[NYTr] Clinton Funding Greed Could Sink the Dems in 2008

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Oct 1, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/giordano10012007.html

The Clinton Campaign's Reckless Race for Big Money Donors

Why the Problems with Clinton Inc. Could Sink the Democrats in 2008

By AL GIORDANO

The $850,000 that conman Norman Hsu bundled for Senator Hillary
Clinton's presidential campaign are the gifts that Clinton will have to
keep giving back, harming her presidential hopes not just monetarily,
but also morally and politically.

Hsu's upcoming court hearings together with a newly filed civil suit in
California, plus the criminal (and likely civil) complaints pending
against him in New York, will soon blast in stereo from the media
capitals of both coasts. The courtroom fireworks will take away a
considerable amount of the message control that the Clinton campaign
has, until now, been able to deploy.

It's a story with sizzle and steak. Major media organizations including
The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The
Wall Street Journal and Newsweek have put many of their top
investigative reporters on the trail through which a fugitive from
justice rose to become one of the Clinton campaign's top 15
fundraisers. With each new report, new lines of investigation open; the
story has so many legs it's a caterpillar. Although very potentially
harmful to Clinton's ambitions, the increasing scrutiny on those that
provide and raise the millions required to win election to national
office is long overdue and should be cleansing for democracy.

Last May, The Nation's Ari Berman filed an important story about the
Clinton campaign's ties to corporate America, "Hillary, Inc." It
captured the contradictions inherent in a candidate who speechifies
against an economy that skews toward "the privileged and the powerful
at the expense of everybody else" while playing footsie under the table
with those same interests. Yet the focus on the corporate nature of
Clinton, Inc. isn't entirely negative for the senator's campaign: it
can also imply--to voters made cynical by the constraints capitalism
imposes on democracy--a level of businesslike competence in the rough
and tumble realities of electoral campaigns.

The Hsu case is more dangerous for Clinton's aspirations because it
shows the incompetent underside of the Clinton organization; a sloppy
and careless venture that back in the era of "1990s values," was
sufficient to help it politically survive its own self-inflicted
wounds. But in this higher tech, faster information-flow, closer
scrutiny 21st century that is upon us, the trademark recklessness that
got the Clinton organization through eight years in power now veers
toward disaster.

Nineties Values

Scratch the surface of the Hsu scandal, and find a confirmation of the
unacceptable risks for the Democrats if the 2008 general election
becomes a referendum on the Clinton White House of the 1990s. It offers
a looking glass into the inevitable disillusionment and scandal that
would follow a Clinton nomination. And even if candidate Clinton were
able to best a similarly flawed Republican nominee, her executive
branch would end up besieged, unable to comply on campaign promises,
because it will be placed on the permanent defensive by its own serial
ethical lapses.

The problem is not Norman Hsu, his Ponzi schemes, or his tragic figure
now rolling down the treadmill toward the buzz saw of justice. Hsu is
not an isolated case. It is emblematic of the malignant negligence of
the front-running Democratic candidate and her organization, the lack
of due diligence when money is involved and the carelessness it
exhibits.

The Hsu scandal involves both Senator and Bill Clinton -- you can't
pull them apart on this one; two birds on the same wire hit by their
own boomerang -- and it offers demonstrable proof that the protagonists
that seek another Clinton White House have not learned well from the
lessons of the first.

The Los Angeles Times reported that a seeming nobody like Hsu was able
to glom onto the highest status in the Clinton organization:

    When Bill Clinton received an award at a gala dinner honoring the
late Robert F. Kennedy last year, the former president expressed his
thanks before an audience that included a Nobel Prize winner and a
glittering array of show business celebrities and Wall Street titans.
Yet the second sentence of his remarks expressed special gratitude to a
man almost no one there had heard of: "our friend Norman Hsu."

The former president still enjoys lifetime protection from the U.S.
Secret Service, an agency that conducts a background security check on
anyone that gets physically close to its charges. If the Clinton
campaign did not know about Hsu's criminal debt with society, it is
highly unlikely that the Secret Service--part of the US Department of
Homeland Security, and answerable to the executive branch--was also
ignorant. The Bush-Cheney administration's Secret Service had no legal
obligation to inform the Clinton campaign that a warrant for the top
fundraiser's arrest was outstanding from the state of California
because it did not present a physical security threat to the Clintons.
The threat was, instead, political, and so the ace was held up-sleeve.

Was the administration saving that red-hot news story for later,
allowing Hsu to rack up even more campaign dollars for the Clinton
campaign, to achieve his stated ambition of becoming Clinton's first
one-million dollar bundler, to receive more praise from the candidate,
pose for more photos at the right hand of power, only to then send the
scandal swooping down upon the presumptive Democratic nominee like a
smart bomb in, say, October '08? A strong indication of that likelihood
came just weeks after The Wall Street Journal, in late August, opened
season on journalistic scrutiny of Hsu, when federal prosecutors in New
York "unsealed" a criminal complaint against Hsu that they have been
quietly building all along.

The clandestine nature of the pending prosecution might well represent
an unfair, even Nixonian, misuse of federal power ("a vast right-wing
conspiracy," in Clintonspeak) to protect Republican continuance in the
White House, but it was made possible by the irresponsibility and
negligence that has always been, and continues to be, the dominant
tendency of Clinton organization fundraising.

The Hsu case shattered the nostalgic amnesia regarding the Clinton
years, harkening back to the day in March, 1996, when then 22-year-old
Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie, of Little Rock, Arkansas, handed an envelope
with $460,000 in bundled contributions, each at or under the $1,000
legal limit of the time, to President Bill Clinton's legal defense
fund. The contributions were obviously bogus: they included money
orders, sequentially numbered, in different names but in the same
handwriting. And the Clinton organization evidently knew something was
amiss: $70,000 worth of the contents of the brown envelope was
returned, but another $378,300 was deposited. "Don't report names if $
are returned," wrote Clinton campaign operative Howard Ickes in an
internal memo that later surfaced to public light. Then as now, when
the scandal erupted, the campaign returned all of those donations.
(Ickes, today, remains a high level Clinton '08 fundraiser, under
another architect of many of the 1990s Clinton fundraising blunders;
Clinton finance chairman Terry McAuliffe.)

As the Washington Post recently noted, "The eerie echoes of the last
Clinton campaign finance scandal are what make the Hsu case so
problematic for the current Democratic presidential frontrunner,"
adding that the current scandal sticks harder to Clinton than it would
to others because no other candidate for president "has that history to
overcome."

The Clinton organization had been warned that Hsu could become a
problem for them (one campaign staffer replied to such a red flag via
email, typing part of her message in all caps, insisting that Hsu was
"COMPLETELY legit"). It was also advised to better scrutinize its
donors. According to the same LA Times report, former Clinton
fundraiser David Rosen had pushed for criminal background checks by
campaigns. "Mistakes happen," he said, "when people are overwhelmed,
under-resourced and undertrained."

Mistakes happen, yes, but a policy of looking the other way raises more
dough.

Why in the world would Bill Clinton shower such public attention and
praise upon an unknown quantity like Norman Hsu at that speech quoted
above? Beyond Hsu's utility to the Clinton campaign, he was bankrolling
some of the former president's pet projects as well. The Chronicle of
Philanthropy reports that Hsu donated $75,000 to the Clinton School of
Public Service at the University of Arkansas (the school will now be
returning the money). That caused the Hsu scandal to hit The Chronicle
of Higher Education, too. And while some supporters of Senator
Clinton's presidential bid insist that the Clinton organization's
fundraising missteps should not be spoken of on the left, lest we
repeat GOP talking points, it is relevant to note that neither of those
esteemed academic journals are right-wing newsletters

The Hsu scandal also enters into public discussion of an important
priority of much of the left: campaign finance reform. The message of
hush up, buck up and shut up from Clinton partisans essentially asks us
to put that goal aside for the rest of the '08 campaign and, indeed,
for the next eight years.

Once again, a politician confronts us with the mantra of "do as I say,
not as I do," because although it doesn't want us talking about it, the
Clinton campaign issues "talking points" to its own mouthpieces to try
to spin the story away.

The Internal Campaign Memo

Newsweek investigative reporters Michael Isikoff, Mark Hosenball and
Evan Thomas published parts of an internal campaign memo with "talking
points" that had been sent to Clinton "surrogates" (one of whom leaked
the document to the reporters; there is apparently dissent within the
machine, too): "The Clinton supporters were instructed to say they
hadn't participated in the vetting. If pressed, they were told to take
a none-too-subtle swipe at Clinton's chief rival. 'Long before
Hillary's presidential campaign took money from Mr. Hsu, Mr. Obama's
senate campaign had as well as a bunch of others,' read the memo given
to Newsweek by a Clinton supporter who didn't want to be identified
revealing internal campaign communications."

Got it? Don't mention the $850,000 that Hsu bundled for Clinton in the
first half of 2007, but by all means whack Senator Barack Obama's
receipt of a relatively meager $7,000 back in 2005. Clinton
communications director Howard Wolfson and spokesman Phil Singer, the
magazine reported, were the ventriloquists behind the "talking points."

Interestingly, Obama's campaign gave that seven grand to charity (which
was the Clinton campaign's first response regarding $23,000 that Hsu
personally gave to its organizations). But when the story grew so large
that the Clinton shop decided to cast off the ballast of almost a
million dollars, those funds would not go to the needy, but, rather,
directly back to 260 donors that Hsu had collected from.

The hypocrisy rises to the level of poetry in that Clinton, in a sense,
might really believe that "Obama made me do it." Obama had bested
Clinton in fundraising for the first half of 2007 ($58 million to $53
million) and, with more than a quarter million donors averaging $224
apiece, Obama may well widen the gap in the third quarter Federal
Elections Commission (FEC) reports due October 15. Another loss in the
Q3 "money primary" to Obama, and the hissing sound this time will be
the air beginning to seep from the Clinton monster truck tires.

That fiscal reality provides important context to the motives behind
Clinton's returning the Hsu bundled donations to sender rather than
continuing to give the money to charity. The fix is cosmetic and
deceptive. Indeed, Clinton admitted to the Associated Press that she'd
welcome most of that $850,000 to be donated right back to her: "I
believe that the vast majority of those 200-plus donors are perfectly
capable of making up their own minds about what they will or won't do
going forward."

In the extremely important money primary, the maneuver opens the
possibility of a kind of laundering of money that was already reported
by Clinton in previous quarters to be counted again, anew, in the
upcoming third quarter, artificially raising her third quarter take.
But while that almost million dollars, if re-deposited, may or may not
make the difference in the fundraising war, the Clinton campaign (that
some fawning pundits have characterized as "flawless" and "mistake
free") has just inadvertently given the Hsu story another set of legs.
It's as if the Clinton organization is now tossing landmines ahead on
the very path it must walk next.

And so beginning on October 15, news organizations will be putting a
magnifying glass to Clinton's Q3 FEC report to find out how much of
that Hsu-bundled money is being re-donated in a manner that
artificially boosts the campaign's claims to fundraising superiority.
That will bring another round of news about the scandal that will not
die.

"He Never Said No"

The New York Times reported that Hsu "was desperate for invitations to
glitzy Democratic party galas in California and private political
dinners in New York." Hsu seemed "almost astonished to be posting for
pictures with former President Bill Clinton at Chelsea Piers and
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton at a rally in San Francisco."

Referring to Hsu as "a compulsive name dropper" that would snag elusive
reservations at chic Manhattan restaurants for Clinton campaign
staffers, the portrait emerges of a loose cannon on the deck of the USS
Clinton that may yet take high-level campaign staffers down with him.
"He spent money, he never said no," Clinton fundraiser John A.
Catsimatidis told the Times.

That sentence--"he spent money, he never said no"--provides a worrisome
hint of the probable spin-off scandals to come. Hsu had already donated
the maximum allowed by law to Clinton's US Senate campaign and thus
could not legally spend any more of his own money that year. Any
Clinton staffer that was party to such lawbreaking may soon go down
with him, as the judicial and media scrutiny heightens.

In Hsu's case, he seemed to be using the status he gained at the right
hand of the Clintons to work his game on others. The Times reported
that one Hsu investor was referred to him as "this big businessman who
was a big friend of Hillary Clinton," and that Hsu encouraged investors
to send campaign donations as "good for business." The Times quotes a
prominent Clinton donor as saying that Hsu "went from a nobody to a
player. And if Hillary was elected he would go from a player to a
well-connected star in Democratic business circles."

Norman Hsu turns out not to be the hapless innocent that looks up at us
with puppy eyes from his mug shots. He is a slash-and-burn player that
sought a position on a team that encouraged him, and others like him,
to pursue a charred earth fundraising policy. Hsu found in the Clinton
campaign a perfect headquarters for unethical money handling, where he
could, and did, blend in perfectly without seeming out of place.

Hsu's Fundraising Methods

Some right-wing bloggers have seized upon Hsu's Chinese ethnicity to
suggest a nefarious plot by foreign interests or governments to buy
influence in a possible Clinton administration (a line that a
Congressional investigation of the 1996 Clinton fundraising scandal
pursued after the Trie donations came to light). But no evidence
whatsoever has so far pointed to that. Others have speculated that Hsu
may have been under the impression (illusory or not) that if he topped
the Clinton fundraising team in "sales," he might parlay that into a
presidential pardon for his past sins. Yet the early evidence has an
even more tangled web unraveling in full public view.

The pattern that instead emerges suggests that Hsu basked in the light
of the Clintons and other politicians to gain the confidence of others
he met in the campaign's orbit in order to run multiple investment con
schemes with their money.

The Washington Post reports that Hsu raised the eye-popping sum of
$850,000 "in just eight months" with "donors that included wealthy
investors in his apparel ventures, hotel shopkeepers, a 96-year-old in
a Florida retirement home and an auto-body worker who mistakenly
thought he would get a tax break for his political generosity."

The Clinton campaign hasn't disclosed the identities of the 260 donors
it says were bundled by Hsu (and that, too, reflects sloppy politics:
it merely postpones the escalation of the story's news value to when
the October 15 FEC report, which requires candidates to itemize
returned donations, can be perused by news organizations). But the Post
investigative team was able to identify "nearly 100" of those bundled
by Hsu, noting that some "had trouble explaining why they gave the
funds to Clinton or could not recall the circumstances in which they
met Hsu." Jack Cassidy, a California businessman, told the Post that he
informed the Clinton campaign and the FBI that Hsu might be part of an
"illegal Ponzi scheme" and that Hsu was using the Clinton campaign to
run his game, "to gain the confidence of the people he was meeting"
through it: "If you are opening a hamburger stand, you want to put a
set of golden arches outside Hsu was using Hillary Clinton as his
golden arches."

One investor that complained of being defrauded by Hsu told the
newspaper: "Norman would make friends with one guy, and then move
around to meet all this guy's friends, and soon they would all be his
investors."

Some of Hsu's New York investors fear that he cheated them out of $40
million, according to another NY Times report. And the Los Angeles
Times informs us that a $23 million lawsuit has been filed against Hsu
in California for a similar bilking scheme. The complaint states that
the plaintiff trusted Hsu with his money because, "prominent persons,
including Sen. Hillary Clinton, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson,
California Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown, national Democratic political
advisor James Carville, film director Steven Spielberg, actor [Tobey]
Maguire, grocery store magnate/billionaire Ron Burkle and others
introduced and/or endorsed Hsu as a friend, colleague and trusted
associate."

Simultaneously, Hsu would pressure his investors to donate to Clinton
and other candidates, according to that same lawsuit. "He always used
that phrase - 'favor' - in communications with the contribution
demand," the plaintiff's attorney told Associated Press.

Hsu was very talented at the con, and his prominence as a "Hillraiser"
brought him new investors. Once they had anted up, Hsu then got them to
donate to Clinton and others by implying that the return on their
investments would be at stake. The more money he raised for Clinton,
the more access and attention was fawned upon him. And it was all going
swimmingly until late August, when the Wall Street Journal first
reported that Hsu had bundled tens of thousands of dollars in Clinton
donations from a California family headed by a postal worker that
earned just $49,000 a year. That report sent other major news
organizations digging, which led to evidence that he had paid money to
some of his bundled Clinton donors (illegal under federal elections
law) and, finally, the startling revelation that Clinton's leading
bundler was a fugitive from justice who had pled "no contest" in 1992
to defrauding investors.

When the jig was up in early September, Hsu turned himself into
authorities in California, paid $2 million bail, but then skipped the
next hearing. He was found in an Amtrak sleeping car crossing Colorado,
in a pharmaceutical haze and an apparent suicide attempt. Bail, after
first being raised to $5 million, was then revoked, and he awaits his
many upcoming days in court from jail.

Was the Clinton campaign so desperate to catch up with Obama's
fundraising success that it ignored clear early warning signs about the
bundler in their midst? It wouldn't be the only example of how the
pressures of raising tens of millions of dollars have compromised the
Senator: in stark contrast to rivals Obama and John Edwards, who
decline DC lobbyist or Political Action Committee (PAC) donations,
Clinton is frenetically chasing such influence money. The Edwards
campaign recently hit Clinton hard over a September fundraising event
in which the campaign put lobbyists for companies seeking Homeland
Security contracts together with key Congressional committee chairs; a
thousand dollars or more to Clinton was the price tag of achieving such
coveted access.

These compromises underscore what advocates of campaign finance and
ethics reform have long asserted: That as long as electoral campaigning
is dependent on wealthy donors, the system will continue to favor their
policy choices over those that benefit the common good.

In the end, though, the fast and loose approach by the Clinton
organization in hunting for those big checks comes down to one word:
Negligence. And evidence mounts that the practice of looking the other
way was not merely an oversight by low-level staffers. The reckless
standard operating procedure came from the highest levels of the
Clinton campaign.

The Negligence Is Top-Down

Signs are beginning to emerge that high level Clinton campaign staff
­including campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle--knew there were problems
with Hsu before the story blew up on them, but did not take action. The
LA Times reported that, from Hsu, "Solis Doyle got a coveted, and
pricey, designer handbag -- a gift that made her so uncomfortable she
returned it."

If a designer handbag made Solis Doyle--a top aid to Clinton since the
office of the First Lady that has often been called "Hillary's
alter-ego"--uncomfortable enough to return it, why did she not likewise
question the $850,000 that Hsu was bundling into the campaign chest?
The difference in value to a cash-thirsty campaign answers the query: a
handbag does not a campaign make, but $850,000 pays for the entire
media budget in various early primary states. Only after the Clinton
shop learned that the FBI was on the trail of Hsu did it say it would
divest from the money he raised. Solis Doyle's return of the handbag
suggests that she knew something was wrong, but looked away at the
larger corruption.

Solis Doyle's problems may now be larger than can fit in a handbag. The
LA Times report locates her as the recipient of Hsu's largesse in
November 2006, after Senator Clinton won reelection in New York, when
Solis Doyle plus "two junior staffers and a New York-based fundraiser"
were treated to a "post-victory trip to Las Vegas" by Hsu, with rooms
at the Mandalay Bay hotel: "While at the Mandalay Bay, Hsu took at
least some of his guests to a favorite bar, Red Square. It features a
huge statue of a decapitated Lenin at the entrance, and the top of the
bar is sheathed in ice to maintain the chill of the caviar and
exclusive vodkas Clinton aides believed Hsu had gotten their rooms on a
complimentary basis because he was a frequent visitor to Mandalay Bay,
the aides said."

That two junior staffers fell into that pit is not surprising, but
Solis Doyle? If the Federal Elections Commission interprets Hsu's
generosity to the campaign manager as an in-kind contribution from a
donor that Solis Doyle already knew had donated the maximum allowable
by law in 2006, the legal burden could also fall upon her. (That the
2006 election had already taken place doesn't serve as an excuse;
federal limits on contributions apply specifically to the "calendar
year.") It's not just the corruption of such game playing that offends;
it is also the ineptitude. The campaign manager of the leading
Democratic candidate for US president ought to know better than to have
crossed that line. And if she's that foolhardy with her own reputation
and adherence to the letter and spirit of the law, it's likely that the
negligence pervades many other aspects of how the Clinton campaign, and
its fundraising operation, is run.

Now that the investigative sharks of the news media smell blood in the
water, the Clinton campaign will be subjected to a level of scrutiny it
had gambled would not occur. The possibility of new scandals, involving
other Clinton donors and fundraisers, is not hypothetical. In the wake
of the Hsu case, another Clinton donor has been indicted. And the race
is on to identify others with less than endearing histories. These are
hot scoops for any investigative reporter because they stick to
Clinton--the similar problems in the previous Clinton administration,
and Bill Clinton's clear involvement with Norman Hsu, make them
examples of a pattern, not just isolated errors--much more convincingly
than to others without that history.

Add to the troubles ahead for those that need the Hsu story to quiet
down is Hsu's hire of flamboyant defense attorney James Brosnahan, who
wants to withdraw his client's 1992 "no contest" plea and try the case
in court and in the media. Brosnahan (who the San Francisco Chronicle
lists as number two on its "top ten lawyers" guide) has hinted at a DC
Madam strategy, with veiled threats to bring down others if his client
must also suffer. "Why didn't they go get him?" Brosnahan asked
reporters, according to AP, then answering his own question. "He was
contributing to California politicians."

Trouble in Paradise

The Clinton campaign's cultivated image as expert and monolithic also
shows signs of becoming unglued in the wake of Hsu. The campaign's Iowa
field director (who managed the victorious caucuses there of John Kerry
in '04 and Al Gore in '00) mysteriously left the campaign shortly after
the Hsu scandal broke and the campaign wouldn't tell reporters whether
she had resigned or been fired. The leaking of the internal memo above
may also indicate some discontent.

NBC's Andrea Mitchell went from gape-jawed praise of former president
Bill Clinton's role in Senator Clinton's campaign to a public
expression of worry in a matter of days as a result of the Hsu scandal.
On September 5 Mitchell, on MSNBC, had lauded Bill Clinton as "a big
asset to his wife's campaign." But days later, Mitchell--even as her
husband, Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan was releasing a
book that praised Bill Clinton (praise that was later cited by Senator
Clinton during an Iowa stump speech) - had this to say on the same
channel: "Up until now, Bill Clinton has been a complete plus among
Democratic primary voters for Hillary Clinton. But now, with the Norman
Hsu money-raising controversy, for the first time there's a real
concern in the Clinton camp that this is real baggage from the Clinton
White House years. There's a lot of stress, a lot of damage control, a
lot of finger pointing - and in fact, stress is so high that there was
a shouting match observed among Clinton staffers in public last week."

The wheels are coming off the Clinton bandwagon, but so far
imperceptibly to all but those paying very close attention. Most
political reporters and pundits don't notice the wobble yet. They
accept the conventional wisdom that the Clinton organization is marked
by competence, that "Hillary, Inc." is a well-oiled political
corporation. Enron, too, was once perceived as healthy. This is another
case of nineties corporate and political values that cannot withstand
the new levels of scrutiny made possible by the expansion of the
Internet. Information is not as easily filtered as it was then. Back in
1997, according to the US Census, only 18 percent of US homes had
Internet access, mainly via slow dial-up connections. By June 2007 more
than 200,000 million Americans (69 percent) are online according to
Nielsen/Net Ratings and it's that much harder for politicians to spin
or sweep inconvenient facts under the campaign rug.

Clinton's fundraising problems and ethical lapses harm all aspects of
her campaign, especially the matters that most concern voters. The Hsu
scandal broke exactly when the Bush administration rolled out General
George Petraeus to sell a continuation of the Iraq war to Congress and
the American public. It was an hour when many looked to Clinton and her
rivals, particularly those Democratic presidential candidates in the US
Senate, to exercise more effective leadership to end that war. But the
scandal paralyzed Clinton in the same way that 1990s troubles paralyzed
the first Clinton White House from effective action on behalf of
progressive agendas.

On September 12, Senator Clinton was so hell-bent on evading media
questions about the Hsu case that some of her supporters manhandled a
Newsday reporter to keep him from doing his job. The reporter, Glenn
Thrush, posted the incident almost immediately to the newspaper's
website, noting that, "Typically, the Secret Service allows
credentialed journalists to question the senator as she heads to her
car (she often refuses to talk) and today there was much to query her
on: the Norman Hsu scandal, her tough talk to Gen. David Petraeus and
Barack Obama's new position on Iraq."

These are just the earliest signs about how fundraising scandals drag
on all aspects of a campaign (or a presidency). Hsu's contribution
truly is the gift that keeps on taking. Clinton's Hsu problem (and the
compounding troubles that grow out of it) can't be fairly blamed on a
vast right-wing conspiracy nor on anyone other than those that, in
their unquenchable thirst for campaign dollars, played fast and loose
with the fundraising game, encouraged vertiginous competition among
million-dollar bundlers and allowed an unvetted glommer like Norman Hsu
into their inner circle based only on his ability to bring in the
checks.

It may be too late for the Clinton campaign to recover and repair its
flawed machine (and, regardless, it has telegraphed that it doesn't
recognize its problem or the need to change course). But it is not too
late for the other Democratic presidential candidates, the party's
candidates for Senate, House, state and local offices, the press corps
and rank-and-file citizens to learn those lessons and adjust
accordingly.

To recklessly gamble that the scrutiny upon how campaigns are funded
won't continue to intensify will be at the peril of what could be an
historic landslide in November of '08, one that could rewrite the
electoral map for decades to come. To risk all that in order to
nostalgically fight the past political wars all over again (or to think
they can be fought effectively without a break from nineties values)
would be as self-destructive for the country as it would be for the
Democratic Party. The alarm clock screams and will continue to ring.
The wake-up call has arrived.


[Al Giordano, the founder of Narco News, has lived in and reported from
Latin America for the past decade. His opinions expressed in this
column do not reflect those of Narco News nor of The Fund for Authentic
Journalism, which supports his work. Al encourages commentary,
critique, additional analysis and news tips for his continued coverage
of the US presidential campaign to be sent to his email address:
narconews at gmail.com. ]