Monday, April 21, 2008

Hillary Has Not Paid Her Debts

do we want a president who can't pay her debts?

ap: But Clinton had debts of $10.3 million at the start of the month, much of it money owed to her main polling, phone banking and advertising consultants. The largest single debt was to the firm of her demoted former chief strategist, Mark Penn.

She also owed $1.17 million to The Spoken Hub, a phone bank operation, and $528,000 to ad maker Mandy Grunwald's firm.

But many of those owed money — vendors from Pennsylvania to Iowa to Texas — were not political insiders.

"We desperately need to see payments so we can pay our vendors," said Chris Menichetti, the founder and president of Endeavor Audio and Lighting Services in Dickson City, Pa., who was owed $43,484 by the campaign.

Still, several other firms contacted Monday said they did not consider the campaign delinquent on payments and were confident they would be paid.

"We will, of course, be honoring the debts in the coming weeks and months, and that goes for whatever our debts are and to whomever they are to," Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson said Monday.

For now, Clinton's red ink is less of an obstacle than her inability to keep up with Obama's prodigious fundraising. Obama raised $41 million in March, twice as much as Clinton. His nearly 5-1 edge in cash on hand gave him a rich base from which to challenge Clinton in Pennsylvania, which holds its primary on Tuesday.