PUMA Roar Bigger Than Bite

During my interview with New Agenda founder Caren Turner last night, the subject of PUMA and their political wing, PUMAPAC, came up. This is what she had to say:

We are not involved with PUMAPAC. I don't know where they are in terms of raising money, but I think they were, let's say, overly optimistic about the money they raised to retire Hillary's debt, and that put question marks in some people's mind as to whether we should affiliate with them at all.

It looks like she made the right call. Chief Pumas Darragh Murphy and Will Bower have each claimed to have raised $7 to $10 million towards retiring Hillary's debt.

However, an official Clinton spokesperson disputed that in a statement to me last month. Darragh Murphy's response was to wait for the July filings.

Now that July's fundraising figures are in, we can see how close PUMA got to retiring Hillary's campaign debt. From The LA Times, via Yestodemocracy:

Hillary Clinton whittled down her presidential campaign debt by $1.3 million in July, and presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama chipped in to help.

Here's PUMA's claim:



Even granting PUMA 100% of those donations, a ridiculous stretch. They were still off by a factor of 6 or 7. Kevin at Rumproast does some more math, analyzing the PUMA $6 million July 4th weekend, and finds that they missed it by that much:

we tracked down the Hillary Clinton for President FEC filing for July contributions. Check out the "contributions by date" info for the beginning of the month, when the PUMA/Just Say No Deal coalition was allegedly pulling in six to ten million dollars for Hillary. I've included the entire July 4th weekend:

DATE	SUM
July 01, 2008	30,979.56
July 02, 2008	19,624.72
July 03, 2008	9,839.16
July 04, 2008	6,446.36
July 05, 2008	15,919.73
July 06, 2008	2,792.90

That's a grand total of $85,602.43 for July 1st through July 6th, not even remotely close to the PUMAs' "conservative" estimate of $6 million dollars (it's 1.4% of that claim, 0.86% of the $10 million figure) and that's not even accounting for the fact that all of the donations during that time period didn't come from self-identified PUMAs.

Ironically, PUMA's inflated claims might have depressed donations to Hillary's campaign, with loyal supporters figuring the debt was paid off.

Add to that the fact that Hillary has had to hire her own muscle to keep the dead-enders in her delegation from embarrassing her, and it looks like PUMA refuses to stop helping her no matter how she pleads with them.