Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Let them Eat Foie Gras [Kellyanne Conway]
The New York Times’ Anne Kornblut writes critically of the eye-popping price tag - at least $30 million — Hillary Clinton spent on her re-election campaign to the U.S. Senate in New York this year. That money helped her squeak out a 30-point win over her Republican rival and purchased private jet time, lavish parties and flowers and a flotilla of consultants.
HRC topped all other U.S. Senate candidates this year in spending, a fact that has raised eyebrows in Democratic circles, some of whom question her fitness to go the distance in a run for the White House. Sure, it shows that she can raise the dough. But it also reveals a lack of order, oversight and restraint that belies the “discipline” she is often credited with having.
As the Times explains,
the way she spent the money troubled some of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters, many of whom have been called on repeatedly over the years to raise and give money for Bill Clinton’s two presidential campaigns, his legal expenses, his library, his global antipoverty and AIDS-fighting program and now his wife’s political career. One Clinton supporter said it would become harder to tap repeat donors if it appeared that the money was not being well spent.
Her pollster was paid $1.1 million. I know Mark Penn is creative, but all the focus groups in the world can’t make her less Hillary and more Clinton. How many ways can you ask people in a survey if they prefer to see you in the black pantsuit or the navy one, if they regard you more as Margaret Thatcher or Joan of Arc?
Mark McKinnon, an adviser to Senator John McCain, and "a veteran of President Bush’s two penny-pinching campaigns for the White House" gets it exactly right: “Donors, like voters, increasingly expect candidates to exercise fiscal discipline,” he told the Times. Just as some voters correctly wonder how someone who could not stand up to a cheating husband will stand up to Osama bin Laden, it is legitimate to ask how someone who wasted millions of dollars to run up the score will treat the people’s purse.
11/21 08:33 AM
