Buried within a Politico item on the growing irrelevance of Hollywood money in a world of presidential politics dominated by the Super PAC is this gem:
With the Clinton Foundation and State Department emails scandals continuing to brew and other Democrats either getting in, or at least thinking about getting into the race, Hillary Clinton may not be any more ready for her Hollywood close-up now than she was in 2008 – when many Hollywood liberals abandoned her for Barack Obama.
“Here’s the deal,” said one such donor. “I have to tell you, there is such a lack of enthusiasm for Hillary it’s really kind of stunning. We’re raising our $2,700, but that’s all we’re doing. Nobody’s called us. I mean, in the ’90s, we gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Clinton and the party and the congressional committees. Hundreds of thousands. We might have been minor players compared to George Soros, but nobody’s called us.”
For their part, Katzenberg and Spahn have also thrown their full weight behind Priorities USA, the main super PAC supporting Clinton, which began as an Obama re-election vehicle in 2011 and is still run partly by Obama’s former aide Jim Messina. But the PAC’s early fundraising was reported to be sluggish, and its efforts have been hampered by factional infighting.
In the end, one prominent fundraiser predicted, Hollywood will come through, and accept the new landscape and its perhaps less dominant role, if only because its overwhelmingly liberal donors find the prospect of a Republican president — and more Republican appointees on the Supreme Court — so unpalatable.