Hicks and Hillary

One interesting detail amid the mega-coverage of Hillary Clinton's presidential gear-up is the hiring as her national field director of the highly capable Karen Hicks, who worked for Howard Dean in New Hampshire and for Gifford Miller here.

Hicks's recent New York stint ended somewhat unhappily: she was in charge of gathering petitions for Miller's 2005 mayoral campaign, allowing them to omit the salary and the cost of her operation from the list of expenditures that counted towards the campaign's overall spending limit. But when the Miller campaign publicly pointed out the campaign benefits of what she had done -- "We knocked on more than 150,000 doors of targeted primary voters to get their signatures and introduce them to Gifford" -- her role became one of a number of negative story lines that helped doom the campaign.

Not that anyone's expecting the prospective Clinton '08 campaign -- which is hardly going to lack for financial support -- to resort to accounting tricks to save money on staff salary.

-- Azi Paybarah