Among the difficulties facing Hillary Clinton’s campaign right now is a bleak financial picture. The campaign has been broke before, but bounced back at key intervals. Now, however, Clinton spent heavily on a lackluster performance in North Carolina and Indiana, the results did not spur a new round of contributions, and her debts are beginning to pile up.
Indeed, when Tim Russert effectively declared the Democratic race over a few days ago, he pointed specifically to the precariousness of the Clinton campaign’s finances: “If, in fact, these reports of Senator Clinton giving her campaign more money are true, then the Clintons have a big decision to make in the morning: Do they go into further debt? … Their ability to raise money after the events of tonight — it’s going to be very difficult.”
The circumstances have led to considerable talk over the last few days of the Obama campaign intervening and “easing” Clinton’s debts. Yesterday, Obama himself broached the subject.
Senator Barack Obama said today that he would not rule out the possibility of helping Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton retire her campaign debt to bring her into the fold and unify Democrats. But he said no discussions have taken place yet.
“Obviously, I’d want to have a broad-ranging discussion with Senator Clinton about how I could make her feel good about the process and have her on the team moving forward,” Mr. Obama said. “But as I said, it’s premature right now. She’s still actively running and we’ve still got business to do right here in Oregon and in other states.”
Mr. Obama stressed that it was premature to talk about lending aid to his rival, declaring: “That’s not a conversation that we’ve had because our working assumption right now is that we’re still in the middle of a race.”
Obama added that these kinds of arrangements are not without precedent: “I think historically after a campaign is done and you want to unify the party — particularly when you’ve had a strong opponent, you want to make sure that you’re putting that opponent in a strong position so that they can work to win an election in November.”
There are a couple of angles to this, including one that’s caused some confusion over the last couple of days.
First, it’s not at all clear if Clinton wants Obama to help with debt relief, and if this would have any influence in her decision to end her campaign. The Clintons have amassed considerable wealth in recent years, and wouldn’t have too much trouble paying off the debt themselves, perhaps using their own money, perhaps turning to a generous donor base. For that matter, as Yglesias noted, “[S]he’s unlikely to face a serious 2012 challenge so her re-election fundraising can just go to pay off presidential campaign debt.”
Second, and even more important, is the notion that people who donated to Obama don’t necessarily want to see their money go to help Clinton with her campaign debts. Josh Marshall noted the other day:
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.
Recognizing the obvious problems with this — and aware that it could conceivably hurt Obama fundraising in the short term — the Obama campaign was quick to point out yesterday that if they were to help Clinton with her financial difficulties, the support would not come from Obama’s campaign account. As the NYT noted, “Instead, he would have to make a fund-raising appeal on her behalf, asking people to contribute.”
In other words, people who contributed to Obama could feel confident that the money would not go to Clinton.
I’d just add that Time’s Mark Halperin ran the “outline” of a possible deal between the two Democratic camps: “Clinton agrees to leave the race in return for help paying off her campaign debt, a key role at the convention, and a guarantee that she becomes the lead Senate sponsor of the health care reform bill under a President Obama.”
We’ll see how that goes.