Go figure! How Hillary and co spend it

Last Modified: 04 Sep 2007
By: Felicity Spector

They used to splurge on paperclips, badges and donuts and - at a pinch - the odd low paid staffer or two. Now political campaigns are so big, so complex and so high spending - they've become big businesses in themselves.

In fact Hillary Clinton's campaign is now a bigger employer than 96 per cent of US businesses - according to research by the Boston Globe - hiring more than 350 full time employees over the last six months alone.

So what are they all doing - these overstuffed campaigns? Here's a look behind those headline spending figures.

And one surprise spend is private security. Barack Obama paid a Maryland security firm $380,000 before May, when he was granted secret security protection from the Feds.

The irony is that all of this collective spin is so expensive that growing numbers of consultants are hired purely to raise more money.

Although Hillary Clinton's also had federal protection since 1992, she's still spent more on private security than anyone else.

It's not even as if these firms are natural bedfellows with the Democrats. The consortium protecting her Virginia campaign HQ - At-Risk - carries advertising on its website for sniper training and assault weapons. Not so nice, for a candidate who supports strict gun controls.

As for the GOP - right up until June, Rudi Giuliani managed to get his cortege of ex-New York cops funded by his own consultancy firm, rather than troubling the campaign team with the (considerable) expense.

But the really big spend of course - political consultants.

There's probably one out there spinning a line that turns the ubiquity of spin into the best thing since sliced bread.

Whereas Bill Clinton's big expense back in 1992 was $400 or so on cookies for his announcement campaign - Hillary has already splashed out $1.3m on consultants and advisors.

And she's not unusual - all 17 candidates between them spent a record $16.2m on consultants during the first six months of this year, according to the FEC's latest returns.

John McCain has already spent three million bucks on the kind of advice which has seen him trailing in the polls, written off by the press, and his bank balance deep in the red.

Perhaps he should have stuck to leaflets, phone calls and petrol for the 'Straight Talk Express.

Now that campaigns have to spread themselves so thin, as the primary calendar squashes into an ever smaller timeframe - they're clearly having to reach out far further, far sooner, than ever before.

And it's not just phonebanking and speechmaking, of course - there are websites to manage, events to stage, commercials to make and place.

The irony is that all of this collective spin is so expensive that growing numbers of consultants are hired purely to raise more money. It's not easy spending almost $23m on staff salaries and another $11.4m in payroll taxes - as the 17 contenders have so far managed between them.

At least they're helping to keep down the unemployment figures. But with logic like this - finding out how to raise enough to spend it again on raising more to spend some more - do the presidential campaign finance figures really add up?

Go figure.