Oh-eight (D): Show me the money
Posted: Friday, February 22, 2008 9:12 AM by Mark Murray
Filed Under:
Democrats
CLINTON: Here's a story that will make the rounds among insiders because of some of the eye-popping numbers being made at a time when the campaign is strapped for cash. Here's what will be the focus: "The high-priced senior consultants to Mrs. Clinton, of New York, have emerged as particular targets of complaints, given that they conceived and executed a political strategy that has thus far proved unsuccessful. The firm that includes Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategist and pollster, and his team collected $3.8 million for fees and expenses in January; in total, including what the campaign still owes, the firm has billed more than $10 million for consulting, direct mail and other services, an amount other Democratic strategists who are not affiliated with either campaign called stunning.
Howard Wolfson, the communications director and a senior member of the advertising team, earned nearly $267,000 in January. His total, including the campaign’s debt to him, tops $730,000. The advertising firm owned by Mandy Grunwald, the longtime media strategist for both Mrs. Clinton and Bill Clinton, the former president, has collected $2.3 million in fees and expenses, and is still owed another $240,000."
The New York Post adds, “Hillary Rodham Clinton's free-spending campaign blew a whopping $95,000 at a low-end supermarket-deli chain last month in Iowa -- a telling sign of why she can no longer cut the mustard financially against Barack Obama in critical states.”
OBAMA: Ever-so-slowly, Obama's run-ins with a couple of notorious '60s radicals is starting to seep into the MSM. "In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn." More: "Obama’s connections to Ayers and Dorhn have been noted in some fleeting news coverage in the past. But the visit by Obama to their home-part of a campaign courtship-reflects more extensive interaction than has previously reported.”
“Neither Ayers nor the Obama campaign would describe the relationship between the two men. Dr. Young described Obama and Ayers as ‘friends,’ but there’s no evidence their relationship is more than the casual friendship of two men who occupy overlapping Chicago political circles, and served together on the board of a Chicago foundation." More: "Obama’s campaign dismisses the notion that his relationship with Ayers should be seen through the lens of the latter’s violent past, or his present lack of regret for the bombings. ‘Senator Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of violence,’ said Obama’s press secretary, Bill Burton. ‘But he was an eight-year old child when Ayers and the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect Obama with events of almost forty years ago is ridiculous.’”
The timing of the Rezko trial, set to start March 3, is not good as it comes one day before Junior Tuesday voting.
Is Obama splitting hairs when he claims that technically he takes no money from federal lobbyists but takes money from folks who work at firms with federal lobbyists?
Peggy Noonan, as usual, has interesting take on Obama's speech craft: "Barack Obama's biggest draw is not his eloquence. When you watch an Obama speech, you lean forward and listen and think, That's good. He's compelling, I like the way he speaks. And afterward all the commentators call him "impossibly eloquent" and say "he gave me thrills and chills." But, in fact, when you go on the Internet and get a transcript of the speech and print it out and read it--that is, when you remove Mr. Obama from the words and take them on their own--you see the speech wasn't all that interesting, and was in fact high-class boilerplate. (This was not true of John F. Kennedy's speeches, for instance, which could be read seriously as part of the literature of modern American politics, or Martin Luther King's work, which was powerful absent his voice.)"
