Sometime's a quickie is a goody...
Ben Smith at Politico posted the Clinton reply to Obama's speech this morning.
Basically it's the old "he's as dirty as we are" response. However, they included some "facts" to back up their claim. So I decided to dig a little and found something very interesting......
In their rebuttal, the HRC campaign included a chart that listed by company, donations that Obama had taken. Here is the list that Clinton campaign put out in their release (once again, from the Smith blog post above).
- Obama has taken $1,180,103 from the top issuers of subprime loans. [cq.com]
- Obama received $266,907 from Lehman. [Cq.com]
- Obama received $5395 from GMAC. [Cq.com]
- Obama received $150,850 from Credit Suisse First Boston. [Cq.com]
- Obama received $11,250 from Countrywide. [Cq.com]
- Obama received $9052 from Washington Mutual. [Cq.com]
- Obama received $161,850 from Citigroup. [Cq.com]
- Obama received $4600 from CBASS. [Cq.com]
- Obama received $170,050 from Morgan Stanley. [Cq.com]
- Obama received $1150 from Centex. [Cq.com]
- Obama received $351,900 from Goldman Sachs. [Cq.com]
As you all know, all donations over $200 require reporting of information like name and employer. Inside of big companies like Morgan and Citi, it is impossible to breakout divisions based on the information that is required. So I did what CQ most like did to get their numbers and searched on donations by company for Clinton. Below are my results:
- Clinton received $259,310 from Lehman. [opensecrets.org]
- Clinton received $1,700 from GMAC. [opensecrets.org]
- Clinton received $110,450 from Credit Suisse First Boston. [opensecrets.org]
- Clinton received $8,050 from Countrywide. [opensecrets.org]
- Clinton received $7,800 from Washington Mutual. [opensecrets.org]
- Clinton received $236,600 from Citigroup. [opensecrets.org]
- Clinton received - from CBASS. [opensecrets.org]
- Clinton received $385,570 from Morgan Stanley. [opensecrets.org]
- Clinton received $2700 from Centex. [opensecrets.org]
- Clinton received $366,150 from Goldman Sachs. [opensecrets.org]
Total for HRC from same sources - $1,370,280.00
And as by second grader learned this year $1,370,280 > $1,180,103
Now, this is all a crock of feces, because these are from individual donors and not PAC or corporate donations. As a word of advice to the HRC campaign, if you are going to use numbers to attack Obama, do better than this. Also, if little old me can do this in about 10 minutes, why didn't the respected reports at Politico not do the same???? Fair and balanced I guess.....
For those that like cool info-porn, on the Opensecrets has a great Quality of disclosure measurement on the bottom of each candidates profile page:
Barack Obama
Hillary Clinton
John McCain
IMO, this metric is more of a indicator of how tight each campaign runs their ship rather than trying to hide money. So, for me, this is just another indicator that Clinton is not the uber-administrator that she is trying to sell to the public.