If you scan your eyes down and to the right, you’ll see that Hillary Clinton has chosen to advertise on our humble little blog site. While I don’t wish to do anything that would cost my Townhall overlords some greenbacks, I can’t imagine anything more stupid.

Some might think that Hillary advertising here represents a laudable effort to reach out to the center/right. I don’t. The readers of this site fall into two main categories. The biggest group by far is conservatives. The only other significant group is a tiny minority of liberals who come here to get annoyed. (With these broad categorizations, I don’t mean to ignore the other kinds of visitors we get like mine and Hugh’s personal friends, Andrew Sullivan, and befuddled grandmothers who have done a Google search for “Triathlons Cystic Fibrosis.”)

If Hillary is advertising to reach out to our core audience, she should save her money. I get your emails – I know none of you will be supporting Hillary in the Democratic primaries. If Hillary is running her ads to reach the tiny portion of our audience who are liberals that come here to work themselves into a lather, that too is foolish. Our site’s advertising rates are among the steepest in the blogopshere because we’re one of the most heavily trafficked sites in the blogosphere. If she’s paying our rates to reach the 3% of the audience who are lefties, that’s just wasteful.

THERE’S A LARGER POINT HERE: Presidential campaigns are often poorly and profligately run. Howard Dean, for instance, burned through a gazillion dollars getting absolutely no bang for his bucks and couldn’t tell you at the end of the day where all the money went.

There’s a reason that campaigns are run this way. Successful businesses are usually run by a CEO who keeps an eye on expenditures. But politicians aren’t business people. They delegate the task of spending the money that they work so hard to raise to other people, people who usually don’t have any experience in the business world either. Businesses have to be careful with their expenditures because there are only two kinds of companies – those that turn a profit and those that cease to exist. Political campaigns don’t have any similarly ruthless metric, at least as far as money is concerned anyway.

Politicians are often completely clueless in running their operations. Again, let us turn our eyes to the Howard Dean campaign for an example. Dean raised over $40 million. That’s good, especially for an emotionally imbalanced small-state governor.

But here’s the bad: Dean paid his campaign guru Joe Trippi a 15% “commission” on all the ads that Trippi purchased. I once worked as a salesman – I had to sell something to make a commission. I guess you could say Trippi had a pretty good gig – all he had to do was buy something with other people’s money to “earn” a “commission.” Because most of Dean’s money went to buying ads, Trippi made millions from this arrangement.

I’m not blaming Trippi here. He was a businessman who a found a golden goose of a putz client. Like most good businessmen, Trippi seemed interested in maximizing his profit. But as for Dean, what can you say? I would assume that McDonald’s doesn’t pay the guy who buys their advertising spots a 15% “commission.” If they do, I want that job. Regardless, even the biggest political campaign is a “small” company. If McDonald’s is paying a hefty commission to a Madison Avenue advertising agency for placing its ads and gaining efficiency there because the company is so large and does so much advertising, a comparably small operation like a campaign has to do better and run leaner.

SO WHAT HAPPENED WITH THE HILARY CAMPAIGN that it decided to run ads on HughHewitt.com? Believe it or not, I don’t have any inside sources in the HRC juggernaut, so I can only speculate. I would figure that someone there decided that it would make sense to advertise on the most heavily trafficked political blogs. From there, the purchaser didn’t do his homework and decided that it would be a swell expenditure to run ads here and on Powerline. Or, in a darker scenario, Hillary’s blog ad purchaser has a Trippi-like “commission” structure and is trying to piss away as much money as possible since a percentage of every dollar that he pisses away winds up in his pocket.

But let us not condemn Hillary. Her campaign merely underscores the state of the art for the modern campaign. It also shows why a candidate with a business background and an inquisitive mind like Mitt Romney will have a huge advantage.

One additional and slightly chilling exit thought: We all know politicians care about nothing so much as their own personal ambitions. If this is any indication of how carelessly they tend to those ambitions, can you imagine how poorly they govern?

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.