As an afterthought to my earlier post on As an afterthought to my earlier post on Hillary Clinton loaning herself $5 million, it occurs to me that the one person who cannot be blamed for the Clinton campaign’s financial situation is Terry McAuliffe. I’ve heard whispers from some Clinton people that they sometimes wish McAuliffe were stronger on television. And, technically, he’s the overall national chairman and not the finance chair. But as the greatest Democratic Party fundraiser in history, and the guy who helped pay off the Democratic National Committee’s debt and upgrade its national headquarters, we all realize that he’s the force behind Clinton’s fundraising team, so you might think: How the hell is she struggling financially, and isn’t he therefore at some fault? Perhaps just the opposite: Though the fact that Clinton “maxed out” among so many donors now puts her in a difficult situation--because she has to find new donors while Barack Obama re-taps into his larger existing database of lower-dollar donors--the existence of all those maxed out donors testifies to McAuliffe-type fundraising abilities. He didn’t just shake the bushes; he de-leafed them. Clinton’s problem is that she is battling Obama’s spigot-style, small-dollar fundraising machine, one that harkens back to what Howard Dean was doing in late 2003—only larger and more efficient by several orders of magnitude. (The Obama campaign claims it has now raised $7.5 million since Tuesday’s results.) All candidates send out emails to their lists and so forth, asking for small donations. So the fact that Clinton is not generating a comparable stream of dollars is hardly a fundraising team effect; it’s a candidate effect. --Tom Schaller
