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:
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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