According to the Huffington Post's Tom Edsall and a number of others, one of the possibilities in the offing if Hillary Clinton quickly ends her presidential campaign is that the Obama campaign will not only retire the $10 to $15 million in unpaid campaign related expenses the Clinton campaign owes but will also help the Clinton campaign pay back to the Clintons personally the $11.4 million they have loaned to the campaign during the last three months.
Helping to retire an opponent's campaign is not unprecedented and can sometimes be justified in the interests of party unity. (Remember, this isn't just money in the abstract. A lot of it is payment to people who provided services or goods of various sorts to the campaign and need to be paid or paid back.) But using more than $10 million raised in large part by small individual donations to pay back the Clintons who appear to be worth many tens of millions of dollars simply seems wrong.
This isn't meant to sound ungracious. I don't begrudge the Clintons their very substantial wealth. And even for really, really rich people, $11 million isn't nothing. But that is simply too much money raised from small givers to give to people who loaned it with full knowledge of the odds and have more than enough money to really know what to do with.
Frankly, I'm surprised that it's even being suggested. It would be a mistake for the Clintons to ask (and just because people are chattering about it -- don't assume they have or will), a mistake for Obama to offer and one that would risk a severe backlash.
That's not what people gave their money for.
This is an excellent point. I certainly did not give money to the Obama campaign so that he can turn around and give it to Hillary. That would just piss me off.
Especially since it appears that Hillary may be willing to lend herself even more money:
Campaign aides acknoweldged that she has lent her campaign $6.4 million in recent weeks — $5 million on April 11, $1 million on May 1, and $400,000 on May 5. She's willing to lend more if necessary, aide Howard Wolfson said.
In my opinion Hillary needs to stop flushing away millions of dollars on her failed campaign. But if she chooses to do so she certainly cannot expect the little people to bail her pantsuited ass out.
I call this the "Audacity of a dope".
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Don't feed the trolls!
It just goes directly to their thighs.