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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.”
Mr. Semetis, however, is not the only one who has been having trouble lately collecting money from the Clinton campaign. The Hotel Ottumwa, a family-owned hotel in Ottumwa, Iowa, played host to an event attended by former President Bill Clinton on New Year’s Eve for several hundred people and had been trying for almost a month and a half to get paid.
The hotel had initially asked for payment of the $9,125 bill up front but kept being put off. But the owners figured that if any political campaign was good for it, Mrs. Clinton’s would be.
“People were a little more comfortable with Clinton because they’ve got money,” said Kay Whittington, one of the hotel owners.
Last week, the owners heard about an item on the local news about a Des Moines cleaning company, Top Job Services Cleaning, which had been trying unsuccessfully to recoup $7,500 from the Clinton campaign.
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Is this the type of competence - the result of "35 years" of experience - we can expect "On Day 1"
Full Article
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/23/nyregion/23owe.html?fta=y
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