A blog for The Chronicle to cover the 2008 presidential election, of which Hofstra University plays a unique part as host of one of the presidential debates. Students will cover the election in real time.

July 10, 2008

Obama nearly forgets unity request

By Samuel Rubenfeld
Senior News Editor


NEW YORK—At a fundraiser, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) almost forgot to ask his donors for money.

The appearance Wednesday night in a ballroom at the Grand Hyatt Hotel was intended to ease tensions between supporters of his and those of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) by emphasizing unity and requesting his donors to help retire her debt. Clinton herself was supposed to appear at the fundraiser as well, but she had to back out due to votes at the Senate, said Jen Psaki, the traveling press secretary for the Obama campaign.

But the request hadn’t come during a 32-minute stump speech to about 1,000 supporters, who paid at least $1,000 to attend the event. Obama walked off stage to Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed and Delivered,” and reporters at the back of the ballroom began asking staffers questions about why no request was made, and whether one would be made at another time.
Realizing his mistake, Obama rushed back to the microphone about a minute later, saying “Hold on a second guys, I was getting all carried away!”

Then he made the pitch: Obama asked the donors to look underneath their seats for an envelope and to “put something in it.”

“It’s something that is very important to us, and obviously, Sen. Clinton would be grateful as well,” he added.

Obama supporters have balked at aiding Clinton, with a report in the New York Times quoting Clinton campaign officials saying they have received less than $100,000 since early June, when Obama claimed the nomination. The article gave many reasons for the lack of enthusiasm in retiring Clinton’s debt, including many supporters’ believing Clinton racked up the bulk of the debt after she had mathematically lost the nomination and that they did not want to pay off one of her chief vendors, Mark Penn, “a reviled figure in the Obama camp.”

Campaign supporters outside the hotel thought it was not a big deal, he just simply forgot and corrected his mistake as soon as he realized it. “If you did all the things he did today, you’d probably forget too,” said Audrey Goldberg, 73, from Manhattan.

Asked why Obama initially forgot to ask for the money, Psaki said: “That was an important part of the event. He asked for his supporters to contribute, and will continue to do so. I have nothing to add to that.”

Clinton and Obama appeared together later in the evening at a $33,100-a-plate dinner for 125 supporters at the Loews Regency Hotel, raising $4.1 million for his campaign, according to a press pool report.

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