Spokesman Says Spending is ‘Efficient’ and Not at Sex Clubs
Democrats love to paint their Republican adversaries as the fat-cat high-rollers, pinstriped corporate titans with a penchant for the good life. But recent campaign documents show Democrats also harbor a taste for the finer things.
Expenditure reports filed with the Federal Election Commission show the Democratic National Committee last fall spent more than $21,543 at a Boston Red Sox game and another $17,125 at a Dallas Cowboys game. DNC officials confirm the events as fundraisers, held in a Fenway Park restaurant and a Cowboys Stadium luxury box, respectively.
Recent reports of lavish spending at the Republican National Committee, including a now infamous visit to a Los Angeles strip club bankrolled by the RNC, have sparked intense scrutiny of both parties’ spending practices.
The RNC tried to turn the tables today by pointing reporters to a long list of high dollar DNC events, as well as hotel and limousine bills.
The DNC spent $13,316 on a party for outgoing chairman Howard Dean at Lucky Strike, a Washington bowling alley, in January 2009. Another $16,275 was doled out for a DNC staff holiday party at the Washington night club Josephine four months ago.
“What you will notice is that there are no expenses on here related to sex clubs,” said DNC Spokesman Hari Sevugan. “The DNC, unlike the RNC, does not conduct business while watching women engaged in lesbian bondage scenes…Unlike RNC expenses for redecorating the chairman’s office or table service at a bondage club, these expenses were not for personal use but for the actual functioning of the party, and activities that added to the coffers, rather than emptying them.”
RNC Spokesman Doug Heye shot back: “This is a conversation the DNC needs to have with itself. Just yesterday on MSNBC, [DNC Chairman and former Virginia Governor] Tim Kaine said, ‘If we see folks doing things of this kind, expenditures that are over the top and super-luxurious, they ain’t staying here. We are in a tough time.’ Yet we see that is clearly not true.”