Obama Asks His Top Donors To Help Clinton With Debt

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

THINGS LEFT UNPAID

Obama Asks His Top Donors To Help Clinton With Debt

LOS ANGELES -- Two days ahead of his meeting in Washington with Hillary Clinton's top donors, Barack Obama has urged his own biggest givers to help retire her $10 million vendor debt.

Obama used the occasion of a conference call Tuesday afternoon to ask members of his national finance team to contribute to the Clinton cause "if they had the means to do so," a campaign aide said.

Clinton ended May more than $22.5 million in debt, with the majority of that money owed to herself. According to campaign finance filings, the vendors the campaign used most heavily included a number of firms run by longtime Clinton loyalists: Denver-based Media Strategies & Research, which bought advertising time; the polling firm Penn, Schoen & Berland; the voter-database firm Catalist; and Grunwald Communications, a media consultant.

She dropped out of the Democratic race in early June, and Obama donors have been seeking cues from his campaign ever since.

Clinton will have a chance to return Obama's favor Thursday night, when she introduces Obama to her most generous supporters at the Mayflower Hotel.

-- Shailagh Murray

MCCAIN AND IMMIGRATION

Meeting With Latinos Draws Fire From Tancredo

Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), a failed presidential rival of John McCain and an anti-illegal-immigration gadfly, launched into the senator from Arizona for meeting in secret with Latino leaders last week in Chicago. One participant in the meeting emerged to criticize McCain for taking a tougher stand on illegal immigration on the campaign trail than the line he allegedly used behind closed doors.

"Strangely, the closed door meeting was not on your official events calendar, no press was invited and no press release appears to have been issued," Tancredo wrote. "Yet, according to several news reports, you promised the group that you plan to pursue 'comprehensive immigration reform.' Senator, given your past sponsorship of amnesty legislation, such statements raise troubling questions."

McCain has promised that he won't grant illegal immigrants a pathway to citizenship until he can certify that the borders have been closed to illegal immigration. At the same time, he has tried to win back support from Hispanic voters who have fled the GOP since the party took up the immigration issue fervently in 2005.

-- Jonathan Weisman

AN ENDORSEMENT, SORT OF

Aide Says Bill Clinton Supports Obama

Bill Clinton has made no public statements supporting Barack Obama since the end of the Democratic nomination battle, but Clinton aides said Tuesday that he supports his wife's former opponent.

"President Clinton is obviously committed to doing whatever he can and is asked to do to ensure Senator Obama is the next President of the United States," Matt McKenna, a spokesman for the former president, said in an e-mail statement.

Clinton is traveling abroad this month and next, returning to his work for the Clinton Foundation and meeting with foreign dignitaries. Obama officials said they expect that Clinton will campaign for the candidate despite lingering hard feelings from the primaries.

-- Anne E. Kornblut

'DELIBERATELY DISTORTING'

Focus on the Family Leader Criticizes Obama Speech

James Dobson, a longtime leader of conservative Christians, accused Barack Obama of "deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to justify his own worldview."

Dobson, founder and chairman of Focus on the Family, spent about 20 minutes on his radio show critiquing a speech Obama gave in 2006 to a group of liberal Christian leaders. In the speech, Obama argued for religious diversity and acceptance, and prodded liberals not to cede issues of faith to Republicans.

Obama contended that religious voters have an obligation to "translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values," to which Dobson responded: "Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies?"

Joshua DuBois, director of religious affairs for Obama's campaign, said in a statement that the full speech shows Obama is committed to reaching out to people of faith and to standing up for families.

-- Krissah Williams