Spin Dry

Thanks again to the gang at Eschaton for the tip-off to this story. As guest-blogging Attaturk points out, if this kind of thing happened when Clinton was president, it would have been a major scandal:

About a third of the 152 adult guests who slept at the White House or Camp David last year were fundraisers or donors to President Bush's campaigns, but at least half of those also are family or old friends.

Oh, wait. It did happen when Clinton was president, and it was a big scandal...

But Republicans accuse the president [Clinton] of using the White House to raise campaign funds and want an independent prosecutor named to investigate the fund-raising.

At a press conference today [02/26/1997] with Chilean president Eduardo Frei, Clinton was asked again about the fund-raising and again defended himself.

"We got strict advice about -- legal advice -- about what the rules were and everyone involved knew what the rules were," Clinton said.

Note the independent prosecutor business above. Funny how we haven't heard the Republicans screaming for one of those since the election of 2000, have we? And yet, when I hear the term "prosecutor," I know that most of the current administration deserves it, to the fullest extent of the law.

Clinton's lie about a blow job didn't start a war, after all.

Another interesting note: in researching the Clinton info, all of the scandal is in terms of dollars. In the Bush story, it's all in numbers of people, so there's no way of telling whether Bush II has used this little perk more or less than Clinton. Figuring from the numbers above, "about a third" of 152 is 50, and "at least half" of that is 25.

From the Clinton story:

The CNN study found 24 overnight White House guests who gave $100,000 or more to the DNC.

From the Bush II story:

Among the [non-family/friend] guests... People who raised at least $100,000 for Bush's campaigns...

So -- where is the material difference? Nowhere.

Harry Reid, isn't it time to start calling for that independent prosecutor to look into this? As far as I can tell, Bush II had one big-donor guest more than Clinton did. Or maybe he didn't. I guess it wasn't worth it for the media to investigate and report the exact numbers this time around.