In recent weeks, the vestigial fundraising machine of the Clinton campaign has grown increasingly pathetic. One e-mail touted the chance to lunch with James Carville and Paul Begala. "You will get to tour all the amazing sights D.C. has to offer," it enthused, "and who knows what else could happen!" I think I know. James Carville will talk a lot and Paul Begala will rely heavily on metaphors and quips. What are the chances that I'm wrong? The e-mails were all the stranger because the only debt the campaign has left is to Mark Penn's consultancy. A quarterly filing turned in last Wednesday showed that the final item on Clinton's balance sheet was $2,300,000 owed to Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates LLC. As Penn has gotten a fair amount of the blame for Clinton's loss, this galls some. Karen Tumulty, however, clarifies things considerably:
Not surprisingly, many Clinton allies are decidedly unsympathetic to Penn's situation. Fumes one: "He should have to eat it." But it isn't that simple. The money is owed not to Penn personally but to his company, which is a subsidiary of the worldwide public relations and advertising firm WPP Group, based in London. The bills the Clinton campaign ran up included $5 million for the polling that apparently failed to pick up on the public mood. And then there was the cost of sending out 20 million pieces of direct mail, with postage alone reaching $8 million, according to an official for the firm. Many would argue that it was money ill-spent. At a minimum, that big a bill for snail mail suggests that Clinton's campaign was relying heavily on tactics from the 20th century, while Obama was running circles around her by using the far more cost- (and politically) effective Internet.[...]Yet the bills remain. "They're not paying Mark Penn; they're paying the shareholders of WPP," says WPP executive vice president Howard Paster, who ran the Office of Legislative Affairs in Bill Clinton's White House. And as long as Hillary Clinton continues to show an ability to pay them off, the firm does not have the option of simply forgiving the debt, Paster insists. If it did, its lawyers say, that could be an illegal in-kind contribution under federal election law.
But that doesn't explain why Clinton is fundraising to pay off this money. Between 2004 and 2006, tax documents show that Bill Clinton earned $51 million. Put differently, erasing his wife's campaign debt would consume 1/25th of his income over a two-year period. I blow a 25th of my income on the occasional dinner. But the former First Family's unwillingness to shoulder the loss themselves means, inevitably, that it will be borne by committed campaign supporters who still love Hillary but are much poorer than the Clintons. It's also requiring a frankly embarrassing level of shilling: They're selling off days with Bill Clinton and tickets to American Idol and lunches with political consultants. Why bother?
