On Wednesday The New York Times and the Washington Post both ran stories on how Hillary is crushing her potential 2008 Democratic rivals with her fundraising strategies and abilities.
The Times noted that while Sen. Clinton insists that her only focus is winning re-election this November, "her finance team has undertaken a vigorous push to round up leading fund-raisers around the country, an effort that was underscored by a recent dinner in Washington at which former President Bill Clinton made an appearance and laid out his vision to the party's big money people."
Combined with the fact that Hillary herself just finished a lucrative nationwide fundraising tour, this can only mean that she is looking at 2008 and that she is making it very difficult for other Dems to compete for the White House. Hillary has even been seducing influential Democratic fund-raisers who worked in 2004 for John Kerry, John Edwards and Richard Gephardt.
In addition, the Times reports that Terry McAuliffe, the longtime fund-raiser for Hillary's husband and former DNC Chairman, "is said by Democrats to be taking an active role in helping introduce Mrs. Clinton and her finance team to legions of new donors and fund-raisers that he met when he was Democratic National Committee chairman in the years after Mr. Clinton left office."
This will prove helpful to Hillary because, says one Dem strategist, "There's a whole new generation of donors who have entered politics since Bill Clinton left the White House. These are people who have never given to a Clinton before."
Meanwhile, the Post reports that Hillary advisor Harold Ickes is compiling a huge, technologically-advanced nationwide database in order to track and contact potential Democrat donors. Ickes's efforts are being paid for by billionaire George Soros and are "drawing particular notice among Washington operatives who know about it because of speculation that he is acting to build a campaign resource for a possible 2008 presidential run by Hillary Clinton." Hillary and other prominent Democrats, it seems, have not been happy with the old-fashioned way that the DNC collects and distributes its donor data, and she see this as a way to modernize the political and financial infrastructure of the party and its liberal allies.
