Clinton last month doled out $15 million to a cadre of trusted political hands, mostly based in Washington. Consultant spending saps Clinton campaign

Hillary Rodham Clinton started the year flush with cash, but by the beginning of this month, she'd blazed through most of it — spending $11 million on ads, $3.8 million on messaging guru Mark Penn and $1,300 at Dunkin' Donuts, to name just a few expenditures — leaving her campaign woefully unprepared for an extended battle for the Democratic presidential nomination.

About $15 million — or more than half of the New York senator’s January spending — went to a cadre of high-priced consultants. Though much of the cash went through the campaign media buyer for ad time, the considerable payments to outside consultants mark an increase in a pattern that has irked campaign insiders. From the beginning of the race through the end of last month, Clinton paid the consultants $33 million — nearly one-third of the $105 million spent by the campaign.


That provides some of the back story behind Clinton’s staff shake-up, her public appeals for campaign cash in the past two weeks and even her string of 10 straight losses to Illinois Sen. Barack Obama since Super Tuesday, Feb. 5.

She simply did not have the cash to compete in the post-Feb. 5 states, mostly because her campaign spending blueprint was built around two flawed premises: that no one would be able to match her fundraising and that the nomination would be decided on Super Tuesday.

Clinton’s January campaign finances, filed Wednesday night with the Federal Election Commission, show she spent nearly as much as Obama from the beginning of the campaign until the beginning of this month. But they also show a top-heavy campaign lacking the liquidity to adjust to the new electoral landscape that emerged after Feb. 5.

Clinton last month doled out $15 million to a cadre of trusted political hands, mostly based in Washington, for everything from producing and placing ads to polling and fundraising and mailings.

Last month’s payments marked a spike in fees collected by those professionals, all working as outside consultants rather than staffers.

The January payments to Penn’s polling firm brought its total haul from the campaign to $8 million. That doesn’t include the $2 million the campaign owed the company at the end of January or the $125,000 it paid to the fundraising consultancy run by Penn's wife, Nancy Jacobson.

Mandy Grunwald, Clinton’s ad maker, pulled down $762,000 in January, bringing to $2.3 million her total from the campaign, not including the $240,000 she’s owed.

The firm that places the campaign’s ads on the air, Denver-based Media Strategies & Research, run by former Clinton Senate campaign staffer Jon Hutchens, in January was paid $10 million, bringing its tally for the campaign to $22 million. Much of that money likely went to television stations to buy air time, but the firm got a cut too.

And the firm of Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s top PR guy, was paid $267,000 last month, bringing its total to $688,000 from the campaign, plus the $16,000 the campaign is in debt to the firm.

Those payments, and others to top consultants, have prompted grumbling by campaign insiders who believe some of the cash flowing to Clinton’s Washington-area brain trust could be better spent elsewhere, given the cash pinch that kept the campaign from matching Obama’s investment in recent states.

Take advertising.

Headed into Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary, in which Obama scored a decisive double-digit win, his campaign outspent Clinton’s $414,000 to $117,000 on ads in the Milwaukee media market, which reaches about 45 percent of the primary electorate, according to an analysis by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

“Since Feb. 5, we have been outspent significantly in many states,” Wolfson told reporters in a Wednesday conference call. It’s clear, he said, “that that had something to do with some of the outcomes in these states.”

The campaign’s fundraising has picked up dramatically since Clinton added an unusual riff to her stump speech about loaning her campaign $5 million to get it through a rough patch. And Wolfson boasted of a $15 million haul during the first half of February.

But Obama nearly lapped Clinton twice in January fundraising, pulling in $36 million to her $14 million. And he still appears to be raking in cash at an equal or greater clip than Clinton. Wolfson has acknowledged that continued brisk fundraising is “very, very important to this campaign for the trajectory of this race.”

Wolfson said he did not know how consultants' fees were structured or whether any have taken cuts or would defer or reduce compensation in February to free up cash.

The campaign acted quickly this month to tamp down rumors staff had taken a pay cut. But it hasn’t been eager to discuss compensation and has worked to prevent internal workings of the campaign from becoming public.

"The salary and fee structures on the campaign are consistent with industry standards," said Clinton spokesman Jay Carson.

Patti Solis Doyle, who oversaw campaign operations and spending as Clinton’s top staffer, stepped down as campaign manager this month in the early stages of the campaign’s 10-contest losing streak. She had been criticized for unchecked spending when she managed Clinton’s 2006 Senate reelection campaign. But the presidential campaign, which had paid her $156,000, insisted the switch wasn’t a reflection of disagreement about the direction of the campaign.

And Wolfson’s compensation package — much speculated about within the campaign — was one of the issues probed by Josh Green for a GQ story that was spiked last summer when Clinton aides threatened to withhold access to Bill Clinton for a planned cover story.

It’s sometimes tough to tell how much money political consultants actually take home, since campaigns often couple payments with the costs of ad production, air time or polling. It’s also difficult to do an apples-to-apples comparison of different campaigns’ spending, because two campaigns can list the same expenses under different categories.

It is clear that — thanks to the $5 million Clinton loaned her campaign and the $10 million she transferred from her Senate campaign — her spending from the beginning of the campaign through January fell only $8 million short of Obama’s $113 million outlay.

But through the beginning of this month, he spent $10 million more than Clinton on “media,” which was mostly for air time: $35 million, compared with her $25 million.