Running for president takes a lot of money and a successful candidate will inevitably wind up raising cash from some questionable sources. This morning there are two articles about where Hillary Clinton is getting her cash. And those two sources are about as distinct from each other as possible. The Hill reports Sen. Clinton digs deep into D.C. donor pockets, while the L.A. Times finds An unlikely treasure-trove of donors for Clinton in New York’s Chinatown.
Something remarkable happened at 44 Henry St., a grimy Chinatown tenement with peeling walls. It also happened nearby at a dimly lighted apartment building with trash bins clustered by the front door.
And again not too far away, at 88 E. Broadway beneath the Manhattan bridge, where vendors chatter in Mandarin and Fujianese as they hawk rubber sandals and bargain-basement clothes.
All three locations, along with scores of others scattered throughout some of the poorest Chinese neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, have been swept by an extraordinary impulse to shower money on one particular presidential candidate — Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Dishwashers, waiters and others whose jobs and dilapidated home addresses seem to make them unpromising targets for political fundraisers are pouring $1,000 and $2,000 contributions into Clinton’s campaign treasury.
Clinton has been shaking down local Chinese neighborhood associations, including at least one with a reputation for human trafficking.
Meanwhile, in another world:
New fundraising data shows that Beltway insiders who had been on the fence are flocking to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) presidential campaign as she has maintained her strong lead in the polls, performed well in debates and made few mistakes.
Clinton raised $1 million from Washington, D.C. donors during the third quarter of 2007, far more than any other presidential candidate and about twice as much as her chief rival, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), according to data compiled by the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
Clinton has seen her fundraising numbers in D.C. remain steady over the last few months, while Obama’s have dropped precipitously, an indication that the inside-the-Beltway political community is gravitating toward Clinton.
Obama has sworn off accepting donations from registered lobbyists, and that partly explains the disparity. But the recent change is more a feature of common wisdom. In September, Hillary became unbeatable in the Beltway’s Hivemind.
Krumholz said that Clinton raised 7 percent of her D.C. money in July, 20 percent in August, and 73 percent in September.
“There are a huge number of donors who simply want to bet on the winner,” she said.
A detailed look at any candidate’s donors will open possibilities for critique, but these two articles tell a story. And it is not a good story for the Clintons. The Clintons are especially vulnerable to accusations that they are raising money from Asian-Americans in an illegal way. In 1996, the Clintons ran into trouble with donations from the People’s Republic of China and Al Gore raised money at a Buddhist temple. It is not a positive news story for the Clintons to be found shaking down Chinatown dishwashers for thousand dollar contributions.
Neither is it a good story for them to be the Beltway Establishment’s pick. Washington DC is incredibly unpopular right now, with both the Congress and the president polling at historic lows.
Hillary certainly looks inevitable. But looks can be deceiving.
Al Gore never held a fundraiser at a Buddhist temple. Somerby has desconstructed that one so many times I can’t believe it has shown up in the pond.
I am really skeptical of articles suggesting that there is something dubious about Clinton’s fundraising. I am especially dubious about any that imply there is something inherently wrong with getting money from non-Anglo sources.
I haven’t read the articles, maybe they are well sourced and this time the news media have done their jobs. I just think we need to beware.
Even Gore doesn’t dispute it was a fundraiser:
I believe there was a fundraiser at a restaurant the day before a meet and greet at the temple.
Actually, the problem was that there was originally a double event, with a fundraiser in a restaurant scheduled for the same day as the visit to the temple. But the lunch was canceled and the two events were combined. Later on, they found email that proved Al Gore knew he was attending a fundraiser that day, which seemed to make him a liar. He wasn’t a liar for that reason, but the temple visit did become a fundraiser. The checks were just collected the next day.
I’m in agreement with Alice on this. This smells of a campaign to take what might be construed as a few potentially questionable sounding occurrences and spinning it into a larger conspiracy laden web of implied illegal fundraising.
This is just too similar to a million other Republican and right-wing efforts over many years, involving any Democrat who might be on a path to impact the Republican machine.
I would be very wary of promulgating this storyline without a lot more hard evidence. There appears to me to be a lot of innuendo and unproveable implications in these stories. And their throwing in the allegation of some historical link between Clinton’s campaign and human trafficking seems quite a stretch.
I’m not a Hillary fan, but a lot of this just doesn’t pass the smell test.
Well, I didn’t vote for Clinton in 1996 because of his fundraising practices and I worked against Gore in the primaries because of his fundraising practices. I’m kind of a rule of law guy, if you haven’t noticed.
What’s going on in Chinatown is almost definitely illegal bundling. The dishwashers get a $1000 in cash and they write a check for $1000 to Hillary. Who’s paying for it? The Chinese business and neighborhood organizations. That’s illegal even if it isn’t being done at the behest of the PRC.
Of course, it’s almost as hard for Hillary to ferret out this kind of activity as it is for the DOJ and the FEC. It doesn’t make it her fault. And it’s not her fault that DC insiders are throwing money at her either, although she could refuse PAC and lobbyist money.
But it is still an unfortunate story line. And it’s just one more reason on top of dozens why I cannot support her campaign.
I share your sentiment as far as not supporting her campaign. And, yes, if something illegal is done it needs to be ferreted out. But, unfortunately, campaign fund raising has become the ultimate dirty business. Dig deep enough in almost any major candidates fund raising activities and you could probably find enough question marks to weave together some kind of similar storyline which could be used to paint the candidate as corrupt beyond repair.
It is frustrating to me that in the media it is almost the Eleventh Commandment that every effort be made to paint major Democratic candidates as under the thumb of corporate donors and illegal schemes, while Republicans seem to be lauded for their corporate ties and resultant fundraising. The gist of the problem is that once this Democratic storyline is chosen, whether or not it is true is irrelevant. And that just galls me to no end.
I find many of the anecdotal stories worrisome, but that may just be my biases acting up. Looking closer at the Chinatown donors gives the impression of some people digging deep and giving as much as they can to a candidate. Others seem just shadowy enough to imply that they did not actually give the money that they are recorded as giving or that they were intimidated into do so.
One of the things I notice which is out of the ordinary is that Hilary returns illegal donations rather than donating them to charity. That makes it well worth it for them to press the edge of legal and give things back when they get caught. In the bundling by felon case bit ago, they were hoping that the individual donors would re-give.
Yet more reasons why we really should be financing our campaigns with public money instead of forcing our politicians to spend far too much of their time asking for it.
There is an interesting story here, and it certainly appears that some of these immigrant organizations are shaking down their members. But there is no evidence (yet) that Clinton herself is performing a “shakedown”. It may be happening. It may not. I think it would be a mistake to perpetuate the Clinton obsession of the right-wing and the traditional media by presuming that she is doing something wrong.
This kind of thing is distasteful and, just as bad, totally unnecessary. Obama, Dean and others have demonstrated that you can bring in considerable amounts of money without having to rely on these shady fund-raisers to do the dirty work. I wish our candidates would figure this out instead of taking the “easy” route.
skepticism aside, given the recent expose of hillary’s fax pas surrounding norman hsu’s fundraising bundling…or bungling, as the case may be…this doesn’t surprise me.
it dovetails rather nicely with an article in the latest edition of the nation, by russ baker and adam federman, a very interesting read:
along the same lines, an article in the previous issue by nicholas von hoffman: For Hillary, There’s No Such Thing as Dirty Money.
daw whatever conclusions you wish, but like the old adage says: where’s there’s smoke, there’s fire.
lTMF’sA
OH, I like that: we are not dealing with Senator Clinton as presidential aspirant, we are dealing with the CLINTONS, a family business, multinational! We are free to criticize them until the nomination process is over. If she becomes the Democratic candidate, I will not vote for her: Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have convinced me that I’d only be wasting my time by voting for the CLINTONS.