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February 22, 2008
In Defense of Hillary Clinton's Deli Bill
I want to say a few words in at least semi-sincere defense of Hillary Clinton. Senator Clinton's new campaign finance report just came out last night, and folks are all over this as showing how she has supposedly squandered a lot of campaign money.
See, this kind of stuff explains why she's losing the nomination. Well, really it doesn't at all, but she's losing and so it is, as she has put it, the politics of pile on. Yeah, she's hurt herself by wasting money and not having it when it was needed, maybe - but the real reason she's losing is because people flat out like the other guy much more than they like her, and no amount of frugality would have changed that.
Looking at this New York Times analysis, just on the surface she doesn't look like she's squandering money any much worse than her opponent. It's just that he's raising a lot more, apparently 2.5 to 1 in January.
My interest in this was peaked by the cheesy headlines in a lot of the media of a line item from this report about spending $95,000 at a deli. Now, that sounds really stupid on the face of it. What, she walked into some little sandwich shop and dropped $100K? Holy crap! You could about BUY a little shop for that and have some property to show.
But in fairness, that's not really quite the deal. It was not a sandwich shop, but the Hy-Vee grocery chain in Des Moines. This was January 1, a couple of days before the all-important Iowa caucuses. I haven't seen a lot of details, but it would appear that she was buying deli platters for pre-caucus feeding of the troops. This would likely have involved multiple stores delivering food. They had the intention of feeding caucus goers all over the state. That seems like a reasonable thing to spend money on for such an all-important event if you have it to spend. Nor would that necessarily seem overpriced. How many thousand people did they feed?
Also, Hillary's campaign has been criticized widely for spending top down money on expensive consultants and accoutrements where her opponent has spent more wisely at the grassroots level. I don't know about all that, but surely snow shovels and lunch for the troops on caucus day would have to count as spending at the grassroots level.
Some of her money may have been squandered, but some of it is just bad luck. Her campaign spent money in Iowa buying snow shovels so her people could shovel drives and get people to caucus. It didn't snow, and she lost. But if it had snowed and she'd won, she'd have been a genius for thinking ahead to buy the snow shovels and lunches.
I guess the main thing here though to me is that Hillary Clinton is not battling on a level playing field, which makes me feel some uncomfortable twangs of sympathy. She may or may not have spent her money with diligent frugality, and she may have made some miscalculations along the way. Hey, to err is human.
But the real problem for Hillary Clinton is that she's not running against a human. She's running against The One, the very embodiment of hope and change. Barack Obama is not a man, he's the savior. He's the Magic Negro who's going to make it all right.
In short, it's hardly fair to criticize Hillary's deli bill in this context. Hillary Clinton wants to feed the troops, she's got to come up with grocery money. Whereas Barack Obama requires no such lowly human concern. If he's got a big campaign rally congregation gathered to hear a sermon on the mount, all he needs is five loaves and two fishes to feed the gathered multitudes - who are more hungry for salvation than food anyway.
AMERICA'S FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT
posted by Al at 2/22/2008 02:42:00 PM
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