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Clintons Use Christmas as Campaign Season
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, facing a 2006 re-election race and a possible presidential bid two years later, is kicking off a two-week, six-state pre-Christmas tour to boost her already hefty campaign bank account and earn political chits along the way. Clinton campaign guru Ann Lewis said while the holiday period between Thanksgiving and Christmas is traditionally a tough time to raise money, it can be done. "It's a festive time and if you do your parties right, if you can do it as a festive occasion, I think it works better," Lewis said Wednesday. While any money left over from Democrat Clinton's Senate campaign can be used for a presidential race, Lewis refused to talk about that possibility.
Story Continues Below "The goal is getting re-elected to the Senate," the Clinton adviser said. "This is a Clinton campaign. The rule in the Clinton campaign is you take one election at a time and you do it really, really well." But according to New York's GOP chairman, Stephen Minarik, it is all part of "Hillary Clinton's deceitful drive for the White House." The former first lady's tour begins Thursday with a visit to Michigan to help raise funds for a fellow Democratic senator up for re-election in 2006, Debbie Stabenow. On Friday, Clinton hits Louisville for an event Kentucky Democrats hope will raise more than $250,000 for the state party. Those events, said Lewis, demonstrate Clinton "is also trying to meet her responsibilities as somebody who can help elect other Democrats." The New York senator is in Chicago the following day for "Saturday Night Live with Senator Hillary Clinton," an event to benefit her own campaign committee. The committee, as of the end of September, already had almost $14 million on hand, having raised more than $5 million in the previous three months.
Those same end-of-September filings showed Clinton's best-known potential GOP challenger, Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, had raised less than $440,000 since entering the race Aug. 8. The senator's husband, meanwhile, takes over fundraising chores on Tuesday in New York City with "An Evening with President William Jefferson Clinton" to benefit his wife's campaign committee. She will not attend. On Dec. 12, the former first lady will hold a fundraiser for herself in New Jersey before she joins her husband the next day for a major event in New York City for the Friends of Hillary committee. Two days later, she will be in Denver for the latest in a series of frequent events staged at private homes and not publicized by her campaign. Lewis said because of the holidays, fundraising has to be concentrated in the first two weeks of December. The goal is to put up impressive numbers for the next campaign financial report that covers the three-month period ending Dec. 31. While Lewis, like Clinton, won't talk about a possible 2008 campaign for the White House, New York's GOP has shown no such reticence. "It's obvious that Hillary Clinton wants to be president (again)," Minarik wrote in a new letter to potential donors. "That's why she is raising millions and millions of dollars. And, that's why we must defeat her at all costs. "Stopping Hillary next year will not only give New Yorkers the Republican senator we need, but it will end Hillary Clinton's deceitful drive for the White House," Minarik wrote. Independent polls have shown Clinton far ahead of Pirro and her other potential GOP challengers.
© 2005 Associated Press.
p>Editor's note:
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