The Obama Campaign's Out of Control Spending

The Weekly Standard reports:

Although the Obama campaign has portrayed itself as "frugal" for making staffers take public transportation from O'Hare, FEC reports of the campaign's spending paint a very different picture. Obama's overhead is $10 million more per month than McCain's, and this is likely to increase substantially given his campaign's out of control spending and lofty plans for the general election.

Obama recently told reporters, "I've never been a big entourage guy. … And that takes some getting used to." Well, the size of Obama's campaign suggests he's gotten used to the idea very quickly. Before even locking up the nomination, Obama's paid staff was already in excess of 700 people. In the last month, Obama has hired dozens if not hundreds of staffers, and his National Field Coordinator said the campaign anticipates deploying more than 2,000 paid staffers to every state in the country. Sending 15 paid staffers to Texas might make a good sound bite, but politically speaking, it is flushing money down the toilet.

A paid staff of 2,000 is unheard of in the history of presidential elections. Consider that it's five times larger than Bush's campaign staff in 2004, which is the next biggest ever assembled. Indeed, Obama will have more people working on his campaign than President Bush currently has in the whole White House. And if Obama spends like this when he needs to raise the money himself, one can only imagine what he'll do when he can instead tap the tax coffers of the U.S. Treasury.