Hillary Clinton won reelection with nearly 70% of the vote, but she spent 30 million dollars to do it.

Since 2001, when she took office, Mrs. Clinton has spent at least $36 million on her re-election. For 2005 and 2006 through Oct. 18, she spent $29.5 million; a final tally will not be available until next month.

At that level, she spent nearly twice as much as Senator Charles E. Schumer, her Democratic colleague from New York, did in his 2004 re-election campaign, when he spent $15.5 million and won 71 percent of the vote, four points more than Mrs. Clinton won this year.

For her money, Mrs. Clinton also won a slightly smaller percentage of the vote in New York this year than did Eliot Spitzer in his successful race for governor. Mr. Spitzer, who raised nearly $41 million for his campaign, won 69 percent of the vote.

To put it into perspective, HRC spent more than Rick Santorum (24 million) who lost anyways. The question everyone is asking is "why?"

Her current finances are no more impressive that John Kerry's and it begs the question of what the utility was for all those extra votes she paid for that she didn't need to be re-elected.

Some theories:

Hillary was doing a dry-run on the presidential election. Its not particularly well-known, but Karl Rove went to school on Hillary's 2000 Senate campaign and learned a lot about GOTV. I think its perfectly plausible that she was testing some new approaches and evaluating her team to see how they performed.

HRC needed a really big margin or victory to prep the state for a potential run against Rudy Guliani. If HRC lost New York state in the general, she would certainly be toast.

Her current financial state is probably nothing to worry about. Raising more money is not likely to be a problem for the wife of a guy who just amassed seven billion dollars for his NGO.