SocraticGadfly: Obama-Clinton edginess may cut both ways in wallets

July 22, 2008

Obama-Clinton edginess may cut both ways in wallets

The L.A. Times reports that, while Hillary Clinton’s former campaign donors have no problems whipping out the checkbook for Barack Obama, the reverse isn’t even close to being true, at least so far.
Clinton’s plea to heal the rift in the Democratic Party, her donors gave as much as $1.6 million to Barack Obama's presidential campaign last month, campaign finance reports show.

Obama's donors, however, were not quite as quick to send money Clinton's way.

Despite a request from the presumed Democratic nominee that his top contributors help Clinton retire half of her $25-million campaign debt, she received a modest $105,000 in June from only a handful of Obama partisans, a Times analysis of Federal Election Commission records shows.

At least 300 Clinton donors gave Obama the $2,300 legal max, the story says. So far, 11 such Obama donors have done the same for Clinton.

The Obama camp claims a bunch of donations for Clinton came in after the June 30 filing deadline, so they won’t become public until August.
Obama gave her a personal check, but it did not show up in the latest report. Nor did a check from Chicago executive Penny Pritzker, Obama's campaign finance chairwoman. Clinton did receive the maximum amount, $2,300, from Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, in June.

Well, we’ll see in a month.

E ven if that is the case, then, Obama donors were a lot slower on the trigger. For the sake of party unity at the convention, he had better hope that the checks were big, when they were finally written, or that August reporting gets covered up by convention news if they weren’t.

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