Salt of the Earth Hillary Clinton wants $300,000 from you PLUS your vote

[onenote]

219. When you have to distort to make your point, you probably don't have a point worth making

Last edited Wed Feb 25, 2015, 06:43 PM - Edit history (1)

Let's consider the title of the OP: "Salt of the Earth Hillary Clinton wants $300,000 from you PLUS your vote"

Reading that, you might reasonably conclude (and be shocked) that Clinton is charging individuals $300,000 to hear a campaign speech.

Of course, the facts are much different.

A year ago, Clinton was paid $300,000 to deliver the Keynote Speech at the Luskin Lecture for Thought Leadership at UCLA. She delivered her remarks (not a campaign speech) to an audience of around 1800 people. That would work out to $167 per person, which would be a pretty cheap fundraiser if it had been a campaign event. Of course, it really didn't cost $167 per person. Student tickets were free. Tickets for faculty were $100 and there were reserved/premier reserved seats that cost $250 and $500, a portion of which was for scholarship and research programs at UCLA. There was a reception for the Premier Reserved ticket holders, but Clinton did not (and was never scheduled to) attend.

But there's more: the $300,000? That didn't exactly come out of the attendees pockets, or even the University's. It came from a multi-million dollar endowment created by the Luskins as part of the $100 million they donated to UCLA in 2011. I don't know how much Bill Clinton was paid in 2012 as the initial speaker or how much Kofi Annan was paid for his 2013 appearance at the second annual Thought for Leadership Lecture. Nor do I know how much other speakers who appear as part of the regular Luskin Lecture series (including Howard Dean, Marian Wright Edelman, Madeleine Albright), but presumably they were paid for their appearances as well -- after all, that's the point of the endowment.

Sort of paints a different picture than the OP and its hit-piece story.