Money flows at Mayflower
In a show of Democratic unity Thursday, Barack Obama told Hillary Rodham Clinton’s top fundraisers that he and his wife, Michelle, had donated $4,600 to help retire her debt and some of Clinton’s biggest boosters presented Obama’s campaign with checks.
In his address to Clinton’s supporters, Obama left no doubt that he would work to help her pay off the $10 million she owes her consultants and other vendors. One of Clinton’s closest advisors, Terry McAuliffe, said he handed a $4,600 check to Obama’s top money-raiser, Hyatt hotel heir Penny Pritzker. Pritzker and her husband gave $4,600 to Clinton.
“I know my supporters have extremely strong feelings, and I know Barack’s do as well,” the New York senator said at the Mayflower Hotel, one of the nation’s premier power spots. “But we are a family, and we have an opportunity now to really demonstrate clearly we do know what’s at stake, and we will do whatever it takes to win back this White House.”
Obama, whom Clinton introduced as “my friend,” said that he recognized that Clinton’s backers were as passionate as his. “I do not expect that passion to be transferred. Sen. Clinton is unique, and your relationships with her are unique,” he said.
But the Illinois senator added: “Sen. Clinton and I, at our core, agree deeply that this country needs to change. . . . I’m going to need Hillary by my side campaigning during his election, and I’m going to need all of you.”
Clinton had called her top fundraisers to join her and Obama at the hotel, four blocks from the White House. About 200 Clinton Hillraisers -- the name she bestowed on donors who raised at least $100,000 for her candidacy -- showed up.
The point, as emcee McAuliffe described it: “Get all of our top people together and let him talk to them. Gets them fired up for the general election.”
The Clinton-Obama show reconvenes today in Unity, N.H., a town where they each received 107 votes in the Granite State’s primary in January.
It comes after many of Clinton’s top donors helped fete Obama at the Music Center in Los Angeles this week, and after Obama urged his donors to help Clinton retire her debt. She plans to pay back the $10 million to vendors, but not the $12 million she lent her campaign.
Pritzker, Obama’s national finance committee chairwoman, sought to underscore the debt-retirement effort in an e-mail this week to his most active fundraisers. It said that Obama “has asked each of us to collect some money to help Sen. Clinton to repay her debt.”
Pritzker’s brother, Jay Robert Pritzker, had been one of Clinton’s top fundraisers. Though he responded to Clinton’s request and turned out for the Mayflower event, he has not written a check to Obama.
Though high-profile donors made a show of working together Thursday, some small donors on both sides who were not invited to the event were hesitant to clasp hands.
Oregon blogger Bob Kholos, who writes under the name SaigonBob, remains an Obama loyalist but said Clinton and her husband represented “the politics of the last century, not the current rise in support for the overturning of such back-room deals.”
“I will still send him [Obama] $50 next month, for his campaign, but I am hoping it doesn’t wind up in a millionaire’s lap,” Kholos wrote.
Lynette Long, 60, a clinical psychologist from Bethesda, Md., who said she had given Clinton about $750, said she could not imagine voting for Obama.
In her view, Obama and the Democratic Party bullied Clinton and displayed “blatant sexism.”
“His politics of change was very dirty politics,” Long said. “He presents himself about change and he is really not.”
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dan.morain@latimes.com
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