How much do you have to donate to get the kewl Obama windbreaker?

It's all about the "O"
 

haha, bravo, Joseph!
 

Maybe we need to update that old saying to read – what is good for the goose shall not be done to the gander.

bert in Ohio
 

That's because girls have no business handling money at all. Except petty cash for grocery shopping - under close male supervision.
 

But if they weren't in debt they wouldn't be Democrats.
 

Whether this is unusual or not depends on past history. I believe I remember that the DNC has often been in debt and had to raise money to pay off those debts, usually after failed or rigged elections they had lost, facing that uphill, headwind task while taking the brickbats of its disaffected partisans who wondered why they had lost, and why they should contribute to losers with a losing media strategy.

Remember folks, the DNC's highly controversial strategy, called the 50-state strategy?

Gore and Kerry raised and spent large amounts of money, record levels for their time, as well as the DNC doing the same in those past two election cycles, contesting races ONLY in maybe 21 states or so, while writing off the rest of the country.

How much MORE money do you imagine it cost to really engage the contest in more than DOUBLE the states? States in which the GOP had most of the advantages, long histories of carrying the state, higher GOP electorate totals, and etc.? Do you think the DNC/Obama/Biden could have carried those red states (Indiana, Virginia, North freaking Carolina!, the Rocky Mountain states), while forcing the GOP and McCain to use resources and campaign time to shore up the red states they DIDN'T lose (but might have), without sizably jacking up the expenditures?

No, there is no case that this was unexpected, unusual, profligate, unless you do the comparisons across the state expenditures vs. the Gore/Kerry expenditures.

Snark away if you want, but realize you are far from making any justifiable parallel to the Hillary loan situation. She loaned her campaign her personal money to get herself the nomination, at a time that her chances seemed quixotic at best, apparently throwing good money after bad, and chasing.

The DNC, by contrast, had truly far larger expenditure needs (because of the 50 state strategy), borrowed money to meet them (as they have often done), and got the job done (against the cries that is was all folly and idiocy from many of its partisans).

If one spends too little, and fails to get the result, ALL the money was wasted. If one (arguably) spends too much, but it results in the desired outcome, only the excess was wasted (which is actually more economic). And the argument of what was too much is far from clear, as larger early expenditures create a tipping point effect, a bandwagon effect, which might not have existed at all unless it were done.

McCain spent a lot of time and resources in his base states, leaving far less available to contest the swing and blue states, PRECISELY because of these expenditures, IMO.

XIslander
 

From as recently as 1997, the DNC debt was more than $18 million, significantly more than now, in nominal (non-inflation adjusted) dollars:

XIslander

DNC Fund-Raisers To Cut Debt
Clinton to raise big bucks this month; DNC hopes to cut debt to $12.3 million.
By Carin Dessauer/CNN

WASHINGTON (Dec. 10) -- President Bill Clinton expects to raise nearly $2.5 million at party fund-raisers this week in New York and Florida.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) expects to reduce its debt from $14 million to $12.3 million by the end of the year, White House and party officials tell CNN.

The president hopes to raise $800,000 at an event tonight in New York for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the most money the president has raised at one DCCC event this year, according to its officials.

Clinton is expected to raise $600,000 at the DNC Hispanic Gala event in New York City tonight and $1 million Thursday at a DNC fund-raiser in Miami.

"By the end of the year we should have the debt down to $12.3 million," a party official told CNN. At one point in 1997, the DNC gross debt had grown to more than $18 million.

House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt will introduce Clinton at the $5,000-per-plate DCCC event. James Taylor will be the entertainment.

According to the DCCC, Clinton and Vice President Al Gore have raised $3 million for the congressional campaign committee. Clinton did six events and Gore did one. The DCCC does not have a set number of fund-raisers that the president and vice president will host for them in 1998, but they do expect the two to host a number of events.
 

Her chances seemed "quixotic" at best?

Oh the mind of the Obot, what a warped and vaporous thing to behold.

Hillary spanked your Precious in the popular vote and utterly thrashed him in states that had primaries. Caucuses, you say? Caucus this: Evidence is rife that they were rife with fraud, and even in the best-case scenario represented less than 10 percent of Democratic voters. The voters wanted Hillary--not Obama. She was winning. Indeed, Obama required the intervention and strong-arming of the DNC to "win," and the use of GOP-like vote stealing and disenfranchisement to do it.

Obama supporters really do live in a reality-free zone. But occasionally one must spike the Obama-Aid with truth.
 

Hey, DO!

I am not an Obot. I didn't vote for him in the primaries, and I didn't send him any cash contributions, despite many solicitations I received from my long-time DNC registration.

The question was how significant it is that the DNC is in debt this much, given the fundraising record totals of BHO. The answer is that is not very significant, because it is entirely precedented under the previous record-holding fund raising Democrat, Bill Clinton, as of the '96 mid-term election.

And the fact is that the word 'seem' relates to subjective opinion, not necessarily the truth. It did indeed 'seem' that her quest was quixotic at best to the mainstream media and the 'progs' of the left. Nor was that subjective opinion entirely divorced from reality.

Eventually, and at the time that HRC loaned her campaign the money, she trailed in pledged delegates enough that she needed to win by over 2-1 margins to catch up during the remaining contests. Barring that highly unlikely event (which didn't transpire), she needed to go ahead of him based on the superdelegate vote. Or, some kind of reversal of caucus-chosen delegates on a fraud claim, which again wasn't going to happen, and wasn't discussed as a plan of action by her campaign, however merited that action may have been.

I take much of the criticism of the BHO campaign to be true. I am no zealot for him, blind to the truth.

But the factoid on which this thread is based is not any legitimate criticism of him at all, IMO. In fact, it was Howard Dean's decision, made at the end of the fall campaign toward the end of October. They had already arranged this line of credit, and would likely have faced extreme criticism if they didn't tap this resource, and as a result or not then lost the election.

Gratuitously insulting people over perceived differences of opinion is fairly silly. When you do so to people who basically agree with you, it borders on stupid. Why not just make your case without the insulting characterizations? Not as much fun?

XIslander