Huckabee on money
Posted: Sunday, January 13, 2008 1:11 PM by Domenico Montanaro
From NBC/NJ's Carrie Dann
COLUMBIA, S.C. --
Huckabee has his mind on their money and their money on his mind.
Speaking
to a crowd of over 250 supporters at the University of South Carolina's Williams-Brice Stadium, the
Arkansas governor compared big spending in Washington to the big
budgets of his rival campaigns.
"In some of these cases,”
the Arkansas governor said of his GOP rivals tonight, “I see how much
money these guys have spent on their campaigns, and they’ve spent an
incredible amount to not get very far.”
“I’m thinking, ‘That’s just what we don’t need in Washington,’” he added.
Huckabee
didn’t mention any candidates by name, but he poked fun at his
opponents for expending copious amounts of “their own money.” (Mitt
Romney has transferred a substantial amount of his own fortune into his
campaign coffers, although the exact amount of the investment remains
unclear. It was $17.5 million through the first three quarters of 2007.)
Romney’s total expenditures through the third
fundraising quarter were more than $50 million.
Giuliani and
McCain’s checks cashed in at about $30 million apiece. Huckabee, in
comparison, spent under $2 million in the same period.
“If
they’d spend that kind of their own money,” Huckabee joked of his
well-funded colleagues, “What in the world would they do with yours?”