Presidential Campaigns About Money, War Mentality

[From article]
Hillary hasn’t announced a 2016 campaign yet. She’s busy polling more than 200 policy experts on how to show that she really cares about the poor while courting the banks. Yet her shadow campaign is already in a déjà-vu-all-over-again shark fight over control of the candidate and her money. It’s the same old story: The killer organization that, even with all its ruthless hired guns, can’t quite shoot straight.
Squabbling competing factions helped Hillary squander a quarter-of-a-billion dollars in 2008.

[. . .]

The former “right-wing hit man,” and impresario of “dirty tricks,” as Brock has said of himself, made his living in the ’90s sliming Anita Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” and breaking the Troopergate story, which accused Arkansas state troopers of setting up liaisons for Bill Clinton and spurred Paula Jones’s 1994 sexual harassment lawsuit.
He has tried to discredit anyone who disagreed with his ideological hits (myself and reporters I know included). And that’s still the business he’s in, simply on the other side as a Hillary zealot.

[. . .]

With the understood blessing of the Clintons, Brock runs a $28 million cluster of media monitoring groups and oppo research organizations that are vehicles to rebut and at times discredit and threaten anyone who casts a gimlet eye at Clinton Inc. As Confessore and Chozick wrote, he uses a fund-raiser named Mary Pat Bonner, whose firm has collected millions of dollars in commissions — a practice many fund-raising experts consider unethical. Everyone wants to be at the trough for this one because Hillary is likely to raise, and more important, spend more than $1 billion on her campaign.

[. . .]

The Clintons appreciate the fact that Brock, like Morris, is a take-no-prisoners type with the ethical compass of a jackal. Baked in the tactics of the right, Brock will never believe that negative coverage results from legitimate shortcomings. Instead, it’s all personal, all false, and all a war.

[. . .]

But, for now, what Republicans say about government is true of the Clintons: They really do believe that your money belongs to them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/opinion/sunday/maureen-dowd-call-off-the-dogs.html?_r=0

Call Off the Dogs
FEB. 14, 2015

Maureen Dowd