Hillary Pushes Back

From Time May 7, 2007


Hillary Clinton's presidential campain was designed and built to a dreadnought, an all-big-gun battleship that would rule the waves without being dented, slowed or thrown off course. But it has been caught off guard by a submarine named Barack Obama, running silent, running deep - until he surfaced with a spactacular showing in the first round of fund-raising numbers.

What startled Clinton's team most were Obama's totals, his success at drummin up contributions over the internet, and how much he has collected from the big donors who have fueled Clinton enterprises for the past decade and a half.

Clinton's campaign still professes publicly to be unperturbed, maintaining that it never believed the ace would be a cakewalk. But Clinton's advisers privately acknowledge that she is retooling her strategy on four fronts: intensifying her fund raising, emphasizing her experience and policy depth, pondering when and how to go on the offensive against Obama and dusting off the two for the price of on theme of her husband's 1992 campaign.

The fund raising comes first. Obama works the phones like a dog. He probably did three to four times the number of events she did in the first quarter. So Clinton is stepping up the pace of her cash raising. Instead of big galas, she will be doing more fund raisers in smaller settings that offer extra attention from the candidate - especially for those contributors who can pony up the maximum $4,600 total allowed by law for the primary and general elections.

Whereas her forces once warned donors that it would be seen as an act of disloyalty to contribute to anyone but Clinton, they are now inviting Obama's fund raisers to consider hedgin their bets by helping her too. And they are reassuring a new and younger generation of fund raisers that despite the size of her operation, there will be plenty of room at the table for them and their ideas.