Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are now talking cash. Cash for Obama's campaign and, you can count on it, also Hillary's debt. Of course, she was profligate in her spending in the beginning and manic in her spending at the end. After all, the presidential campaign was what she had been building towards for at least a decade and a half, and certainly since her husband's other loves became public. It probably was her sole solace.
The talk about joint funding for the real contest between Obama and John McCain is only part of the story. Yes, some of her top fund-raisers who had imagined themselves as ambassadors in Amsterdam or Copenhagen, Budapest or Costa Rica where Mr. or Ms. Moneybags are usually sent are still trying to keep themselves on the list. They will now give to Obama, and deep pockets from the Obama camp will now--swallowing hard--contribute to the Clinton debt. Clinton's debt is close to $25 million, maybe more as the days go by, with $4.6 million dollars owed to Mark Penn, one of the prime architects of her defeat. Then there is the thought that, had she not been so persuaded she might yet win when everyone else knew that to be impossible, her debt would have been much less substantial.
Anyway, the real question is whether she insists that in return, as one of her finance chairmen put it, for Hillary's "100 percent focused on campaigning and raising money" for Obama, he raise cash for her. And will she expect that he also retire her $12 million dollar debt to herself? Is it fair to ask Obama to pay for her vanity twice over?