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Go Home Who Lost The Event Planners?

THE PLANK MARCH 31, 2008

Who Lost The Event Planners?

BY AUTHOR INFO NEEDED

Forget the superdelegates. The Clinton campaign is in danger of losing a still more critical constituency:

Hillary Rodham Clinton's cash-strapped presidential campaign has been putting off paying hundreds of bills for months — freeing up cash for critical media buys but also earning the campaign a reputation as something of a deadbeat in some small-business circles. A pair of Ohio companies owed more than $25,000 by Clinton for staging events for her campaign are warning others in the tight-knit event production community — and anyone else who will listen — to get their cash upfront when doing business with her. Her campaign, say representatives of the two companies, has stopped returning phone calls and e-mails seeking payment of outstanding invoices. One even got no response from a certified letter....

In fact, about a third of the nearly 700 individual debts Clinton reported at the end of February were for various types of “event expenses,” including $319,000 for catering and venue costs, $420,000 for equipment, $11,000 for photography and $9,000 for security.... And word is getting around that Clinton’s campaign does not promptly pay those who labor to make her events look good, said an employee of the event production company Forty Two of Youngstown, Ohio. “I feel insulted by the way that the campaign treated this company and treated us personally,” said the employee, who did not want to be named talking about a client.

Ticking off Forty Two can't be a good way to become Clinton 44.

--Christopher Orr

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12 comments

How better to show the working class folks you "feel" their pain than stiffing them on invoices for bottom-tier jobs like event services.

- singlespeed

March 31, 2008 at 10:06am

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This is pretty devastating stuff.  Nobody wants to contribute to a campaign to pay off old debts.  This is probably the surest sign we've seen that the Hillary Clinton campaign is on life support.  Only a matter of time before the plug is pulled for good.

- Brent

March 31, 2008 at 11:00am

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Yeah, that's a heck of a solution for "Main Street." In any financial enterprise, you pay your payroll first. The day you can't make payroll is the day your business died, even if many companies don't realize the fact for months. You pay your suppliers second. The day you cannot pay your vendors is the day your business started to die. You pay your promotional budget (ads) and yourself last.

It's worth remembering that in the modern primary system, campaigns do not end because their candidate fails to win. They end because they run out of money.

- rhubarbs

March 31, 2008 at 11:17am

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Yeah, I agree with the two previous. Someone said that the reason she's still in it is not because she hasn't already lost (she has), but because she hasn't run out of money. Whoever is continuing to enable her is doing her (nor, apparently, her service personnel) no favors.

- miceelf

March 31, 2008 at 11:25am

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She hasn't been paying her staff's HEALTH Insurance bills, according to another site.

The madness must stop, the monster must be put back in her senate cage. Stop it now, Superdelegates, please, oh great and powerful supers, PLEASE!!!!

The shame, the shame, but as someone says, you can't shame a Clinton, for they know no shame.

- tkozal

March 31, 2008 at 11:35am

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Not doing her staff any favors, either -- Politico is reporting that Hillary has (again) stopped paying her staff's medical premiums.

www.politico.com/.../9274.html

Also, Hillary campaign manager Maggie Williams is being outed as the director of a subprime lender that used corrupt practices Hillary says she wants to outlaw. I guess if your campaign manager made $200,000 helping a subprime lender exploit poor minorities, that makes it easier not to pay her salary. So it's all good.

- rhubarbs

March 31, 2008 at 11:47am

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Amazing how the story on Obama apparently "misspeaking" about never having seen an old newspaper questionaire (which puts him more to the left than he's probably comfortable with today) goes unnoticed but people are all over the Hillary med insurance bills issue.  Because they both can't be self-serving liars, right?  

- Lymon1

March 31, 2008 at 12:03pm

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lymon, if Hillary ever claimed to have forgotten filling out a questionnaire, I'd defend her, as I have done here when people try to hold the bit about claiming to have been named after Edmund Hillary.

Not every false thing a candidate says is a lie. Sometimes -- frequently! -- people are just wrong. Family stories -- such as about the origin of one's name, for example -- are often not really true, but that's OK. It's not a lie to remember a story your parents told you and repeat it without fact-checking. Heck, I don't even expect legislators to remember every bill they voted on. If Hillary said she voted one way on a minor bill, but it turned out she voted the other way, I'd laugh it off. People make mistakes, and I'd sure hate to be held to account for misremembering something I said in a meeting last week, much less some memo I signed off on a year ago.

The Tuzla thing, as well as the Northern Ireland thing, were not mistakes or faulty memories or honestly believed false stories being repeated. They could not be anything other than knowing lies -- well, unless they were honestly believed delusions, which is actually worse.

Now, if anyone can produce, say, a memo written by Obama the day he denied knowing about that questionnaire in which he describes the memo in great detail, then it will be fair to nail him for lying about it. Until then, though, we're well within the range where any reasonable person needs to cut a little slack, whether for Hillary or any of her opponents.

In a larger sense, it is just so dispiriting what Hillary has done to her Democratic supporters. Unable to mount a positive defense of Hillary's honesty, now that she has been exposed as a Bushian serial liar, her supporters are forced to mount desperate attacks to demonstrate that her opponent is _also_ a liar, and nyah nyah nyah. Do the Hillaristas really believe shouting, "yeah, well, so are you" at John McCain is likely to be a winning strategy? If it is a choice between two liars, or two cynics, or two whatevers, what makes the Hillaristas think voters wouldn't opt for the one who seems less dishonest, or less cynical, or less whatever? And so far, Hillary seems already to have lost the battle to be taken seriously by anyone as the lesser of two evils.

- rhubarbs

March 31, 2008 at 12:31pm

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At least she won't need to go far to find some unfortunate without health insurance to stand next to her the next time she does some health care press conference.  Cagey.

- selish70

March 31, 2008 at 12:33pm

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lymon, and you remember every form you filled out 12 years ago? um..... misremembering getting shot at is now the same as forgetting about filling out a form. OK.

Issues change, people evolve generally becoming more conservative as they age. Obviously he forgot filling out the form. 12 years ago, man. that is reaching.

- blackton

March 31, 2008 at 12:45pm

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How will she answer that phone call at 3 a.m. if the phone company has cut off service because she hasn't paid the bill for four months?

- WoodyBombay

March 31, 2008 at 12:51pm

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Its ok, the 3am call is probably someone wanting payment....

- dbhuff

March 31, 2008 at 3:50pm

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