Thursday, April 10, 2008

One Positive from the Long Primary

Most right-thinking Democrats want Hillary to just drop out already and let the putative nominee, Obama, get going with the general election. She won't drop out, for predictably flawed psychological reasons, so we need to find some lemonade from the Hillary provided lemons.

One benefit I came up with is based on the campaign finance limits. Each individual donor can give up to $2300 to each candidate. However, as far as I can tell, 2300 can be given for the primary and another 2300 for the general. Hence why Hillary's fundraising numbers are deceptively high: most of her new money is coming from old donors who've maxed out for the primaries. She's in debt and can't spend her new money except in the general (which she won't get). Obama on the other hand is still raking in dough for primaries from millions of small donations of new donors.

So the silver lining is that since Hillary is forcing Obama to go state-to-state in the primary battles, and since Obama would have to do this *anyway* during the general election, he gets to double-dip! He gets to use primary money on what is functionally a general election enterprise. Tah-dah!

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