What Exactly Can $32.5 Million Buy?

POSTED BY , 02 July 2007

Barack Obama has officially made the grade: with $32.5 million in second quarter campaign contributions, he's not only making history, but he's making the other democratic candidates green with envy. Hillary's pulled in a full $10 million less, and Edwards is following behind with a lowly $9 million. All this money talk makes us here at Veracifier wonder what he could do with all that cash.

If he were the sort of guy who wanted to blow it all in one place, he could invest in the glitzy penthouse at The Tribeca Summit, but he's never been much of a showy guy. So those ten bedrooms and Jersey view probably isn't his cup of tea.

And who would want to spend all that dough in one place anyway? Maybe he wants to be part of history. If so, for a mere $10-to-$20 million, he could get naming rights in honor of our 43rd president at the still unborn George Herbert Walker Bush Library. And that still leaves a good $15 million to play around with.

We all know Obama cares about education, and for $5 million, he could be the proud sponsor of Barack Obama gymnasiums in ten high schools in Wisconsin. And for a few million more, he could throw in some cafeterias, too.

With about $10 million left, it's time to tackle those other campaign issues, like health care. On average, an American spends $7129 on health care each year. There are approximately 9.5 million people in Chicago, and if he wanted to take a crack at fixing the system close to home, he could cover everybody's health care for a day. Let's hope that cough is just a 24 hour bug.

But knowing how hard it is to wrangle an HMO into paying out, after the health care day, there might not be much left. But if he had a few pennies to spare, he could always adopt a polar bear. (Who isn't still scarred by the image of the polar bear in An Inconvenient Truth?)

At the end of the day though, maybe he'd just want to escape all the campaign muckracking. Get a private island, some palm trees and a drink with an umbrella. But inaction has never been Obama's m.o. Maybe he should spend all that cash to get his message out there. I recommend AVIAD Aerial Advertising. At $4,500 a flight, he could hire a plane to sky-write a campaign announcement over America's 800-some-odd cities, nine times each. The only hitch is that the message has to be 30 letters or less.

My suggestion? "I got more money than she did."