Clinton’s millions

Wed, May 07, 2008 - 1:28 PM

A day after suffering a major drubbing in North Carolina and a narrower than expected victory in Indiana, Sen. Hillary Clinton’s staff revealed today that the candidate has loaned her campaign $6.4 million over the last month, including about a $1.5 million in the last few days.

Including the $5 million she loaned the campaign in January, Clinton has now dumped $11.4 million of her own money into her increasingly unlikely bid to overtake Barack Obama’s lead in the Democratic nomination fight.

On a conference call with reporters this morning, Howard Wolfson, the campaign’s communications director, said that the loans should be seen as sign of Clinton’s commitment to her campaign. When things looked down for Clinton in January, the $5 million loan helped spark a wave of new donations that helped her close the fundraising gap with Obama a bit. Her staff hopes for a repeat this time, to help rack up wins in the next six primaries.

But surely, the necessity of pumping even more of her own money into the campaign – at this point, more than the $10.5 million she made for her book “Living History” -- will also be seen as a sign of desperation.

There’s one irony worth noting. Clinton has emerged as the preferred candidate of low-to-middle income voters on the strength of her populist economic message. Her campaign likes to portray Obama as an elite candidate preferred by college-educated types – “eggheads” in the words of an anonymous Clinton advisor quoted in The Washington Post this morning.

But, of course, wealth is an important measure of the amorphous concept of eliteness, perhaps the most important measure. The Clintons and the Obamas are both millionaires, but the Clintons are worth far more than the Obamas, largely because of paid speeches Bill Clinton has given since leaving office. He has made nearly $52 million from speeches.

The loans she has made to her campaign represent a small fraction of the $109 million the couple has earned in the eight years since Bill Clinton left office. In fact, the money she has loaned her campaign dwarfs the Obamas’ income. The Obamas reported income of $4.2 million last year, up from just under $1 milllion in 2006.

--Sean Mussenden