Bloomberg has a good rundown today of the constraints facing Hillary Clinton if she tries to recoup the $11.4 million she’s loaned to her campaign. A number of readers have had questions about how the loan repayment would work and the rules and regs associated with personal campaign loans, and this piece should answer most of those.
Let me touch on one other aspect to this. A lot of attention has, legitimately, been focused on the fact that Bill is an indirect conduit for money to her campaign. His speaking or consulting fees can ultimately find their way to Hillary’s campaign coffers in the form of those personal loans from the Clintons. One campaign finance expert interviewed last week said “the Clintons have effectively bypassed campaign finance reform in a manner that’s ingenious — using Bill Clinton effectively as a front for the fundraising.”
But there’s another point to be made on these Clinton loans that relates to the pre-existing concerns about a First Lady succeeding her husband to the Presidency. The Clintons’ personal fortune is a direct result of their political careers. One of the trappings of the office in this day and age is the celebrity attendant to it — and the money-making opportunities that affords. Their lucrative outside endeavors — book publishing, speaking engagements and consulting — would not have been possible had he not been President (and to a lesser degree, were she not a senator).
The Clintons are taking $11.4 million made as a result of being in public office and plowing it back into retaking that office. The campaign acknowledges that Hillary only made about $11 million from her Senate salary and book deals, so at least a fraction of the loan came from joint assets contributed by Bill, although regardless of how much Bill technically contributed, the remaining fortune is what gives her the luxury of ponying up $11 million. If $11 million was all they had, you can bet they wouldn’t have loaned that much to the campaign.
Without that $11.4 million, Hillary’s campaign would very likely have run out of money to compete in Indiana and North Carolina. It’s possible that she would have been forced to withdraw from the race already were it not for that money — money they had available by virtue primarily of Bill having been President.
There is, it seems to me, a qualitative difference between this kind of self-financing and the more traditional kind, where an independently wealthy candidate seeks to leverage his or her personal fortune to win political office. It’s also different than lending one’s name and celebrity to one’s son’s campaign, to name another recent example. In essence, they are using the trappings of the office once out of office to get back into office. That is the sort of self-perpetuation of power that we associate with dynasties.
In some ways, it misses the point to heap this all at the feet of the Clintons. It’s the result of a series of political and social changes — longer life spans have lengthened the period of the post-presidency, First Lady’s can and will have their own professional and political lives, celebrity has become its own currency — that the Clintons aren’t directly responsible for and which the founders could hardly have anticipated.
Still, the effect is undemocratic, and it’s troubling that we don’t seem to recognize it as such.
