$33 million on consultants . . . 15 mil in JANUARY alone ?!?
Thu Feb 21, 2008 at 01:01:03 PM PDT
This is unbelievable - yet, actually, it is also believable.
$33 million on consultants ?
Nearly $4 million to Mark Penn, apparently just in JANUARY - and $10 million (incl $2 mil so far in Feb) overall to Penn's firm ? !
All that, and the ROI is 26 losses out of 38 contests to date, nearly 1 million behind in the popular vote, and clear edges for Obama in both pledged delegants and the overall delegate count ?
You gotta be kidding me. Seriously.
MORE AFTER THE JUMP . . .
For all the talk about her opponent being an 'empty suit' who's all talk/no action and who isn't qualified to be Commander-in-Chief of a Boy Scout troop, you would think that the former first lady with the name Clinton, a former prez on the stump for her, and 100% name recognition would have done a tad better against a first-term Senator who was a virtual unknown until a few months ago. Yet he's won 26 out of 38 contests so far.
And here are some examples of being 'ready on day 1' and worthy of being handed the reins of our national treasury :
Consultant spending saps Clinton campaign
By: Kenneth P. Vogel
Feb 21, 2008 03:11 PM EST
Hillary Rodham Clinton started the year flush with cash, but by the beginning of this month, she'd blazed through most of it — spending $11 million on ads, $3.8 million on messaging guru Mark Penn and $1,300 at Dunkin' Donuts, just to name a few expenditures — leaving her campaign woefully unprepared for an extended battle for the Democratic presidential nomination.
About $15 million — or more than half of the New York senator’s January spending — went to a cadre of high-priced consultants. Though much of the cash went through the campaign media buyer for ad time, the considerable payments to outside consultants mark an increase in a pattern that has irked campaign insiders. From the beginning of the race through the end of last month, Clinton paid the consultants $33 million — nearly one-third of the $105 million spent by the campaign.
. . . The January payments to Penn’s polling firm brought its total haul from the campaign to $8 million. That doesn’t include the $2 million the campaign owed the company at the end of January or the $125,000 it paid to the fundraising consultancy run by Penn's wife, Nancy Jacobson.
MORE HERE
