{"id":1005,"date":"2008-07-08T18:27:49","date_gmt":"2008-07-08T22:27:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/?p=1005"},"modified":"2008-07-08T18:27:49","modified_gmt":"2008-07-08T22:27:49","slug":"your-campaign-contributions-at-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/2008\/07\/08\/your-campaign-contributions-at-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Campaign Contributions At Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Times has an interesting story today, tracking the spending of the presidential campaigns<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 I wish stories like this would get more play, so people really understood where their contributions were going.\u00c2\u00a0 Well worth a quick look<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’m not exactly a “give now!” cheerleader<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 In fact, I think that it would serve the entire system well if we were all more skeptical about whether we were getting good value for our money, forcing the campaigns to be a bit more thoughtful in their spending.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Check out the NYT story’s interactive graphic, which breaks the spending down<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 You can see, for example, that Obama’s spent almost $15 million on direct mail.\u00c2\u00a0 Whether that’s reasonable or not, I don’t really know.\u00c2\u00a0 But I suspect it is, as direct mail is a terribly competitive business.\u00c2\u00a0 What’s not<\/em> a competitive business?\u00c2\u00a0 Political media consulting.\u00c2\u00a0 And Obama’s spent $84.9 million for that with GMMB<\/a>. And we’ve just barely arrived in the general election.<\/p>\n

I’m not trying to pick on Obama, here.\u00c2\u00a0 For the real bottom of the barrel, check out the ongoing TPM story on BMW Direct<\/a>, which seems to specializing in fleecing unknowing people out of their money under cover of various no-hope Republican candidates’ names.\u00c2\u00a0 In one instance, the firm raised $400k on behalf of a candidate, but she only ended up with $30k to actually spend, after BMW Direct’s “costs.”\u00c2\u00a0 And then it sent that candidate’s previous donors another letter<\/a> asking to help retire her “debt.”<\/p>\n

Pigs at the trough, people, and your hard earned dollars are helping fill it with swill.\u00c2\u00a0 Or maybe we’ll let one of the beneficiaries of this spending use his own analogy:<\/p>\n

Justin Hemminger, [the political director of the company Obama uses for bumper stickers\/t-shirts\/etc.], toldHannah Fairfield of The Times, who compiled the chart: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s like having a whale wash up on the beach. You want to shovel food into the whale as fast as possible before the tide turns. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re all out there with shovels. \u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times has an interesting story today, tracking the spending of the presidential campaigns.\u00c2\u00a0 I wish stories like this would get more play, so people really understood where their contributions were going.\u00c2\u00a0 Well worth a quick look. I’m not exactly a “give now!” cheerleader.\u00c2\u00a0 In fact, I think that it would serve the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}