The Daily Background
| How is Mark Penn spending his gigantic haul?
by Arlen Parsa
As of early February, the Clinton campaign had paid or owed chief strategist Mark “automatic delegate” Penn’s firm over $4.3 million. What is Penn spending that money on?
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s pit-bull pollster and chief strategist Mark Penn has his Washington, DC, neighborhood in an uproar. He recently started multimillion-dollar renovations on his house on O Street in Georgetown, but didn’t alert anyone beforehand, said one local. “It includes an underground garage and home office. His yard is an ugly, huge gaping hole that looks like the descent into hell.”
It’s the talk of Georgetown: Why is Mark Penn, pollster and strategist to Sen. Hillary Clinton, building a tunnel underneath the lot between his two houses on O Street NW?
Perhaps he wants to avoid prying eyes, or a 30-foot walk in wintry weather. But could Penn’s renovations really be a way to provide a swanky undisclosed location for a hypothetical President Hillary to hide out in the event of terrorist attacks?
[…]
Penn says it took months of traversing Washington bureaucracy to obtain building permits for his tunnel project — which will house a home fitness center. He plans to rip up his one-story elevated yard, build the tunnel and then redo the patio space between the two houses, which are assessed at over $7 million.
The guy has two Washington DC houses. More or less across the street from one another. And he’s building an underground tunnel to connect them. Wow.
B. Clinton asks donors to close fundraising “gap”
Former President Clinton sent out an email to his wife’s email list Wednesday claiming that there was a gap of $1.9 in television expenditures between the two campaigns, and asked donors to help close that gap. He wrote:
In just 24 hours, you closed the $1.3 million advertising gap with Obama this week. In response, their campaign has bought another $1.9 million worth of airtime.
For Hillary to win on March 4, we must close this gap — and we have to do it quickly. We cannot let this race be decided by Obama’s spending advantage on the air.
Help Hillary make up the $1.9 million spending gap in 24 hours with your contribution today.
Obama, whose campaign touts its more than 1,000,000 unique donors, is already outraising Clinton by huge numbers (and it doesn’t help that the Clinton campaign is giving Mark Penn all their money), but is the television advertising gap only $1.9 million in Texas and Ohio? That number, while achievable for the Clinton campaign to raise, is suspiciously low. Since neither the Clinton or Obama campaigns have released information on how much they are spending in the expensive media markets of Texas and Ohio, there’s no way for that number to be verified. The Clinton email did not cite a source on their claim that only $1.9M was separating the two candidates.
MSNBC’s First Read noted Wednesday:
Watching local TV here in Ohio, it feels like Obama has a 4-to-1 advantage — with SEIU, UFCW and Obama just blitzing the airwaves compared with Clinton. It’s happening in all four states. In fact, per TV ad expert Evan Tracey, Obama has outspent Clinton $23 million to $14 million in the last 30 days. How is she expected to hold a big lead if she gets outspent this badly? The third party groups are like salt in the Clinton wound.
A similar admission from the campaign itself:
On the Clinton side, Mandy Grunwald that between Obama’s own spending and two unions spending on his behalf, Clinton is being outspent four-to-one in Ohio and between two-to-one and three-to-one in Texas.
Is that only a 1.9M gap? While $1.9M may be an achievable goal for the Clinton campaign to raise before March 4th, it is unlikely that the gap is that little.
[…] Talk about absurdity. How is Mark Penn spending his gigantic haul? is answered by Arlen at the Daily Background: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s pit-bull pollster and […]