History
During the 1997 Camden, New Jersey City Council race, the Camden City Democratic Committee spent $10,765 to pay street workers $40 each to "get out the vote". Others have included Jon Corzine (whose campaign paid out $75 apiece to New Jersey party officials during his successful 2000 Senate bid), John Kerry (in Pennsylvania during the 2004 presidential election) and Robert A. Brady (during the 2002 U.S. House race).
After the 1993 New Jersey gubernatorial campaign, Republican Christine Todd Whitman's campaign manager Ed Rollins was accused of boasting that he had given $500,000 in street money to black churches in New Jersey in exchange for their keeping their congregation from voting for incumbent James Florio. Rollins later retracted his claims, saying that his comments were taken out of context. Subsequent investigations by the New Jersey Attorney General's Office and Federal Bureau of Investigation found no wrongdoing on Rollins' part, finding that his original claims were braggadocio.
During the 2008 Pennsylvania Democratic primary, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton refused to hand out street money, Governor of Pennsylvania Ed Rendell commented that the unusual amount of interest in the race would bring people out in support of both candidates, street money or not. Rendell later remarked that the Clinton campaign had "barely enough to communicate on basic media", much less for street money.
Read more about this topic: Street Money
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“When the history of guilt is written, parents who refuse their children money will be right up there in the Top Ten.”
—Erma Brombeck (20th century)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)