Hillary's defense dough.

AuthorConniff, Ruth
PositionPolitical Eye - Hillary Clinton

In the so-called money primary, Democrats are running a lap ahead of the Republicans, and Hillary Clinton is crushing the other Democrats.

The candidates' third quarter reports, released in mid-October, showed that Hillary had raised $90.9 million. That exceeds her $75 million goal for 2007, the Center for Responsive Politics points out, noting that Hillary is asking her big donors, the "Hillraisers," to come up with $1 million a piece--ten times what George W. Bush asked his elite donors, the Pioneers, to pony up. Barack Obama is running second to Hillary, at $80.2 million, while Mitt Romney has raised $62.8 million and Rudy Giuliani is at $47.3 million.

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But the big news is the massive contributions by defense contractors to Hillary. Talk about "making history."

The defense sector as a whole gave Hillary $122,988 this quarter, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, compared with Romney's $82,975, Giuliani's $58,400, and Obama's $57,990. Only Chris Dodd, who has a major General Dynamics submarine project in Croton, Connecticut, fared better than Hillary, with $168,900.

Reversing their historical pattern of giving lopsidedly to Republicans, employees of the nation's biggest weapons makers chose Hillary as their candidate, reports Thomas Edsall, Columbia journalism professor and Huffington Post political editor. Analyzing records of individual candidate contributions of $500 or more, Edsall found that employees of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Raytheon gave Democratic Presidential candidates $103,900 and Republicans only $86,800 in the third quarter. That's a big vote of confidence for the Democratic Party, and particularly the frontrunner.

"The contributions clearly suggest that the arms industry has reached the conclusion that Democratic prospects for 2008 are very good indeed," Edsall writes.

As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Clinton has befriended the defense industry (the contractors tend to be big donors to members on Armed Services, who control their access to lucrative government contracts). She has also issued calls for beefing up the military, increasing troop strength in Iraq and, most recently, refusing to discount the possibility of war with Iran.

But taking money from big military contractors isn't the most troublesome fundraising issue in the current election season. The more worrisome group of donors is the private contractors that have been...

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