That, at least, is the conclusion we're supposed to draw from today's New York Times report on her campaign's spending habits in the month of January alone - $100,00 on party platters, $11,000 on pizza and a whopping $5m on consultants.
Was it worth it? Given that her candidacy is now hanging by a thread, it's easy to say that it was not, that she should have fired the consultants. After all, her former campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle may not have had things entirely in hand, but why let her go and still keep her chief consultant and adviser Mark Penn? (The New Republic's Chris Orr figures it out: she can't fire Penn because she literally can't afford to - she owes him more than $2m.)
The truth is obscured by the fact that both Clinton and Obama have spent more than $100m so far on their respective campaigns. The Times says that a detailed comparison of their spending is difficult because of the way expenditures are labelled, but they do say that, by their count, Clinton's camp has spent more than $35m so far on media, polling and consulting. Astounding! Except that Obama's campaign has spent about $40m on those same things. Both campaigns are spending at a rate of about $1m a day.
The real difference is buried in a graphic that accompanies the piece, which shows that 22% of Clinton's spending has gone to "other" expenses (those apart from salaries, travel, administration, media, polling and voter outreach: i.e. fun stuff like pizza parties) - about $23m in all. The Obama campaign, by contrast, spent only 13% of its money on "other" expenses - about $15m. What did it spend cash on instead? Media, polling and voter outreach. Looks like that paid off.
Clinton's bigger problem now, though, is that she's simply not raising as much money as Obama, and so her campaign is sinking deeper into the red. Losing your frontrunner status will do that.
