Posted on 07/19/2006 12:30:26 PM PDT by siunevada
From Murdoch Fund-Raiser to Zuckerman Huddle, Senator Clinton Has a Massive Money Apparatus, Ritzy Staff, Dispenses Lucre—Apparently Aimed at ’08: ‘Bill’s Re-election Was 9, This is 10’
As a pack of New York officials sweated through their shirts at an outdoor rally on Monday, Hillary Clinton stood onstage and chatted amiably with Mort Zuckerman, the media mogul who owns the Daily News.
A few hours earlier, behind closed doors, she held an audience with Mr. Zuckerman’s tabloid nemesis on the third floor of News Corp. headquarters, where New York Post owner Rupert Murdoch was hosting a fund-raiser for her Senate campaign.
Mrs. Clinton, like her political machine, is everywhere these days, running hard—maybe a little too hard—to win re-election to an office she has virtually no chance of losing.
The reason for all the sweat? As Mrs. Clinton’s opponents have long claimed and her top donors freely admit: This fine-tuned machine is designed to get to a much loftier destination than the Senate in 2006.
In the last three months, the campaign has raised $5,679,413, according to Mrs. Clinton’s latest fund-raising filing, giving her more than $22 million on hand for what amounts to a shadow-boxing bout against politically troubled and cash-poor competition. Her high-priced campaign staff is one of the most loyal and effective in politics, and the direct-mail database they have compiled is of a scale more befitting an incumbent Presidential candidate than a Senator coasting to re-election.
John A. Catsimatidis, a top donor to Mrs. Clinton, spoke of her apparatus in strictly Presidential terms. “They are running the most professional campaign I have seen in 20 years,” he said. “If you rate the Dukakis campaign, it was a 4; the first Clinton campaign, it was 6; the second Clinton campaign, it was a 9. This one is going to be a 10.”
“I think what you are seeing overall is the campaign shift into high gear,” said Jennifer E. Duffy, political analyst for The Cook Political Report. “Success in 2006 is critical to position for 2008.”
Mrs. Clinton’s infrastructure—and money—has created a campaign vehicle that can run simultaneously on parallel tracks, with the Senator’s public events tacitly doubling as campaign stops.
For example, on Monday, between the secretive News Corp. fund-raiser and the casual conversation with Mr. Zuckerman, Mrs. Clinton visited Westchester for a conference on hybrid-electric buses, co-sponsored prescription-drug legislation and delivered an impassioned speech in support of Israel. In recent weeks, Mrs. Clinton has also sounded off from her legislative perch on cuts to New York’s Homeland Security funding, mismanagement at FEMA, the war in Iraq and raising the minimum wage. While all those topics help boost her national profile, she also took her campaign operation to Idaho and Colorado for fund-raising, signed up the Internet activist Peter Daou—who directed blog outreach and online rapid response for the Kerry-Edwards campaign—and earned potential chits down the road by stumping for Democrats in Ohio and California.
“It’s unusual for candidates in-cycle to raise money for other candidates,” said Fred P. Hochberg, the dean of the Milano School for Management and Urban Policy at the New School. “It bespeaks a well-oiled machine that can do that.”
Mr. Hochberg should know—he, like so many other influential Democrats, has become part of the machinery. At the behest of the Clinton campaign, Mr. Hochberg’s Manhattan apartment is about to enter into service as the venue for Mrs. Clinton’s fund-raiser for Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota.
For all its peripatetic qualities, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has allowed her to tap into the city’s most exclusive ZIP codes as effectively as any public official in American history. In February, about 90 people paid a thousand dollars or more to attend a fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton in the living room of Ellen Chesler’s apartment in the Dakota on West 72nd Street.
Ms. Chesler, a political activist and a fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton, said that when official duties prevent the Senator from appearing at events, her campaign can call upon a reserve of prominent surrogates—including, on occasion, Bill Clinton—to take her place. Ms. Chesler also noted the campaign’s substantial appeal to women donors in the business community, due to such high-profile surrogates as former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, former president of the National Partnership for Women and Families Judith L. Lichtman and Ann Lewis, the communications director for Mrs. Clinton’s political operation.
But Ms. Chesler added that no surrogate was as effective in raising money and support as Mrs. Clinton herself, even when she is not physically in the room. She recalled a June event at Columbia University honoring Dr. Allan Rosenfield, dean of the Mailman School of Public Health, who has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal form of sclerosis.
“It was during a week she couldn’t be there, so she appeared in video,” said Ms. Chesler. “There were 800 esteemed people there that night who may have become strong supporters because of that.”
She has now raised a total of $43 million since taking office.
By contrast, Mrs. Clinton’s prospective Republican opponents are barely scraping by: John Spencer, a former mayor of Yonkers, raised more than $1.2 million in the most recent period, and Kathleen Troia McFarland, a former Pentagon official, raised $224,000.
“Her whole apparatus, everything she does and everywhere she goes—and you can ask anyone in New York State—shows that she is a full-time candidate for United States President and a part-time candidate for U.S. Senator,” Mr. Spencer told The Observer, with more than a hint of disgust. “She’s raising it from all over the United States on the premise that she is running for United States President.”
Ms. Lewis, a veteran of the Clinton White House, attributed the success of Mrs. Clinton campaign to her work ethic—not a particularly surprising assertion—and said that the staff comprising the campaign’s nuts and bolts is unique in politics.
“She attracts and maintains quality staff, whether it is in policy or politics,” said Ms. Lewis. “People stay with her. It really is a tribute in a town like this one, and a field like politics, that she has maintained so many.”
Many of Mrs. Clinton’s major donors echoed that notion, specifically citing the contributions of Patti Solis Doyle.
Ms. Doyle, who came on as Mrs. Clinton’s scheduler nearly 15 years ago, now runs HillPAC, Mrs. Clinton’s leadership committee, and Friends of Hillary, the Senator’s re-election engine. She thus oversees an extensive political operation responsible for fund-raising, travel and speeches. She is assisted by Maggie Williams, who served as Mrs. Clinton’s White House chief of staff.
Howard Wolfson, of the Glover Park Group, and pollster Mark Penn are her chief political consultants, while, on the policy side, Mrs. Clinton consults John Podesta, Mr. Clinton’s last White House chief of staff and now the president of the centrist Center for American Progress. Longtime aide Neera Tanden, who also makes her philosophical home at the Center for American Progress, is another key advisor.
Other staff members, who are not directly associated with the campaign but who were frequently cited by Mrs. Clintons’ biggest donors, include Laurie Rubiner, her new legislative director and a leading advocate for universal health insurance, and Karen Persichilli Keogh, Mrs. Clinton’s state director.
Harold M. Ickes, another key player on the team and a former senior official in the Clinton White House, said that Ms. Doyle had constructed a “formidable fund-raising mechanism,” but he also emphasized that “the first and most important factor is Mrs. Clinton herself.”
“When she first ran, she had name recognition, but nobody knew how she would stand with the major donors,” said Mr. Ickes. “We started the direct mail in middle of 1999, and by the end of the campaign in November of 2000, we had a 100,000-plus direct-mail list. Now it’s far exceeded that.”
That could be one reason why more than 90 percent of the money Mrs. Clinton collected in the most recent quarter were in donations of under $100. Another, according to Craig Kaplan, a lawyer and major donor to Mrs. Clinton, is that the Senator enjoys raising money.
“Emotionally, she accepts fund-raising as part of what it takes to be a politician in America today,” said Mr. Kaplan. “And because she accepts it, she is good at it.”
Mr. Kaplan said that donors who disagree with Mrs. Clinton on crucial issues, as he does on the death penalty and the war in Iraq, nevertheless write her hefty checks. But he also made it clear that raising money for a Senate re-election, even one with such a strong whiff of Presidential ambition, is not necessarily the same thing as gathering support for an eventual run for national office.
“People who support her in this race do not necessarily support her in the field of national candidates,” he said. “The question of electability is not one that plays out now.”
But not all of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters are making such a strong distinction between 2006 and 2008. In a July 2 op-ed in The Washington Post that read like a clarion call to early national donors, Mr. Penn and another powerhouse Clinton consultant, the Democratic strategist James Carville, made the case for her Presidential prospects. “We don’t know if Hillary is going to run for President,” they wrote. “But as advisers who have worked on the only two successful Democratic Presidential campaigns in the past couple of decades, we know that if she does run, she can win that race, too.”
Meanwhile, Mrs. Clinton and her policy advisors have been staking out positions that seem calibrated to attract the broadest swath of voters possible, from the right to the left. Just as her hang-tough position on the war in Iraq has bolstered her security credentials among conservative voters, her vocal push for a hike in the minimum wage is certain to please traditional liberals.
Perhaps no supporter better illustrates Mrs. Clinton’s new crossover appeal than Mr. Murdoch, who tried to torpedo her first campaign with an unending stream of damning headlines in the New York Post and Fox News. On Monday, he hosted a fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton where about 60 News Corp. executives met the Senator for an informal question-and-answer session.
“Look, Rupert’s a very important media leader,” said Francis Greenburger, a literary agent and major Clinton donor. “To the extent that he wants to support Hillary, it’s O.K. with me. Hillary is not the one who is changing; he is.”
Not unlike Mr. Murdoch, a number of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters said that they were initially put off by her, and that they weren’t won over until they interacted with her in intimate settings.
Kay LeRoy, the widow of Russian Tea Room restaurateur Warner LeRoy and a major Clinton donor, said that despite many people’s instinctual revulsion for Mrs. Clinton—“like the way people hate Yoko”—she was won over by the Senator during Ms. Chesler’s February cocktail party. The key moment, she said, was when Mrs. Clinton personally removed a nametag from her lapel just as a photographer was about to snap a picture of them together.
“It was so thoughtful and sweet and warm,” said Ms. LeRoy, who added that she finds an e-mail from the campaign updating her on Mrs. Clinton’s activities nearly every time she logs onto her computer. “I wonder why it doesn’t come across when she is on a stage.”
For now, that doesn’t seem to be much of a problem for her.
As Mrs. Clinton climbed up to the scorching stage at Monday afternoon’s pro-Israel rally outside the United Nations building on Second Avenue, she looked composed and cool in her yellow skirt-suit while the other political leaders perspired through their clothes. She smiled at the crowd and motioned to a friend to join her onstage, but turned on the outrage when she took to the podium.
“Israel has every right to defend herself, and the world must know that the United States, our government and our people will stand with Israel,” she said in an impassioned speech.
She then turned to Mr. Zuckerman and, in a whisper, complimented him on an editorial that appeared in the Daily News on Friday.
“I was thrilled with what she said today,” Mr. Zuckerman said afterward.
When asked if he found anything remarkable about Mrs. Clinton’s earlier meeting with his rival, Mr. Murdoch, he said, “I have never found anything strange about American politics.”
Hildebeast has a lotta people fooled. Ya know the old adage: You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
This is exactly the situation between the Field Marshal and her audiences.
When I see and hear Billy Goat's Nominal Wife speak I know, full well, that she is an educated idiot. In fact, I believe that Hillary and her nominal husband are both two of the most boring speakers in history and, if you listen carefully, you'll discover as I have, that the sentences when strung together and briefly reviewed are absolutely senseless.
... for the 'common good'."
That's just what America needs, messages from Hillary from everywhere---TV,Internet,Magazines, NewsPapers for the next 8 years. For gods sake I was tired of them talking about Hillary in '98,'99' and 2000. As a matter of FACT, it wasn't 1 day after George W. Bush won the Presidency that a Poll was put on TV showing how many people wanted Hillary to run in 2004. Then we had to hear about her every week for the last 2 years now. Does America really want to hear more B.S. out of this wretched woman for another 4-8 or 12 years? Let her run and lose. The law should be that you give up your position as Senator to run for President, but surely I'm living in a dream world for that to occur.
He titled it
"Reason for Celibacy #52".
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