"Street money": A Usually Legal Practice That Wears Black Eyes

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: A Usually Legal Practice That Wears Black Eyes
By MIKE McINTIRE and MICHAEL LUO
Published: May 13, 2008

In the threadbare border towns of South Texas, one of the country’s poorest regions, enterprising locals like Candelaria Espinoza have long been paid to round up votes for candidates on Election Day. There is even a name for these electoral soldiers of fortune: politiqueras.

So when Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign arrived in South Texas in February seeking an edge in its uphill battle against Senator Barack Obama, Ms. Espinoza was happy to oblige, for a price. The campaign paid her and seven other members of her family $100 to $200 each to knock on doors, deliver fliers and get voters to the polls for the Democratic primary on March 4, which Mrs. Clinton narrowly won. “I’ve been a politiquera for 20 years,” Ms. Espinoza said in an interview last week outside her trailer in the town of Pharr. “The money the Clinton people gave me was about the going rate, more or less.”

The Espinozas were among at least 460 Texans, most of them rural Hispanics in South Texas or African-Americans in Houston, who received payments from the Clinton campaign for this kind of work, according to a review of Federal Election Commission records. The records show that Mrs. Clinton did something similar in Ohio, giving $38,300 to a state legislator, Eugene R. Miller, who says he used it to pay more than 200 people to get out the vote in predominantly black neighborhoods in Cleveland. The payments, known in the political vernacular as “street money,” are a legal but controversial tool that Mrs. Clinton employed at a time when she was desperately seeking a victory after losing 10 consecutive contests to Mr. Obama....

Not equipped with the volunteer-driven grass-roots movement that has propelled Mr. Obama’s get-out-the-vote efforts, the Clinton campaign hired more than three times as many local operatives as he to fill that role in those two states. While mostly forgoing the use of street money in Ohio and other places, the Obama campaign paid about 150 people in Texas, most of them college students, for campaign work. The payments were widely dispersed, with only a handful in South Texas and fewer than 20 in Houston. The Clinton campaign made payments of $80 to $125 to more than 200 people in Houston, and $100 to $200 to 170 people in the McAllen and Brownsville areas near the Mexican border.

The Clinton campaign did not respond to several requests for comment. Hari Sevugan, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, drew a distinction between the money it paid to college students, who he said were enthusiastic supporters to begin with, and the payments by the Clinton campaign, which he described as an effort to buy influence among important constituencies....

***

While the use of street money is not uncommon in Cleveland, in other places the expectation that it will be disbursed is more deeply engrained in the electoral infrastructure. In Philadelphia, some local Democratic operatives openly groused about Mr. Obama’s reluctance to engage in the practice and his reliance on out-of-state campaigners for the Pennsylvania primary, which Mrs. Clinton won....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/us/politics/13streetcash.html