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The Buying of the President 2008
Last election, the Center for Public Integrity ran a series called "The Buying of the President." We are now hearing about fortunes and tax returns and watching the candidates tweak their "branding" during the primaries. Unprecedented hundreds of millions, truly obscene amounts of money, are gathered not just for phone banking and the newer internet candidate sites but for ads and tours that resemble those of rock stars. Combined expenditures for 2008 are set to reach at least a billion dollars. Buying of the President is the 2008 version from Center for Public Integrity.
Read the series at the link above -
Listen to the podcast ("The Longest Campaign") here or download the MP3
Part One: Early efforts to limit the influence of big money in presidential politics
Part Two: Scandals trigger reforms on a grand scale—and grand ways to evade them
Part Three: Watergate ushers in the most sweeping campaign-finance reforms in history
Part Four: A tidal wave of “soft money” washes through the biggest loophole in campaign-finance law
Part Five: A new breed of fat cats “bundles” billions to candidates as the federal campaign-finance system crumbles
Just this week, stories came out in the media about McCain's wife's hundreds of inherited millions, his situation with respect to his own campaign finance law, the impressive amounts raised by the Obama campaign primarily from small donors over the internet, and the $119 million the Clintons have pulled in since leaving the White House. Center for Public Integrity can be depended on to dig deeper.
They have two categories, Democrats and Republicans.
Here is an excerpt from Part Five of the series:
When President Bush ran for reelection in 2004 he again rejected the federal subsidy for the primaries, which would have been less than $20 million, and raised an astounding $269 million. The leading Democratic candidates aspiring to oppose him in the general election, former Governor Howard Dean of Vermont and Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, followed suit, knowing that the nominee would have to keep pace with Bush during the long run-up to the Democratic National Convention, when primary money could still be spent. Dean’s campaign imploded despite the $51 million he raised, and Kerry raised $234 million in winning his party’s nomination. Both he and Bush accepted the federal subsidy for the general election campaign, Kerry losing in November.
Until this astounding money race, the basic public-financing scheme set in place in the post-Watergate reforms had essentially worked. In 1986, a bipartisan commission co-chaired by former Democratic National Chairman Robert S. Strauss and former Nixon Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird reported that “public financing of presidential elections has clearly proved its worth in opening up the process, reducing the influence of individuals and groups, and virtually ending corruption in presidential election finance.”
But the failure to increase the levels of allowable contributions to deal with the rising costs of campaigns and an accelerated election process finally persuaded leading candidates to break from the fundraising limits. And bundling made it possible for them to raise such vast amounts that the federal subsidies they turned away seemed like small potatoes. The sky’s-the-limit strategy seems to have become the only way to survive and compete, although raising a large number of small donations on the Internet has boosted the campaigns of Howard Dean in 2004 and both Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Ron Paul in 2008.
If there is any prospect of deliverance from the wretched excess of money in presidential politics, it’s not likely to come before the 2012 election cycle, as the leading candidates in both parties this time around take pages from the hugely successful fundraising techniques and apparatus of George W. Bush in 2000, and his copycats in the Democratic Party in 2004, to raise ever higher the price tag attached to the buying of the president.
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I guess there is no way that this is going to be redressed. I'd have said that once. I don't say it now because I do believe that things can change. When campaign money is raised and comes from huge donors - of course it comes at a price. Huge corporate donations or gifts are NOT donations OR gifts. They've been offered for a particular purpose.
We the People are sick of this procedure. Barack Obama gives me hope. He has so far been able to rally We the People to give individual donations and he has outraised them all. That's how important it is to get corruption out of our governments. Corruption in government is dependent upon big gifts from corporations. Get rid of the big donors and most of the corruption will dissolve. It will still be there but nowhere on the scale of now.
America is trying to spread *democracy* across the planet. World Domination. What America doesn't seem to realise is that none of us want American democracy. In Australia we nearly got it under John Howard and we hated it! Look at other democracies in the world. The campaigns and the elections. Nowhere else in the world is this costly year long fiasco played out. Nowhere else on the planet is this spectacular - and obscene - waste of money more obvious.
The consequences of this are inevitable. The richest person will win. The person with the majority of the country's financial backing will dominate. Money is power. UNTIL .....
America will never achieve the global domination so coveted by Bush, Cheney and McStupid et al. We the People all over the world will reject it. Just as We the People of Iraq have begun to flex their organised muscle amidst the chaos and take on the American invader and its Iraqi puppets.
All the money in the world will not buy global domination. There are far more ordinary and poorer people in the world who won't accept it. We the People are in the majority.
woz and DiAnne,
I agree that world domination cannot be bought. But what I fear most is that world domination is not what they are after. I think what they are after is a nice island somewhere, with their own servants and slave boys, a sustainable high-end lifestyle and to hell with the rest of the planet. They really do think money can buy a lot of protection, if nothing else.
I keep reminding myself that they are still, and always, the school yard bullies, the dominant males. Anytime I forget, I remember Dick Cheney, sneering and saying "SO?"
That "SO?" is what should continue to resonate in all our ears, lest we forget what deep sickness our country has allowed to buy us out for.
Let them have a very small island in the pacific, Karen. Plenty of those are going under as I type. Global warming, melting ice caps and all that. Sadly the islanders are having to relocate. Imagine having to leave the island home your family and friends have lived on for many thousands of years.
Why do they have to leave? Because the *advanced* greedy nations of the world have drowned it.
Give them an island with no power. No little slave boys. No mobile phones. Just each other. No servants. Let them go down with their island.
And when Cheney protests that they can't possibly live there without the amenities. Respond in unison with.....
....... SO?
Only in America - I want Obama but ALL OF THIS IS INSANE.
We need ENFORCED campaign finance reform, an end to special interests and corporate lobby control.
Report: Obama Has Run More Than 100,000 Political Ads
By Greg Sargent - April 9, 2008, 1:08PM
This is just astonishing:
Barack Obama has spent a record breaking $60 million to run more than 100,000 political television ads in pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination, a new analysis conducted for CNN shows.
In contrast, John Kerry ran a little more than 19,000 TV ads four years ago in his successful bid for the Democratic nomination, according to TNS Media Intelligence/CMAG, CNN’s consultant on political television advertising spending...
Clinton, who trails Obama in fundraising by about $60 million, has run just over 60,000 TV ads in her bid for the White House.
Obama has run more than five times as many ads as Kerry did. Hillary has run three times as many. Of course, the primary has dragged on far longer, too.
Keep in mind that this ad blitz is funded largely by what is basically a small donor revolution. Obama is now apparently laying the groundwork to possibly opt out of public financing, saying that the Internet has effectively created a "parallel public financing system."
It can be argued -- and Obama likely will argue -- that his success in bringing small donors into the process has proven at least as democratizing as public financing has, if not more so.
This is nuts too. Crazy.
Hillary's Big Fundraiser Tonight Starring Elton John Will Bring In $2.5 Million
By Greg Sargent - April 9, 2008, 11:31AM
Hillary's big and very high-profile fundraiser tonight -- which will feature a performance by Elton John at Radio City -- will bring in $2.5 million, Hillary finance chair Hassan Nemazee confirms to me.
The number vastly exceeds some expectations -- an AP story last week, for instance, predicted that the event was "expected to bring in more than $1.5 million," which is nearly a million dollars short of the actual tally.
Nemazee tells me that the event, which will draw 6,000 people, has sold out. "We are in our fifteen month of fundraising, and to do two and a half million is extraordinary," Nemazee says, not without some justification.
Now, none of this changes the fact that Obama, who continues to break records with his astonishingly successful fundraising, will badly outspend Hillary in the remaining states. He is outspending Hillary three-to-one in Pennsylvania right now, for instance.
But Hillary's fundraising numbers, though lower than Obama's, would appear to demonstrate that many of her donors haven't given up on this race yet.
Nemazee confirms, for instance, that an event in Los Angeles last week brought in a couple hundred thousand dollars, and adds that he's secured $50,000 in commitments for another fundraiser in Pittsburgh starring Chelsea Clinton, and another couple hundred thousand dollars in commitments for an event in Houston on the 24th.