As Somerby points out, the New York Times yesterday had yet another story about the Clinton campaign's doughnut expenditure. Admittedly, it's tough to tell in this case how much of this is Clinton Rules and how much of this is the inevitable tendency to retroactively claim that every strategic decision by a losing campaign was bad, but this is a silly story. Campaigns really do need to provide food to their workers, volunteers, caucus voters, etc., and it's not as if the amounts involved are especially large. There are legitimate issues with the financial management of the Clinton campaign -- it seems highly unlikely that the marginal value of Mark Penn's services has been more than $10 million -- but this isn't one of them. (Unless the scandal was supposed to be about choosing Dunkin' Donuts per se; serving your loyal workers deep-fried sawdust could be a comparative disadvantage if the Obama campaign located decent doughnuts...) --Scott Lemieux
