The Political Fiend

The Clinton campaign is bleeding money. Since Super Tuesday she’s raised somewhere in the vicinity of 4 million bucks; Obama has pulled in nearly double that amount within the last 48 hours. How is Hillary’s camp addressing this? By trying to recharacterize Clinton as the ‘outsider’, and Obama as the ‘establishment’ candidate. This would be great, except that Clinton’s main selling point has been her claim that she’s got more experience in Washington. She’s trying to simultaneously make herself the insider, the outsider, the underdog, and the frontrunner. Today on NPR’s Morning Edition a Clinton strategist made it a point to emphasize just how much money Obama’s campaign has raised in recent days, and pointed to Clinton’s 5 million dollar self-loan, making her out to be a starving leper, who in spite of the odds has been successful nonetheless.

This would all be well and good, except for one thing. Clinton may have fewer donors than Obama, but her donors are bigger, and a greater percentage of her donors have given the statutory maximum than Obama’s donors. This is gonna be a hard case for her to make.

Morning Edition: February 7, 2008