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The Buying of the President 2000

Acknowledgements

"I am a firm believer in the people,” Abraham Lincoln once said. “If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.” These words convey the raison d’être for the Center for Public Integrity, which in slightly more than nine years has produced nearly 40 investigative reports. The “real facts” we bring to the American people invariably relate to public service, public policy, and ethics-related issues. It is in that spirit that we have written The Buying of the President 2000.

That was certainly the context in January 1996, when we released the inaugural edition of The Buying of the President. Two years before that, it had occurred to us that we’d never scrutinized the electoral process itself. As author Kevin Phillips later wrote, “Washington is a giant influence-mongery, and the buying of the president is the hottest game in town.” Who were the 1996 candidates, we wondered, and who were the real forces behind them? Weren’t the American people entitled to know before the election? It amazed us that no one had ever investigated the backgrounds of the candidates for a book published before the presidential campaign.

And so, in late 1994, we embarked on our unprecedented investigative project. For more than a year, six writers, 16 researchers, and 103 student database researchers at two universities applied the Center’s exhaustive, “no stone unturned” approach to this important subject. In January 1996, a month before the Iowa caucuses, we released The Buying of the President, the first systematic examination of the financial relationships and entanglements of America’s major presidential candidates. We wrote: “The presidential campaign in the United States has become not so much a ‘beauty contest’ or ‘horse race,’ but instead a giant auction, in which multimillion-dollar interests compete to influence and gain access to the candidates, who would be president . . . Before the first vote is cast in a presidential primary, a private referendum has already been conducted among the nation’s financial elites as to which candidate shall earn his party’s nomination.”

Against this backdrop, The Buying of the President 2000 was inevitable.

Roughly two dozen researchers, writers, and editors worked on the project this time around. The members of the “Investigative Team” are listed in the front of the book, and brief biographies of them are on the Center’s website. I gratefully acknowledge the devoted efforts of each and every one of these wonderful, enormously talented individuals. Once again, I am humbled and thrilled most by the warm collegiality and willing submersion of ego for a greater good. In recent months, for example, we’ve seen the Center’s new managing director, Peter Eisner, a former foreign correspondent, editor, author, and entrepreneur who happens to speak four languages, step up to the plate, cheerfully. We’ve watched a Pulitzer Prize-winning, 30-year veteran journalist, Knut Royce, join our ranks and quietly sock a few home runs. And we’ve reveled at how effortlessly Bill Allison — our frighteningly bright chief of research, and project manager of the Center’s next book — comes in from the bullpen in the late innings. Such self-effacing teamwork is hardly limited to these three. In general I benefited hugely from the best “bench” of research talent I have ever seen. Anya Richards tirelessly assembled much of my research for this book, and she kept in her sights all of those we sought — and actually managed — to interview, the former number being much larger than the latter. Nathaniel Heller, Marianne Holt, Melanie Strong, and Derrick Wetherell all played wherever and whenever they were needed. Simply stated, a work of this range and investigative breadth could not be remotely contemplated without extensive collaboration and patient perseverance of remarkable, dedicated professionals who also had more than a year to work their magic.

There are a few people who should be singled out for special thanks and mention. First and foremost, Bill Hogan, a nationally respected journalist and the Center’s director of investigative projects, has now shepherded his fourth investigative, nonfiction book to print here in three years. On The Buying of the President 2000, Bill led weekly editorial meetings for 18 months, edited all the copy, and, in his spare time, managed to break a perishable, important national story about Vice President Albert Gore’s campaign chairman, Tony Coelho. For years here, he has been an inspiring blend of investigative instincts, insightful Washington knowledge, and good, old-fashioned, infectious exuberance.

No one worked harder or longer on this book than Russ Tisinger and Annys Shin, who were in the trenches for a year and a half. No one carried the full, overwhelming, editorial weight of The Buying of the President 2000 more than they did. They were, and they remain — along with Monte Paulsen, a veteran journalist, and Shannon Feaster, a recent graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, who both came a year later — our in-house experts on the leading candidates. Their grace, good-natured perseverance, and generous spirit toward their colleagues were essential to this exhaustive project.

This book is dedicated to my teacher, mentor, and friend, James R. Soles, the distinguished professor of political science at the University of Delaware. I hope such an act is more of a blessing than a curse; please do not blame him for the specific content or any inadvertent errors contained herein. At the Center we have created the James R. Soles Fellowship — a guaranteed, one-year stipend with full medical benefits — awarded to the best political science graduate at Delaware. The first Soles Fellow has been Dan Steinberg, a truly exceptional young man who is so thoughtful and multitalented that we took the somewhat unusual step of putting him in charge of the Center’s career patron analysis and compilation. Dan handled it with quiet dedication, good humor, and aplomb. He has set a dauntingly high standard, one that the second Soles Fellow, Nathaniel Heller, already shows signs of reaching.

In terms of our investigative methodology, we read dozens of books about campaign finance, the presidential election process, and the 1996 race and attendant scandals, as well as books by or about the candidates themselves. Using the electronic news libraries of Lexis-Nexis, we consulted tens of thousands of newspaper, magazine, wire-service, and newsletter stories, along with transcripts of television shows, congressional hearings, and the like. We frequently clicked on the pertinent websites of the candidates, the parties, and various political research organizations. We even queried the members of our new International Consortium of Investigative Journalists — more than 70 of the premier investigative reporters on the planet from some 40 countries — for any relevant information or published stories about the U.S. presidential candidates abroad. (More relevant than ever before, in light of the money from abroad that poured into the U.S. political process in 1995 and 1996.)

Regarding primary sources, we analyzed tens of thousands of relevant Federal Election Commission records and state reports (Texas, for example) for campaign contributions going back, in some cases, more than 20 years. We examined thousands of pages of relevant congressional testimony and reports; federal financial disclosure and trip reports; federal and local court and real estate records; federal lobby registration records; filings at the Securities and Exchange Commission, company annual reports and incorporation records; and thousands of pages of public documents received from various Freedom of Information Act requests.

It was a difficult internal choice for us, but we decided to not use up valuable, finite “word count” space in these pages with complete, detailed footnotes. Therefore, and perhaps as a sign of these multimedia times we live in, the complete footnotes are available on the Center for Public Integrity’s website, www.publicintegrity.org.

As with The Buying of the President (1996) and The Buying of the Congress (1998), we once again compiled the “Top 10 Career Patrons” for each of the major presidential candidates, as well as a new feature, “Top 50 Party Patrons.” For the candidate patron lists, these names came not only from FEC filings in Washington, but also from available records for state-level political committees and for not-for-profit organizations that are unequivocally functioning for or led by the candidate. Obviously the career patron calculation was different for novice candidates such as Elizabeth Dole and Gary Bauer. The former’s career patron list necessarily is based only on her 1999 contributions; the latter’s list includes only his 1999 campaign contributions and contributions to his PAC and its state account. We have more detailed profiles of the candidates’ “Top 25 Career Patrons” on the Center’s website. The party patrons were culled from soft-money donors to both major political parties from 1991 through June 1999.

Our “career patron” lists could not have been compiled, of course, without the basic campaign-finance data that federal candidates and committees must file by law with the Federal Election Commission. The public records staff at the FEC was unfailingly helpful to us throughout 1998 and 1999, and Bob Biersack was especially helpful in providing us with data not available on the agency’s website (www.fec.gov).

The Center for Responsive Politics, under the fine direction of Larry Makinson, once again provided us with gracious access to its extraordinary computerized databases and its unique fingerprint coding of interest-group giving. Our daily work is now infinitely easier now because of the user-friendly, information-laden websites maintained by CRP (www.opensecrets.org) and Public Disclosure, Inc. (www.tray.com/fecinfo/), a research firm. Even with all of the straight numbers increasingly available, compiling a career-patron list entails remarkable patience and several subjective, difficult judgment calls. How, for example, do you identify and tabulate employed spouses? When you are compiling the largest donors over many years, as we have done, how do you describe and incorporate all of the changes that result from mergers and acquisitions? Once such tough decisions are made, another significant challenge then is how to maintain consistent, data-counting standards regarding all of the candidates, and how to ensure a certain discipline and uniformity.

Craig McDonald of Texans for Public Justice, professor Fran Hill of the University of Miami Law School, Ellen Miller of Public Campaign, Sheila Kaplan of U.S. News & World Report, veteran Washington lawyer and author Dan Guttman, Richard Miller, John Newman, and Rick Shenkman of TomPaine.com, among many others, provided valuable insights to us.

We conducted many hundreds of on-the-record and background interviews with campaign aides, federal and state government officials, lawyers, lobbyists, company and labor-union representatives, political scientists and public-interest activists around the nation, and campaign contributors — ordinary and extraordinary. For example, we interviewed Archibald Cox, the Watergate prosecutor who was fired by President Richard Nixon in the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre” of October 1973. We questioned the current chairmen of the Democratic and Republican parties, Roy Romer and Jim Nicholson, and the chairmen of the DNC and RNC during the controversial 1996 election, Donald Fowler and Haley Barbour. We talked to Pat Choate, the former vice-presidential candidate of the Reform Party, and Russell Vemey, the party’s former chairman. We also spoke with Stan Huckaby, a prominent campaign-finance accountant and consultant. The transcripts and audio of these and other interviews are also on the Center’s website.

Regrettably, none of the presidential candidates would talk to us. We don’t take this personally — indeed, to them the prospect of talking to us is probably as exciting a notion as root-canal surgery. For more than half a year we sent formal letters to the candidates requesting interviews, and we made literally scores of follow-up calls to every campaign organization.

Our research is almost entirely based on public records, public actions, and the expenditure of public money. Indeed, in a democracy, these would-be public servants and want-to-be residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue each have a moral obligation to answer such inquiries. We therefore have put some of what we deem to be the most important “Unanswered Questions” for each of the candidates on the Center’s website. Why? Because we have the quaint notion that the American people and working journalists might actually get an opportunity to ask the candidates serious questions. Even though personal contact with nondonor voters is decreasing each election, the candidates still occasionally must appear at public functions such as debates and town meetings where questions are put to them.

I want to thank our thoughtful, savvy attorney, Marc Miller, of McLeod, Watkinson & Miller, who has scrutinized every word coming out of the Center for almost a decade now. Kudos to our tenacious development director Barbara Schecter and development associate Megan Vaughan. We are very grateful to the Area Foundation and Alida Messinger for specifically supporting this project. And our government accountability research at the national level generally (we also have investigations in the 50 states and internationally) is made possible by the terrific ($10,000 and above) support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Everett Philanthropic Fund, the Hafif Family Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the New York Community Trust, the North Star Fund, the Park Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Price Family Fund, the Scherman Foundation, the Florence and John Schumann Foundation, the Streisand Foundation, and the Town Creek Foundation. That is in addition, of course, to thousands of members nationwide who subscribe to our award-winning newsletter, The Public i. The Center does not accept advertising or contributions from corporations, labor unions, and governments. Major donors and the organization’s IRS filings (Form 990s) for the past three years are listed on our website.

The most generous, steadfastly loyal patron of this organization has been the Schumann Foundation. I will always be deeply grateful to the members of the Schumann family, and certainly to Bill Moyers and John Moyers for their wonderful insights and steadfast support these past years.

The effects of the Internet and its technological and cultural reverberations on our daily lives seem to grow every hour. Thus, what we were able to offer you in terms of information in 1996 is almost primitive compared to today. The Center’s website, www.publicintegrity.org, augments The Buying of the President 2000. There, directly or linked to other sites, you can find: full candidate profiles, including personal biographies; the most significant books and articles written by or about them; personal financial information about investments; speaking fees; all-expenses-paid trips; their adherence to U.S. campaign finance laws, according to the Federal Election Commission; their “Top 25 Career Patrons”; campaign contributions; major-donor profiles; candidate policy positions in their own words; their legislative voting records; and much, much more (undoubtedly including things we hadn’t envisioned when the book went to press).

On a more personal note, as we celebrate the Center for Public Integrity’s 10-year anniversary, I want to thank the magnificent members of the organization’s Board of Directors, particularly Charles Filler, who was present at the creation of this excellent adventure. Charlie, co-founding board member Alex Benes, and I held the Center’s first board meetings in places such as the outfield stands at Baltimore Orioles baseball games. The Center’s board and outstanding Advisory Board members have been amazingly supportive of me and the difficult, not always popular work we do here.

Finally, I am surrounded, sustained, and steadfastly supported by four strong, independent, brilliant women. No one has put up with me more — and complained less — than they have, and I am truly blessed by their presence. I thank them here, in the order of their years of hardship in this regard: my mother, Dorothy Lewis; my sister, Mary Lewis; my daughter, Cassandra Lewis; and my wife, Pamela Gilbert.

And there is at least one thing about which we all completely agree. We all very much look forward to the day, hopefully in the near future, when the notion of a woman running for president of the United States — let alone getting elected or holding that office — is no longer “news.”

Charles Lewis
September 1999
Washington, D.C.