The New York Times today writes about Hillary Clinton's online fundraising surge. The article is well worth a read, for several reasons.
"Go to www.HillaryClinton.com," she said, drawing applause and cheers from her throngs of supporters. "This is your campaign and your moment, and I need your support."
The prominent mention of her Web site was intentional, part of the Clinton campaign’s recent efforts to keep pace with Senator Barack Obama’s fund-raising juggernaut. The campaign has nearly doubled the volume of her e-mail solicitations, showcased her Web site more at events and intensified online advertisements asking for small contributions.
The article goes on with a discussion of the competitive landscape for the two remaining Democratic campaigns, interesting reading no matter how the contest ends.
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The last paragraphs, however, should give her supporters pause.
Robin Purnell, 54, who earns $14 an hour working at an insurance agency in Gary, Ind., has long been a supporter of Mrs. Clinton but had not donated to her campaign. After learning about Mrs. Clinton’s loan last month, she decided to give $25.
"That’s kind of when it dawned on me," Ms. Purnell said. "Maybe we need to do more than get the word out."
Since then, Ms. Purnell has given several more times, for a total of about $175. To save money for her donations, Ms. Purnell said she often skipped lunch or avoided eating out. "Everybody’s got to make sacrifices," she said.
The spirit is admirable, no question, and heartening to any Democrat; we rely, as a party, on average people making small sacrifices to keep our campaigns going. Barack Obama has excelled at that, for example, with well over a million individual donors and counting. On a strategic note, Clinton's fundraising surge validates what those of us in the grassroots and netroots have been saying for a long time: that the future of the Democratic Party lies not with lobbyist dollars or big-ticket bundlers, but with a broad-based donor network. Hillary is learning the lessons Howard Dean has taught for a long time, not because she wanted to, but because the old fundraising model is being demonstrably eclipsed.
However, the lesson is only being learned on the margins. While Ms. Purnell sacrifices her lunch, others are not making the same sacrifice.
The Financial Times:
Although Mrs Clinton has banned her campaign from paying for alcohol, her January financial statement revealed she had spent $95,000 on groceries in Iowa last month before losing the caucuses there. Her campaign also spent $267,000 in January in the monthly salary for Howard Wolfson, the communications director, compared with an annual $144,000 salary for Robert Gibbs, who is Mr Obama's communications head.
Questions are also being raised about the almost $4m paid in fees to Mark Penn, her senior strategist, and his associates for consulting, polling and direct mail services. Mandy Grundwald, who is a long-standing media adviser to the Clintons, received $2.3m. [Emph. added]
The disconnect is striking. Robin Purnell earns $14 an hour. Howard Wolfson, assuming a 30-day working month at fourteen hours a day (it is a campaign), earns $635 an hour, more than Robin Purnell by a factor of 45. Based on a more conventional twenty days at eight hours a month, he pulls in $1,668.75 an hour, which corresponds to Robin Purnell's salary by a factor of 119. Wolfson's salary is a valid example of the waste going on in Clinton's campaign more than the amounts paid to Penn and Grunwald; his payments are strictly for services rendered, while Penn and Grunwald's totals are inflated by the production and distribution costs of direct mail and TV ad buys.
Campaigns that rely on grassroots fundraising have an implied fiduciary duty to spend their money carefully. The Obama campaign (and before it, that of John Edwards) is meeting that duty; $14,000 for a national campaign communications director is an acceptable sum, even on the low end of what that position can reasonably expect by way of compensation.
Hillary's campaign, however, is still stuck in the expense structure more commonplace in old-line, large-donor-funded campaigns. And while Robin Purnell in Gary, Indiana, skips lunch to eke out a $25 shot in the arm for Hillary's campaign every now and then, along with many others making similar sacrifices, the foundering Clinton campaign shows no sign of being aware that it owes Robin a higher level of accountability.