How Obama Did It

Good rundown from Karen Tumulty. I'll just say as I've said before, though, that the whole campaign dogfight is irrelevant if not for their contrasting positions on the war five years ago. This is an interesting tidbit:

Consider the salaries: Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson was paid almost twice as much in a month — $266,000 went to his firm, according to her January campaign filing — as the $144,000 that Obama paid Gibbs for all of last year.

That's a huge difference. I wonder why Clinton would pay that much? Surely recruiting staff wouldn't have been a problem for her. Money being handed out on that level tends to re-enforce my suspicion that she was pushed to stay in the race in part by senior staff whose primary motive wasn't necessarily the good of the Clinton brand, or the Democratic Party, or the country. You want to pay your advisers enough to hire good people, but you don't really want to pay so much that their motivation becomes mercenary.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/06/how-obama-did-it/45253/