A whole lot of people on the left saw the Harris campaign as a giant pile of unguarded money, just waiting to be taken.

Money may not be able to buy you love, but “joy” is extremely expensive.

Shane Goldmacher reports in the New York Times, ‘all told, the Biden and Harris campaigns collectively raised about $2.15 billion, two people said.” For comparison, the Biden campaign raised and spent a bit more than $1 billion in the 2020 cycle.

Goldmacher’s article clarifies a bit about the Harris campaign’s runaway spending, but then raises other questions. Either the Harris campaign did not end with debt, as had been previously reported, or they raised enough to cover those debts:

Patrick Stauffer, the campaign’s chief financial officer, said in a statement that there had been no outstanding debts or overdue bills as of Election Day. He said that “there will be no debt” on the next Democratic National Committee and Harris for President campaign filings in December.

Donations made after the election to the “Harris Fight Fund” are being funneled to the Democratic National Committee, officials said.

And the Harris campaign didn’t pay Oprah Winfrey a million dollars, precisely, but there are still questions about why the Harris campaign paid so much for what amounted to a run-of-the-mill infomercial with Winfrey:

One particular Harris payment has drawn attention in the aftermath of the election: the $1 million paid to Oprah Winfrey’s production firm, Harpo Productions. In an Instagram post, Ms. Winfrey said the company was paid to stage a live-streamed town hall in Detroit, providing the set, lights, cameras, microphones, crew, producers and even the chairs.

“I did not take any personal fee,” Ms. Winfrey wrote. “However the people who worked on that production needed to be paid. And were. End of story.”

The $1 million actually undercounts the full cost of the event, which ran closer to $2.5 million, according to two people briefed on the matter.

That’s roughly one dollar per view on YouTube for the 90-minute September 19 event.

Question: Why? Why did it cost nearly $2.5 million to produce what amounted to an infomercial? Why did the Harris campaign need to cover the costs of the set, lights, cameras, microphones, crew, etc. when Winfrey and Harris could have sat down anywhere? They could have recorded it on an iPhone. If town hall meetings cost $2.5 million to produce, you would rarely see them.

(The Chicago Tribune editorial board argued that Winfrey, who has a net worth of $3 billion, should have paid for the television production out of her own pocket.)

It’s a similar story with Harris’ other events with celebrities – the celebrities appeared for free, but the costs of the non-celebrity crew and support staff were gargantuan:

Another pricey choice was holding swing-state rallies featuring star performers on the eve of the election, including Lady Gaga in Philadelphia, Jon Bon Jovi in Detroit, Christina Aguilera in Nevada, James Taylor in North Carolina and Katy Perry in Pittsburgh.

The singers themselves were not compensated, officials said, but the support staff was. The overall bill for the election-eve rallies exceeded the planned budget and is said to have topped $10 million.

The cost overruns were partly because the Harris team built an entire rally venue at a park in Pittsburgh only to be told by the Secret Service that the site could not be properly secured. They had to rush to take it down and rebuild at a second venue.

I suspect Matt Shapiro is correct – everyone involved in the Harris campaign knew they were awash in money, and thus everyone had every incentive to charge the highest price possible. The Harris campaign could afford it, and they didn’t have time to haggle.

Loose money is like blood: the scavengers can smell it a mile away. Not all scavengers are low-lifes. There are plenty of respectable high-class scavengers who can see when the money is flowing and position themselves in a good place for soaking it up. These people and groups don’t really care about the goals and intent of those with the money. They just know that the money river is flowing and it’s time to wade into it and get what they can while the getting is good… Harpo Productions saw a money river, put themselves in front of it knowing that no expense would be denied, and sucked up that money because why not? It’s free money, right?

Goldmacher continues, “Ms. Harris’s campaign also made two $250,000 donations to National Action Network, the organization led by the Rev. Al Sharpton. Mr. Sharpton interviewed Ms. Harris on MSNBC in October.” That interview, by the way, had 652,000 viewers. The Five, airing over on Fox News at the same time, had 850,000 viewers.

Why? What did that half million dollars get the Harris campaign that it otherwise wouldn’t have gotten? The reasonable conclusion is that the Harris campaign had so much money, it could throw a half-million at Sharpton for no good reason other than to keep Sharpton in a good mood.

As I noted two days after the election, the grifter problem that has bedeviled the modern right for years now has an equally powerful counterpart on the left. A whole lot of people on the left saw the Harris campaign as a giant pile of unguarded money, just waiting to be taken.

The Harris campaign spent an estimated $600 million on ads, both digital and television. Top campaign strategists usually use their own media firms to create and air the ads, and get a commission on every ad that airs. So someone, and probably multiple top staffers on the Harris campaign made an absolute fortune. Goldmacher concludes:

One of the unanswered questions is who exactly made money off the commissions on Ms. Harris’s advertising, which can be especially lucrative. Such payments are often hidden even in federal disclosures.

In 2020, for instance, Mike Donilon, who was one of Mr. Biden’s top strategists, reported on his personal financial disclosure form with the White House that his consultancy had earned $4.35 million in 2020, far more than the roughly $543,000 disclosed to the Federal Election Commission in payments to his firm.

At some point soon, we will know who made the most from the Harris campaign – and I suspect those figures will become phenomenally infamous in Democratic circles.

Hey, it’s not easy for a political consultant to achieve that dream of “generational wealth.”