Some background: essentially, walking around money is this thing in Philadelphia (and a few other places) where Democratic candidates give a bunch of local party workers a hunk of cash and they use it to fuel GOTV efforts. Before you ask, yeah, it’s legal. Not exactly ethical, but legal: it’s not used to pay people to vote, exactly. It’s used to pay people to make sure that other people vote. The difference is sufficiently perceptible to keep people from going to jail, which is the primary consideration here; in other words, welcome to machine politics, and here’s your accordion.
Barack Obama passed up doing it for the 2008 PA Democratic primary, but went ahead and did it in the general election, possibly because Barack Obama happened to lose the PA Democratic primary by over nine points. He went to win the PA general election by over ten points, but nobody’s expecting that kind of result again – particularly Senator Bob Casey, who is in the middle of a fierce re-election battle and who still could easily end up the loser in a state that returns a, say, O+5 result. So the question is: will Obama be handing out walking around money again?
Heck, does he even have it at this point?
Given that BoA fronted them $15 mil loan and I’m sure other banks would too if they need it (Hello, bailout recipients!), the raw fundraising numbers don’t mean the O campaign will run out of money. One way or the other they will have all the money they need. The question is if that money will translate into votes.
This is O’s last campaign one way or the other, so big short term loans are perhaps even BETTER than real donations. They can be gotten in one big drop with no limits (am I wrong?) as to size. Debt is money OTHER people pay.
$15 million of it, eh?
Ah, but money is still a more or less finite, more or less fungible asset, despite Obamacare tricky bookkeeping.
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Every dollar Obama has to borrow is a dollar that isn’t available for another Dem to borrow…
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Bleed them!
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Mew