.

Kind of a mirror of our current government's economic policy, to be sure.

[flor de jasmim]

24. Wouldn't newspaper articles be cheaper than filing in court?

[Debi]

26. Sure but why should they have to go that far? n/t

[Colobo]

25. We can afford to have a president that can't even manage her own campaign.

[Debi]

27. Who can't hire trustworthy or competent staff

Obama should be proud!

[BigDaddy44]

28. What happens when its over?

She is clearly bleeding money, the flow of new money is drying up, and the end appears near. I get the feeling a LOT of small businesses are going to get stiffed. If Hillary is to remain politically viable for future years, she's going to have to spend a LOT of time raising money just to pay off these debts. Can you imagine how distasteful a task THAT would be?

And I am curious. Lets say you end a campaign $10 million in the hole. Can a rich donor basically write a check to get rid of it for you, or are you still bound buy campaign finance rules?

[Debi]

30. Campaign finance rules

those small vendors are screwed. (Well actually their customers are screwed b/c they'll pass on their losses)

So in a way we all get to contribute to the Clinton campaingn x( whether we like it or not.

[MadHound]

29. Failing, and failing badly

Failure to have a Plan B, failure to have a ground game, failure to select the right people, failure to keep control of those people, including her husband, failure to manage her funds, failure to raise funds. What should we let such a failure get the nomination, unless we want to have a failure in electing a Democrat to the White House this fall.