Hillary campaign's money problems appear real

In early 1987, I was hired as a catering sales manager at the old Bismarck Hotel in downtown Chicago. One of the first things my Texan boss told me was this:

Jawn...One of the first things ah have to tell you is this...Don't give credit to political campaigns.

There was a mayoral contest underway, and he went on to explain how one candidate four years earlier stuck the Bismarck with a lot of unpaid bills. He didn't want a quadrennial deadbeat repeat.

I worked there for three years, and I saw a few exceptions to that rule, future governor Jim Edgar was one. With Edgar and a couple of other politicians the rule-within-the-rule was: If the pol is an incumbent, and wasn't an event just before an election (which the candidate could lose), then it was okay.

The problem with granting credit to a political campaign, is that as tough as it is to raise money while running for office, imagine how difficult a task it is after getting defeated.

Which brings us to Hillary Clinton. In February, the New York Times ran an article with the headline, "Small Vendors Feel Pinch of Clinton's Money Troubles."

From that article:

But with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination enduring a rough patch, Peter Semetis, the owner of a deli and catering business in Lower Manhattan, had been following the news and growing increasingly worried that he was not going to be paid for the assorted breakfast trays, coffee, tea and orange juice he had provided the campaign for an event in mid-December.

The bill? Just under $2,500.

What about the larger vendors?

John Fund picks up the tale of the empty piggy bank in yesterday's Wall Street Journal:

Hillary Clinton likes to boast about the budget surpluses piled up by her husband Bill when he was in the White House. But she is completely silent about the burgeoning deficits in her own campaign treasury. Apparently, she has developed a reputation as this political season's chief deadbeat. She even was late in paying $292,000 in health insurance premiums for her campaign workers -- a bit embarrassing for a candidate who promises a universal health care system for all 300 million Americans.

Clinton aides blame an oversight and say the two vendors involved in the health insurance dispute have now been paid in full. But many other companies are having trouble with the Clinton campaign, including two Ohio vendors who say they are owed more than $25,000 for staging events during that state's key primary. Forty Two, a production company in Youngstown, says it got no response from Team Clinton, even after mailing it a certified letter.

People, businesses, and of course political campaigns will run into financial problems. The heart of the capitalist system is risk, and sometimes things don't work out.

But with Hillary Rodham Clinton, I wonder if she has any sympathy for those Ohio vendors or the Manhattan deli operator.

I just finished reading Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, and he dug up this telling 1990s quote when HRC was confronted with the charge that her health care plan would devastate small businesses, her reply was, "I can't save every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America."

There are probably a lot of businesses right now siting their employees down, and saying, "Don't give credit to political campaigns."

Especially Hillary Clinton's, they might add.

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