I know we're all supposed to be about sympathy and unity now - but I have to say it's hard to be sympathetic when these debts came about because of:

1) Fiscal mismanagement
2) Over-investment in a doomed effort; and
3) at the same time appeals were made for donors to pour money into a similarly doomed and mismanaged effort

MSNBC calculated that her cost per delegate was somewhere in the neighborhood of $110,000. "Big Money makes mistakes" says Neil Peart.

BTW, when does the Clinton post mortem end?

Pay the vendors, stiff Penn, and as I said on another thread, have a fundraising YouTube event around watching her burn that yellow jacket with black trim and other classically shocking pieces from her wardrobe. Who wouldn't give 5 bucks to watch that!?

Just a couple of thoughts:

1. She ended her campaign on saturday. Are we still going to keep having 6 or more clinton stories on a daily basis. What next? Her vacation plans. It really is silly.

2. She has plenty of cash to pay the debt and she elected to continue on credit when she lost in February. That was her decision. Anyone else would have dropped out and not run up the debt. That's her problem. It's not news.

It keeps her in the headlines, which must be a silver lining from her point of view.

NO COMMENT. DON'T FEED THE THE CLINTON TROLL THREAD CREATOR.

I think Hillary has to pay back Penn. Penn's firm is a subsidiary of Burson-Marsteller Worldwide, a British company. If B-M forgives the debt that would amount to an illegal foriegn contribution.

No sympathy for her whatsoever. She made her bed...

Yes, and it must be pointed out that unlike BHO - who until his prez. run did not have funds stashed like HRC - Hillary did not spread out her fat warchest on other dem races or down-ticket dems in her area. She did not do a lot of campaigning for Dems either...unless you count Bill and her swooping in to save Lieberman.

BHO hit the ground running as a US Senator, spreading out his money and time.

Not trying to pile on....just saying. She mismanaged a HUGE pile of money for totally cynical and personal reasons. Basically she was stashing prez money since the inception of her senate race. Just so she could blow it in one amazing, futile wad. And what is worse....the people who got stiffed in the most egregious manner were small businesses, caterers, florists, etc....Penn and the other big dollar types didn't get stiffed so bad plus they could tolerate only getting 4 mil instead of 6 mil, whereas a local caterer could be ruined by an HRC stiffarm.

Sometime, she is bound to wake up from this frenzied ME ME ME hangover and say to herself: "I did what? Oh God how can I show my face again."
I guess it might be one of the biggest, ever, political trainwrecks. Spinning it as a victory, and all of the superlatives that were ladled on her in the last months seem especially hollow and laughable.

On another post, someone was saying that according to some un-named research that BHO got 96% favorable coverage and HRC got 47% favorable coverage. I said, no way that with all the rerun rerun rerun of the Wright story, the muslim comments, the catholic priest, the bitter-gate, the nafta/canada story and the kitchen sink HRC was throwing....no way that BHO had 96% favorable "coverage"
I further said, do an experiment. Go yourself to an event...a contest. And long after you are eliminated, keep hanging around making lunges for the Big Prize...and see how much favorable coverage you get.
It is almost un-measurable how much damage HRC did to her reputation, the dems, her warchest, and her supporters when she decided that she could not win with votes/delegates and started a monthslong Quixotic windmill cage-match. She was spending money and supporters like a General who decides his army will all die a glorious death instead of retreating from a lost cause.

It would be great if she did right by the "hard working Americans", e.g. the vendors who provided services by ensuring that they got paid. Pay them...work her heart out to stand up for them in this process.

As for Penn, he was working as a private American consultant or he couldn't have been working on the campaign. Let him go back to his regular work portfolio.

BOYCOTT TPM THREADS UNTIL THEY GET THE MESSAGE THAT SENATOR OBAMA WON THE NOMINATION.

She still has some huge fundraising assets, namely herself and her husband. They will be able to raise millions more by attending fundraisers but at some point they will quietly convert their loans into contributions just because they're tired of rubber chicken.

Many insist on telling us that she lost because sexim couldn't allow a woman to win...

Hillary is a privileged being. So much that, when out of money and deep in debt to small vendors, she was able to continue her campaign by pouring in millions of her own and her husband's money.

That is privilege -having that kind of money available to you-. That is elite.

What is she waiting for to pay all those vendors??

She was completely irresponsible to continue her campaign with this amount of debt. It's Bushian policy in action. I think the debt is yet another reason the super-delegates were never going to support her over Obama.

Man, 40 million dollars is a lot of kids bikes!

I feel bad for all those who supported and trusted her campaign even after the writing was on the wall, vendors and donors alike.

It's interesting to me the degree to which HRC was willing to go all-or-nothing. I mean steadfast conviction is an admirable thing, but the damage she did to herself financially, to her reputation and the money she gladly took from her (high school educated, low income) loyal supporters smacks of judgement compromised by power-fever.

Still, the great speech on Saturday seems to have erased a lot of political debt, but financial debt is a little less fickle.

even winning politial campaigns incur debt. this has been the most expensive presidential primary race in history- you would imagine the loser of that race would have big chunk of debt to show for it. i honestly don't think that this debt will hamper sen. clinton for years- she and her husband have plenty of money, plenty more coming, and plenty of ways to raise that money back. i'm not worried about it, and neither should anyone else.

No sympathy here. They did it with their eyes open. They chose to pay obscene amounts of money to shysters like Mark Penn. And all it will take is a few speeches by Bill to make it back.

I'm glad Hillary seems to have come around -- I thought her speech Saturday was great -- and I have no interest in piling on, but no, I'm not feeling sorry for their financial straits.

This fiscal irresponsibility to serve a raging ambition is the most damning reason I can think of to show why Hillary Clinton should not have been POTUS or Commander In Chief. You need cool, rational thought in the White House -- and Hillary couldn't control herself with respect to reality.

She literally bet the farm and that shows a terrible judgment on her part. What's worse is that she is now a shining example of why so many people own homes that they couldn't have afforded in the first place. She, like them, is expecting a bailout!

I'm sure that Hillary felt that if she kept throwing money into the campaign she could win and there would be no problem paying off any amount of debt she ran up.

Her tactics reminds me of the movie A Big Hand for the Little Lady in which Joanne Woodward ends up playing a poker hand for a huge amount of money against a big man in town who had cheated several people in town. She runs out of money and asks for a loan from the town banker on the basis of her hand. The banker is one of the people cheated by the BMIT, and offers her an unlimited line of credit based on her hand.

The BMIT eventually folds and it turns out to have been a huge scam by several people, including the banker, to recover the money they were cheated out of. The poker hand itself was an ordinary hand.

The only difference here is that Obama was able to call Hillary's hand and she was holding a busted flush.