Updated: Clinton loans her own campaign $5 million
I’ll admit, I follow US politics about as closely as a foreign amateur can sanely follow it. Okay, delete “sanely”. I deserve a free anorak. But this I don’t get.
Hillary Clinton has lent her campaign $5 million.
No, seriously. This is her campaign. But she wants her money back. Nevermind that a champion of the working class, campaigning against the filthy rich conservative capitalist scum with tax breaks, happens to have $5 million in spare change lying around idle. Why didn’t she send that to the IRS to fund universal healthcare?
But seriously, how do you lend money to a campaign? To your own campaign, of all things? Most people “donate” to a campaign. Isn’t she willing to donate? Doesn’t she have enough faith in the campaign? Does she expect to get the money back from suckers who have the conviction to donate in future?
And does this suggest that the GOP isn’t going to get the dream opponent, the one they’ve always wanted to beat just for the personal satisfaction of watching a Clinton go down, in the same way the Democrats would have loved to run against, say, Jeb Bush?
Does this suggest that Barack Obama, the rookie, has more money than the venerable matriarch of the Clinton dynasty? That she’s the underdog now?
John McCain took out a loan to finance his campaign. This makes sense. He’s going to have to pay it back, win or lose. But is Clinton’s campaign going to have to repay her if she wins? Even if she loses? This boggles the mind. It’s not like campaigns are for-profit companies. What sort of organisation is left to repay the debt if she loses? Did McCain even think to consider this eventuality when he sponsored McCain-Feingold?
I mean, how do you lend money to yourself to finance your own career?
I sure hope, if she wins, she’ll tell the rest of us this trick. It sure sounds wonderfully useful. “Look how much money I’m willing to lend myself! Surely, Mr Angel Ventura, if I trust myself this much, you can fund my idea for a non-lethal light-sabre design — named Taser-B-Gone — that I can sell by the gross to police forces around the world?”
Update: Al Giordano reasons that the money is already spent, that the Clinton campaign now faces a major budget deficit (making a mockery of her “fiscal responsibility” claims even before she can prove it to be empty rhetoric as president), and that she is running a “match the Clinton campaign” advert in which she describes the loan as a gift from Hillary and Bill. Whether that’s true depends on what the definition of “give” is, I guess.
Update: Tim Dickinson, writing for Rolling Stone, points out that Bill Clinton said this kind of self-financing “clearly violates the spirit of campaign finance reform”. Far be it from me to defend American campaign finance rules, of course, but if the Clintons want to use it as a club against political opponents, they should wield it more carefully, lest they accidentally bop themselves on the head.
Isn’t the bigger issue that she has a fight on her hands, and is running out of money, rather than whether or not the campaign will repay the loan?
True, it does indicate a surprising level of vulnerability that with her establishment machine and fame she can’t raise enough money to head off a rookie upstart. Still, I can’t remember other self-funded campaigns involving self-loans. I find, to quote a phrase, her lack of faith disturbing.
I must say the woman doesn’t look 61.
You don’t have to be 61 to be batty. This is the candidate who wants to freeze mortgage interest rates for five years. She’s every bit as dotty as she looks.
Remember Ivo, there is a maximum donation of around 2000 dollars. Thus it has to be in the form of a loan. bullshit i know, but thats how it is..
That limit doesn’t apply to a candidate’s own money, however. Mitt Romney, for example, is spending a lot of his own wealth on his campaign, and he’s certainly not the first self-funded candidate. Just from memory, Steve Forbes used his own cash, and John Kerry also had a lot of his own money at stake. Independents like Ross Perot and Ralph Nader also part-funded their own campaigns, if I recall correctly.
Fred Thompson also blew through a big pile of his own cash. Fat lot of good it did him.
of course you are correct, but i reckon, if you looked at the paperwork, they would too, be in the form of a loan to their respective campaigns, that would be repaid (of course not), if able too
I can sort of understand people who after a career in commerce and industry want to “serve their country” by standing for election. But what I find odd about the Clintons is that they seem to have done nothing else but stand for office (barring some lawyering between elections) so how come they manage to save so much money? The rest of us have very little left after taxes, mortgages and college fees.