The math that finishes off this primary might be financial, not electoral.
Feral Press Alliance reports:
Here’s why Hillary doesn’t hold large rallies. They’re God-awful expensive. Say you want to hold a rally in a park for 27,000 people (actually Bernie had about 11,000, but lied with the higher number) you can’t just say meet me at the park. You have to pay for a permit, arrange and pay for porta potties, and pay for almost all the security. The city/town pays for their regular patrols, the person holding the rally has to arrange for and pay security in advance. These are almost always off-duty cops who can wear their uniform. They make about $100-$200/hour. For a crowd of about 27,000 that’s at a minimum of $100,000 per hour. And the candidate has to pay for clean-up afterwards. A huge rally can cost the candidate a million in campaign donations. For what? He has a photo-op of him in front of a lot of people.
What does Hillary have? Photo-ops of her sitting with some guys and winning at Dominos; eating an ice cream concoction named after her; dancing the Meringue in Harlem with a small crowd going wild and dancing with her; visiting and talking with children; and meeting and listening to people having problems. Oh, and the best one of all looking at and coveting that piece of cheesecake as one of her campaign aides digs into a slice of strawberry cheesecake. Total cost for Hillary maybe $10,000.
Bernie is burning through his cash. Hillary spent a few million in advertising. Bernie spent more in New York than Clinton, Trump, Cruz, and Kasich combined.
Bernie has about $4 million in the bank. Hillary has about $33 million.
Clinton visited Philadelphia yesterday, with the major event being a roundtable discussion with former Attorney General Eric Holder and the Mothers of the Movement:
Time reports:
“I do think the evidence people use to justify stop-and-frisk doesn’t hold up under scrutiny,” Clinton told a room of mostly black listeners at St. Paul’s Baptist Church in Philadelphia, part of her most extended public comments on the controversial practice to date. Police “should be looking for probable cause.”
“Some people will be stopped,” she continued, “but it will not be the kind of wholesale stopping you have seen in too many places.”
“I would hope that the federal government” encourages local police departments “to begin to retrain and change the mindset and practices in police departments to get back to a much more community-grounded approach toward trying to prevent crime,” Clinton told the mostly black audience.
“Everyone knows we have to prevent crime, but we’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t work,” she continued. “I think federal government can play a much bigger role in providing both the carrots and sticks to local departments so we can do what works better than what maybe is just the lowest-common denominator that people fall back on and just keep doing whether or not the evidence is there.”
Two people asked Clinton about stop-and-frisk during the event. One asked whether she would consider appointing a Supreme Court Justice who would overturn Terry v. Ohio, a landmark Supreme Court case that paved the way for stop-and-frisk.
“Anybody I would consider appointing to the Court would be somebody who wants to take a hard look at what has worked and what has not worked and that includes standard for probable for cause,” Clinton said.
U.S. News & World Report reports:
Clinton began her tour of Philadelphia Wednesday with a low-profile but highly emotional exchange with former Attorney General Eric Holder and members of the Mothers of the Movement group – women who lost children and loved ones to gun violence or after altercations with police officers.
"This weekend in Philadelphia, you had 12 shootings. You had four people murdered, including a 4-year-old girl. You had a policeman shot. That was just one weekend in one American city," Clinton said. "The federal government has a role to play, but we also have to change laws and approaches in the states and cities as well. We need to develop a national consensus."
"We obviously have to do a whole lot more to avoid what they call the school of prison pipeline," Clinton said Wednesday. "We also have to look at the sentencing structures and the mandatory minimums and the whole set of issues that have been raised that we have to address."
"Anytime you have to go back to 1994 to find something bad on a person, she must be a bad sister, OK?" says Geneva Reed-Veal, whose daugher, Sandra Bland, was found hanged in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas. She noted that Clinton's interest in her cause sealed the deal for her.
"When you're openly grieving and the Secretary of State steps to you, you'd better endorse her," she said. "Because she's already endorsed you."
Finally, Clinton is again zeroing in on gun control.
Huffington Post reports:
Hillary Clinton closed her New York victory speech on Tuesday night with a spirited tribute to the activism of Erica Smegielski, the daughter of slain Sandy Hook Elementary School principal Dawn Hochsprung.
“There is a remarkable young woman here tonight. Her name is Erica, Erica Smegielski,” Clinton said. “She lives the truth of what I have been saying every day.”
Clinton paused, then revealed why Smegielski’s activism was especially moving.
“Erica’s mother, Dawn, was the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School,” Clinton said, drawing some audible gasps from the crowd. “And she died trying to protect her children, her students.”
“She’d never been in politics before. But she has made it her mission to advocate for common-sense gun safety reform,” Clinton continued, prompting loud, sustained cheers. “You know, like the mothers of Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin and so many others, Erica has turned her sorrow into a strategy and her mourning into a movement.”
“It isn’t easy, but as Erica said the other day, ‘What if everyone who faced tough odds said, It’s hard, so I’m going to walk away? That’s not the type of world I want to live in,’” Clinton concluded. “Erica, it’s not the type of world we want to live in. And we refuse to live in that.”
Here’s Clinton’s new ad featuring Smegielski, called “My Mom”:
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Crossposted at HillaryHQ, an independent, progressive blog committed to the electing Hillary Clinton as the next President of the United States.
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