Countdown

The Buying of the President 2004

Introduction

Politics, Winston Churchill once said, “are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.” Frankly, most Americans these days would hope for a little less excitement in their politics. But the appalling attacks on September 11, 2001, resulting in the largest loss of civilian lives on U.S. soil in modern times, followed by mysterious anthrax, assaults and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — all in just two years — have if anything further blurred the line between politics and war. Our unending war on terrorism overshadowed the 2002 midterm elections. And as we now contemplate the 2004 presidential election, there is no better metaphor for how war and politics have merged than the indelible image of our commander in chief speaking to the world just moments after his dramatic fighter plane landing on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier just returning from war.

Of course, our domestic politics had already become intensely bitter, full-throated combat by the turn of the new century and millennium. We witnessed the first impeachment and Senate trial of a sitting U.S. president in more than a century — which was decided along substantially party lines. And we lived through the closest presidential election since 1876, in which Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote but Texas Governor George W. Bush won the electoral vote (though neither got 50 percent of the votes cast) — with the outcome of the disputed Florida voting, and the presidency, decided by the Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court.

Bush and Gore spent a world record $835 million on the 2000 election, and even when the carnage was over it wasn’t over. Despite 36 days of surreal, contentious post-election chaos and scores of lawsuits and multimillion-dollar investigations by major news media organizations in Florida, 175,000 legally cast ballots were not counted. What really happened in Florida in 2000, where the state legislature was Republican and the governor was the president’s brother, but the state supreme court and most of the local county election supervisors were Democrats? We’ll never know for sure, but political Hatfields and McCoys will be fighting over it for generations.

Indeed, we have become, as respected conservative author Michael Barone put it, “the 49 percent nation.” Bill Clinton won reelection in 1996 with 49.2 percent of the vote; Republicans held onto the House of Representatives in 1996, 1998, and 2000 with 48.9, 48.9, and 49.2 percent of the votes, respectively. Each of these numbers rounds off to 49 percent. “We haven’t had such stasis in successive election results since the 1880s, which was also the last decade when a president was elected despite trailing in the popular vote and when the Senate was equally divided between the two major parties,” Barone noted.

Ours is the most elaborate, lengthy, and costly process for selecting a national leader in the world. Every year, politicians, journalists, and political scientists talk about our peculiar endurance contest to ascertain whether a candidate is fit to govern, but nothing ever changes. In 1995, when the Center for Public Integrity first investigated the major presidential candidates and political parties for The Buying of the President, former Republican congressman, presidential candidate, and cabinet secretary Jack Kemp told us that he personally dreaded the prospect of appearing at between 300 and 250 fundraising events the year before the election and spending “80 percent of my time on the phone or at fundraisers, which most of [the presidential candidates] are doing. . . . You’ve got to be compulsive. . . . I don’t criticize anybody who’s going through this, but I’m glad I’m not. . . . I think the [presidential election] process is too long and too expensive.”

Eight years later, the process is just as intense and wacky. In early 2003, for example, two major Democratic presidential candidates facing potentially life-threatening health problems found it necessary to hawk donors for campaign contributions while still recuperating from major surgery. Florida senator Bob Graham had an aortic valve replacement and double coronary artery bypass surgery, but within days he was on the phone dialing for dollars. Massachusetts senator John Kerry, in a hospital just hours after prostate cancer surgery — sore, bandaged, medicated, and forced to use a catheter tube to urinate — nonetheless felt compelled to send a personal e-mail to his campaign’s financial backers, flatly reassuring them that “We have every reason to expect a complete, speedy recovery.”

Both men and their aides understood that these unforeseen developments could seriously disrupt their political plans, throw the embryonic campaign off message and on the defensive from the onset, and dissuade donors from writing those all-important early checks in the so-called wealth primary, the private referendum held the year before any votes are cast anywhere, in which thousands of the richest Americans — one-tenth of 1 percent of the population — make the maximum allowable campaign contribution, now $3,000. Early, crucial, political momentum has a decidedly greenish hue. And the often-criticized, who-will-win “horse race” coverage of the presidential candidates by political reporters always starts with — besides public opinion polling — Federal Election Commission contribution reports revealing exactly which candidate is amassing the most cash.

One horse who surprised everyone out of the gate was Democratic senator John Edwards of North Carolina, who raised the most money in the first quarter of 2008. He somehow appeared at 175 fundraisers, putting him on an average of two a day for the year. Edwards and eight other major Democratic White House contenders — the most crowded field since 1976 — cumulatively raised $26 million in the first quarter. In stark contrast, the incumbent Republican president, who didn’t start his reelection campaign until the second quarter, raised $84.4 million — more than all of the major Democratic candidates combined. That included $21.7 million in a two-week, 14 fundraiser blitz. It started off one late spring night in 2003, at a stand-up, $2,000-a-person, lobbyist-laden Washington reception where hot dogs and nachos were served. The Bush-Cheney campaign would not disclose the names of almost 200 people who had cochaired the event, and each personally promised to collect $20,000 for the cause, and restricted media access to the grand hotel ballroom affair, which generated $8.5 million.

The recurring secrecy leitmotif aside, George W. Bush has altogether redefined the parameters of political fundraising. In the 2003-2004 election, he is expected to collect in the vicinity of $200 million. To put that number into perspective, consider that it is 62 percent higher than his record-shattering total of $125 million and four times more than Al Gore collected in the 2000 presidential election.

Running for president today is an all-consuming, two-year basic training program that includes hundreds of dehumanizing meet-and-greet, frozen-smile events, which culminate in a grueling 33-week stretch of campaigning in 45 state caucuses and primaries. By comparison, John F. Kennedy campaigned in just seven states back in 1960 before he was nominated. The survivor then gets to accept his party’s nomination at the carefully choreographed-to-the-minute national convention with its thousands of delegates, hundreds of parties and events, and dozens of personal meetings, followed by at least 10 additional weeks of brutal national barnstorming in the full glare of local, national, and international journalists.

But the most demoralizing — and shameless — thing candidates have to do is to ask for money from thousands of strangers, virtually every day for more than a year. Why do they do it? Because they have to if they want their message to resonate with voters. At a time when television networks and local TV stations keep decreasing the amount of air time on actual political news, they keep getting richer from paid political ads. According to the Alliance for Better Campaigns, candidates, parties, and issue groups spent slightly more than $150 million in 1980 and more than $1 billion in 2002 — so much, in fact, that they are now one of television’s leading sources of revenue. Candidates can no longer depend on “free media” news coverage to get their word out, which means they must have sufficient funding to purchase campaign commercials. A candidate with no ads simply doesn’t exist. A well-funded major presidential candidate necessarily has scores of paid campaign staffers, plus a phalanx of pollsters and media and other consultants.

But there is another reason candidates must make a headlong rush for the cash. As we mentioned in the 1996 and 2000 editions of The Buying of the President, the single most salient fact about the White House selection process — a discovery first made by Republican political fundraising consultant Stan Huckaby — is that in every presidential election since 1976, the candidate who has raised the most money at the end of the year preceding the election, and been eligible for federal matching funds, has become his party’s nominee for the general election. At midnight on December 31, it was Carter and Ford who had amassed the most campaign cash in 1975, Carter and Reagan in 1979, Mondale and Reagan in 1988, Dukakis and G. H. W. Bush in 1987, Clinton and Bush in 1991, Clinton and Dole in 1995, and Gore and G. W. Bush in 1999.

All major presidential candidates and most national political reporters recognize that the top money chaser the year before the election almost assuredly will be the nominee of his political party. That means that the race for the White House is substantially decided before any actual votes are cast. The dirty little secret of American presidential politics is that the wealthiest interests essentially hold a private referendum the year before the election; otherwise respectable candidates who didn’t put up sufficiently impressive cash numbers are often driven from the race and cast as “losers” who can’t put together “an effective organization.” By January of the presidential election year, the biggest money is already down on the next president of the United States, which effectively predetermines whom the nondonor public gets to vote on.

Consider 1995, for example. That year the eventual 1996 Democratic and Republican presidential nominees, Clinton and Dole, each raised about $26 million, both record amounts at the time. Of the 16,300 donors who contributed $1,000 to the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign, 94 percent gave their money in 1995. Similarly, of the 48,000 donors who contributed the maximum $1,000 to Republican presidential candidates, 83 percent contributed their cash in 1995. Prior to the 2000 campaign, no single presidential candidate had found more than roughly 19,000 donors contributing the maximum $1,000 contribution. That all changed in 1999–2000, when George W. Bush received 59,279 donations of $1,000, more than triple that of any previous contender.

Bush would go on to shatter all fundraising records in 1999. He raised $68,877,684 — $230,360 a day — with no single check larger than $1,000. During the first four months of his active candidacy, Bush collected $87 million. The previous record had been Bill Clinton’s in 1995, when he raised $26 million in seven months. No one raises that kind of cash casually or quickly, of course, and it certainly doesn’t come from backyard barbecues and neighborhood bake sales. A contribution check of $1,000 isn’t something the average American can write; most often, those who open their checkbooks are lawyers, lobbyists, or the vested economic interests they represent who want something in return from the government.

BUNDLING FOR BUSH

For two years, the Texas governor and his brilliant political advisors had been quietly, meticulously planning his charge for the White House, including issue briefings by experts flown in to Austin to give Bush personal tutorials. Prospective major donors, more than 60 of whom stayed overnight in the governor’s mansion, were personally feted by Bush and his coterie of aides. When Bush publicly announced he was running for president in June 1999, and he and his candidacy burst into the national consciousness, most Americans had no idea just how fully prepared or extensive his campaign and its fundraising apparatus were. Four leading Republican candidates soon quit the race, months before the 2000 caucuses and primaries were even held, because of those extraordinary numbers, the gushy media coverage, and the overall aura of inevitability that began to surround his candidacy.

How did a state governor just starting his second term — an elected official for less than five years — pull off such a historic fundraising feat? Well, being the son of a former president with his own nationwide network of thousands of loyal donors obviously didn’t hurt. But the elder Bush never racked up anything close to his son’s cash numbers. The answer lies, rather, with an unusual, secretive “Pioneer” fundraising system, for which the participants pledged in writing to each raise at least $100,000 by aggressively “bundling” together $1,000 checks from family, friends, and acquaintances. (For the 2004 election, the Bush campaign has introduced a new wrinkle to the bundling program: in addition to the $100,000 Pioneer fundraisers, it has added the $300,000 “Rangers.")

In litigation filed by the National Voting Rights Institute, John L. Oliver III, the national finance director of the 2000 Bush campaign, explained under oath how the Pioneer program worked. “If you raised $100,000, it was credited to your number,” he said. “That was how you were made a Pioneer.” Each contribution received had an assigned tracking number, so that the Pioneer and his or her industry received “credit” for the money raised.

Another indication of how the program worked came in a May 27, 1999, letter from Bush Pioneer Thomas R. Kuhn to other fundraisers for a reception with the presidential candidate. “As you know, a very important part of the campaign’s outreach to the business community is the use of tracking numbers for contributions. . . . Listing your industry’s code does not prevent you, any of your individual solicitors or your state from receiving credit for soliciting a contribution. It does ensure that our industry is credited, and that your progress is listed among the other business/industry sectors,” he wrote.

Now why would they want to receive credit? Clearly, many donors wanted first-in-line access to and influence with the prospective new administration. What is unusual about the Pioneer system is the unabashed directness of the transaction: You help us and we’ll credit you and remember your loyalty and support later.

Raising money this way has long been controversial because such exceptionally well organized bundling violates the spirit of limiting the size of contributions, which is one of the hallmarks of the post-Watergate campaign finance laws. “These documents reveal the disproportionate power gained by those who can bundle huge sums of hard money for political campaigns,” said John Bonifaz, the executive director of the National Voting Rights Institute. “This offends the basic constitutional promise of political equality for all.”

Direct contributions to federal candidates must, of course, be disclosed as required by law, but fundraising networks can have secret contribution tracking systems without being required to make their information public. We only got a glimpse into the Pioneer “innovation” because litigation surrounding the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act required the Bush campaign to disgorge thousands of internal documents. In 2000, the Bush campaign publicly disclosed the names of 212 Pioneer fundraisers. Three years later campaign documents show that the number was larger than 550.

Attorneys for Bush also asserted, in response to a subpoena in the autumn of 2002, that they were unable to locate specific information about the money collected by each Pioneer; in fact, so far they have only provided limited financial data on 212 Pioneers. This inability strains credulity. With such a meticulous, methodical pledge card and numeric tracking system, how could the Bush campaign, when pressed in potentially embarrassing litigation, say that they couldn’t find the relevant information? In the highly sophisticated, overlapping worlds of politics, law, and public relations, this sounds only slightly better than “the dog ate my homework.”

Craig McDonald, director of Texans for Public Justice, and an expert witness on behalf of the National Voting Rights Institute, testified that many of the Pioneers had special access to candidate Bush and subsequently were rewarded with government appointments; for example, his group found that 19 Pioneers (of the first acknowledged batch of 212) were appointed as ambassadors. At least one Pioneer, Elaine Chao, the wife of Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, became a member of the president’s Cabinet. But what most disturbs McDonald is what he perceives as deliberate subterfuge. “It’s time to end the secrecy over who bankrolled the Bush campaign,” he said. “It just isn’t believable that the president’s campaign lost most of a $60 million fundraising list.”

One of the Pioneers was Kenneth Lay, CEO of Enron, the Houston-based company that collapsed from massive fraud in late 2001. Lay, co-chairman of former President Bush’s 1992 reelection campaign, was credited with raising at least $112,050 for the George W. Bush campaign. Enron, both the company and its top officers, were Bush’s top career patron in The Buying of the President 2000, indeed the top career patron by amount of any of the presidential candidates for that election. And through mid-2003, the disgraced, now bankrupt company remains by far Bush’s top career corporate patron, with company and employee contributions of more than $597,000. In January 2003, when the Enron scandal burst into public view, President Bush — previously known to call his longtime Enron sponsor “Kenny Boy” — now started publicly referring to him as “Mr. Lay.” The Center for Public Integrity’s investigations into the various legislative favors sought by Enron dating back to the late 1980s and the hundreds of pages of correspondence between Lay and Bush while the latter was governor of Texas, detailed later in this book, reveal that the relationship between the two men was much deeper and richer than the White House has acknowledged.

In contrast, Gore raised more money than any Democratic presidential candidate in U.S. history, but ultimately Bush raised two and a half times more than Gore’s total. At the end of 1999, Gore had amassed $80,777,121, or an average of $84,330 a day. And by Election Day, he had accumulated $49,427,800, not including matching funds, compared to Bush’s jaw-dropping $125,410,986. But early in the campaign, armed with such an astonishing amount of campaign cash, Bush did something else no other front-runner candidate for his party’s presidential nomination had ever done: he declared that he would now voluntarily opt out of the post-Watergate reforms on presidential campaign finance.

In July 1999, days after stunning the political world with his $87 million in receipts, Bush announced that he would forgo federal matching funds and the spending limits that accompany them. Framed for journalists as a defensive maneuver designed to counter the unlimited spending anticipated by billionaire GOP candidate Steve Forbes, Bush ignored the federal spending ceiling of nearly $50 million in the pre-convention phase of the election cycle, as well as the state-by-state spending caps. Ironically, the most significant advantage this bold maneuver gave him was not against Forbes but against Arizona Senator John McCain in their infamous “OK Corral” showdown, the South Carolina primary.

MCCAIN POSES A THREAT

The battle in South Carolina epitomizes the profoundly disturbing state of American politics today. It shows how the power of money and the messages it can buy can overwhelm an otherwise popular, respected opponent by creating devastating false perceptions. Anyone who recalls Joe McGinniss’ book, The Selling of the President (1968), knows that conjuring up positive and negative images untethered to reality is hardly new. Still, the most demoralizing lesson of the 2000 Republican South Carolina primary is that if your resources are superior enough, inconvenient facts can be rendered irrelevant. With saturation through paid advertising, phone banking, direct mailing, and e-mailing — compounded by a tepid, easily hoodwinked news media abrogating its truth-telling role — veracity itself is obscured and the public, bamboozled. In the end, as Mark Twain put it best, “A truth is not hard to kill and a lie told well is immortal.”

An authentic American hero who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for five and a half years, McCain had served two House terms and had just begun his third Senate term when he entered the 2000 presidential campaign. Since the mid-1990s, he had championed the issue of campaign finance reform, persistently going against the wishes of his own Republican Party; in turn, GOP Senate and House leaders killed it or kept it off the legislative agenda year after year. McCain’s genuine fervor over the issue is fascinating, given how he came to it.

In 1989, the Arizona senator got caught up in the infamous national savings-and-loan scandal, known as the Keating Five affair. McCain and four other senators had over the years accepted $1.3 million in campaign contributions from Charles Keating, who owned Lincoln Savings and Loan. It later collapsed and was bailed out by taxpayers at a cost of $2.6 billion. McCain had received $113,000 in campaign contributions during his political career from Keating, his family, or his employees; in addition, in 1986 Keating had sold shares in a shopping center to McCain’s wealthy wife and her father. The McCain family and their babysitter had also traveled on Keating’s corporate jet nine times, including three trips to Keating’s vacation estate in the Bahamas.

In his memoir, Worth the Fighting For, McCain writes that he and Keating “became friends almost from the moment we met. . . . He was quite obviously an important supporter of my ambitions. But more, I genuinely liked him and enjoyed being around him.” The five senators — Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini, John Glenn, McCain, and Donald Riegle — had met at least once with federal regulators on Keating’s behalf, which McCain would later describe as “the worst mistake of my life.” The Senate Ethics Committee concluded that McCain had “exercised poor judgment” but that his actions had not been “improper nor attended with gross negligence.” But it ruined the political careers of DeConcini, Cranston, and Riegle; none of them sought reelection and all three were seriously rebuked by their Senate colleagues.

The Keating Five affair was a life-changing event for McCain. He apologized publicly and often for his actions and won reelection to the Senate with 56 percent of the vote. But the episode was instructive. The moth had gotten too close to the flame and gotten burned. Keating, the longtime career patron of McCain’s and a multimillionaire thrift operator desperately worried about being shut down by regulators, had become Keating, the friend. He expected a particular return on his years of investments, as he made personally, painfully clear to McCain. And to aggravate matters for the Arizona senator, Keating was publicly outspoken about hoping that his campaign contributions had bought influence with the five senators.

McCain was frank when he spoke to the Center for Public Integrity. “There’s no doubt that the Keating Five [scandal] . . . brought home to me the importance of the appearance, as well as the reality, of corruption,” he said. “The appearance of what I did caused the citizens that I represent to become disillusioned with me. And that to me was the worst thing I could do to them, because they had placed their confidence in me.”

So McCain had an epiphany about the corruption of American politics and fought courageously, if unsuccessfully, in the second half of the 1990s for the campaign finance reform legislation he cosponsored with his Democratic colleague, Russell Feingold of Wisconsin. At the same time, for his reelection and presidential campaigns, he had to raise millions of dollars in campaign contributions from companies with business before the government, including the Senate Commerce Committee he chairs. As we found in The Buying of the President 2000, half of his top 10 career patrons were telecom or media companies. But McCain’s disarming candor and outspokenness about the pervasive corruption of American politics placed him in an unusual position with the media and public, and when he entered the presidential race and the New Hampshire primary in 2000, cleaning up politics was his central issue.

By contrast, Bush was unostentatiously but unmistakably opposed to campaign finance reform and, as noted earlier, had publicly thumbed his nose at the post-Watergate state spending limits and matching funds. Moreover, his father had vetoed the last comprehensive campaign finance reform legislation passed by Congress in 1993.

As a presidential candidate with relatively modest funding, McCain had decided to strategically sidestep the earlier Iowa caucuses and put his limited chips on New Hampshire, South Carolina, Michigan, and Arizona, four primary states in four different regions of the country. With his “Straight-Talk Express” chartered campaign bus, he campaigned intensely in the “Live Free or Die” state, holding 114 town hall meetings. The New Hampshire crowds got larger as the crucial vote neared. On primary election night, February 1, he stunned the nation and the world by upsetting Bush, shellacking him by 19 points.

For McCain’s excited followers, the euphoria and hope of the moment were palpable. “All of a sudden, John McCain was transformed from a political candidate into a kind of folk hero,” said former New Hampshire senator and friend Warren Rudman. “People wanted to touch him. They wanted to bring their little children. They wanted his autograph.” That night, McCain described the victory to his screaming supporters as “remarkable” and said, “My friends, a wonderful New Hampshire campaign has come to an end, but a great national crusade has just begun. . . . We have sent a powerful message to Washington that change is coming.” In fact, in exit polling that day, 80 percent of the voters in the New Hampshire Republican primary supported campaign finance reform, and two-thirds of those voters saw McCain as being more likely to help bring reform than Bush. In response to the question, “Which candidate do you feel says what he truly believes?” voters favored McCain over Bush by a three-to-one margin, 50 percent to 17 percent.

McCain would later write in his memoir that the night he won the New Hampshire primary “was probably the most intoxicating moment of my political career.”

Humiliated, Bush and his inner circle of stunned aides retreated to Texas to “retool,” his word for what would happen next. With the unexpected loss, his usually high-flying, button-down campaign faced angry questions from its biggest donors about everything from political strategy to spending. One frustrated Bush Pioneer who had raised more than $100,000 for the campaign told The Washington Post what he had privately told campaign officials: “We’ve raised you $70 million. Why have you spent $50 million through the end of January to win 31 delegates?” The rattled campaign, the Post reported, “deputized some of its leading money men to reassure the finance troops.”

Meanwhile, just hours after Bush’s defeat, at a Republican National Committee “Team 100” meeting in Florida of soft-money donors who had each given at least $100,000 to the party, cochair Julie Finley reportedly told those assembled that if McCain were to win the GOP nomination and get his way with campaign finance reform and a ban on soft money, “We’re out of business.”

When the Center for Public Integrity asked her three years later to expand on those remarks, Finley told us, “If [McCain] had been the nominee because of his [reform] position with regard to soft money, or non-federal money rather, it would have been difficult for us to raise non-federal money because my assumption was he would not attend events that were for the purpose of raising non-federal money.” She emphasized that she and her Republican Party colleagues “were neutral. Those of us who were running RNC programs were neutral. We did not solicit for any candidate.” That, of course, would have been illegal. But the implicit message to major party donors couldn’t be clearer, especially since roughly 80 percent of the Team 100 members were supporting Bush, according to RNC finance chairman Mel Sembler.

McCain quietly understood the darker implications of his victory and the powerful forces he had just unleashed. He wrote in his memoir: “I had won [in New Hampshire] by running against the Republican establishment and against Republican orthodoxy on issues from campaign finance reform to tax cuts. . . . Party leaders and loyalists weren’t about to turn on a dime and embrace my candidacy and positions just because I had landed one good punch in a 12-round fight. They were going to help George fight like hell in South Carolina, and the worse the beating I got, the happier they would be.”

His worst fears were confirmed. Two and a half weeks later, McCain got clobbered, losing to Bush 58 to 42 percent. Even though he later won primaries in Michigan and his home state of Arizona, his national momentum hit a brick wall on that fateful South Carolina night of February 19. Most stunning, though, were the exit poll results. A majority of Republican voters told pollsters that George W. Bush was the “real reformer,” not McCain.

THE BUSH TEAM GOES OFFENSIVE

How had the Bush campaign reversed attitudes and perceptions so quickly, creating “a perfect storm” that capsized McCain’s momentum in just 19 days?

Just after the New Hampshire debacle, back in Texas, Bush aide Karen Hughes had recalled the governor’s successful 1994 and 1998 state campaigns as a “reformer” there on such issues as crime, education, taxes, and tort reform. She suggested to Bush’s chief political strategist Karl Rove — frustrated and publicly embarrassed by his own underestimation of McCain in New Hampshire — and to Bush himself, that, in order to counter the McCain momentum, they immediately needed to change Bush’s campaign message to the “reformer with results.” They all agreed. Although campaign finance reform was a subject about which Bush historically had had political laryngitis — in fact, prior to the presidential campaign, as far as we can tell, he had never made a single political reform speech or proposal as governor of Texas — after his humiliating New Hampshire loss, Bush miraculously found the subject and his voice in South Carolina. The campaign pounded in this theme over and over again, via hundreds of saturation radio and TV ads and in the candidate’s speeches, accompanied by new slogan banners.

At the same time, this “reformer with results” was aggressively shaking the law and lobbying firm money trees in our nation’s capital, sending out fundraising memos to “Association Executives for Bush,” and seeking help from major corporate lobbyist Pioneers Haley Barbour and Wayne Berman, former House members Tom Loeffler and Bill Paxon, and others. Bush also ran attack ads in South Carolina labeling McCain a Washington insider and hypocrite. It was true, as we noted earlier, that McCain was no stranger to Washington. But neither was Bush. In fact, throughout 1999, Bush’s presidential campaign took in at least $526,600 from employees of Washington lobbying firms, while McCain netted $116,675, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research organization.

As McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis told us, after Bush “had announced that he was the ‘reformer with results,’ then on the day of one of our debates, he actually released his own campaign finance plan. We were really struck by that. Because basically, he had been [going] around talking about how nobody cared about campaign finance, he wasn’t for that and he thought it would hurt the parties and all of these kinds of things. Then, on the day of the debate, he releases a five- or six-page campaign finance plan that didn’t do a whole lot.” (His plan did not end, for example, the large six- and seven-figure soft-money checks to the political parties.) The whole turnaround, Davis said, “was really amazing to us.”

But according to Furman University political scientist Danielle Vinson, who has studied the primary campaign very closely, the actual truth about the “real” reformer never penetrated the South Carolina voter consciousness. While reporters were skeptical of Bush’s new “reformer with results” message, she said, the “problem was that they didn’t question it in the press. They just didn’t report that he was saying that he was a reformer with results. But all of his mailings were hammering on that and hammering on that. And so there was really no one to refute that other than McCain. And I don’t think he really picked up on it very quickly.”

That may be at least partly because McCain was distracted and on the defensive. Most remarkable to the Arizona senator and his aides was the vicious personal turn the presidential campaign took in South Carolina. Both candidates went negative, criticizing each other in ads. “We found ourselves in quite a dog fight,” McCain’s campaign manager told us. “I have been doing this since 1976, and it was the worst barrage of negativism that I have ever seen in a campaign. And it was immediate.”

In fact, a bizarre array of single-issue groups appeared out of nowhere, angrily trashing McCain. Besides facing the best-funded presidential candidate in U.S. history with at least a 5-to-1 cash advantage, McCain also found himself up against aggressive statewide campaigns criticizing him daily, using e-mails, faxes, phone calls, mail, newspaper ads, and radio and TV commercials. The groups assailing McCain included the National Right to Life Committee, the South Carolina Citizens for Life, the Christian Coalition, the Keep It Flying political action committee dedicated to preserving the Confederate flag, the National Smokers Alliance, the National Rifle Association, Americans for Tax Reform, the English Language PAC, and several anti-immigration groups.

Political scientists William Moore and Danielle Vinson, who have meticulously analyzed the South Carolina primary, replayed every campaign and outside-group ad that hit the airwaves, and collected every known communication via the U.S. mail, e-mail, fax, and telephone, have concluded that “virtually all” of the issue advocacy campaigns waged by interest groups in the primary “attacked John McCain.”

Bush advisor Rove had earlier enlisted Ralph Reed, the former executive director of the Christian Coalition and a corporate lobbyist, to galvanize the religious right on Bush’s behalf. To avoid the glare of publicity an association with the controversial Reed might cause. Rove reportedly asked Enron before its meltdown to quietly put Reed on its payroll while he was assisting the Bush campaign. Reed denied a New York Times story of being hired by the Houston firm to campaign for Bush in a Rove-Enron Texas two-step. But his involvement and role in South Carolina was undeniable. Century Strategies, Reed’s Atlanta-based lobbying and consulting firm, contacted hundreds of thousands of Christian conservatives in the state with negative mailings and phone calls: “[McCain] claims he’s conservative, but he’s pushed for higher taxes and waffled on protecting innocent human life.”

In the South Carolina primary, the Christian Coalition is believed to have targeted 140,000 voters, sending a card in the mail two days before the primary entitled “10 Disturbing Facts About John McCain,” which, among other things, noted that McCain was the sole Republican candidate “who sought and received the endorsement of the Log Cabin Republicans, a pro-homosexual rights group.” The Bush campaign disseminated a recorded phone message in South Carolina from Ralph Reed’s former boss, televangelist Pat Robertson of the Christian Coalition, who separately on television made a dark, mysterious reference to “some of those other things that are in John McCain’s background.”

But it wasn’t just the Christian Coalition and anti-abortion groups going after McCain, although they may have been the most effective. A Baptist church in Kansas faxed a flyer decrying McCain’s “Fag Army” to South Carolina radio stations. On primary election night, several individuals called radio talk shows saying that a group of psychiatrists had come to the conclusion that the Vietnamese had brainwashed former prisoner of war McCain and programmed him to destroy the Republican Party.

No one will ever know how many millions of dollars were spent in the South Carolina primary by Bush and those “independent” outside groups that helped him, as there is no federal law requirement to disclose their spending. McCain was restricted under federal election laws to direct campaign expenditures in South Carolina of $1.5 million; counting media ad buys in neighboring states that reached South Carolina voters, he probably spent roughly $3 million. He believes Bush and all of the forces aligned with him together may have spent as much as $20 million.

What particularly irked McCain, though, were the personal slurs and subterfuge. During his interview with the Center for Public Integrity, McCain talked about “the under-the-radar campaign. . . . The thousands of phone calls, ‘Do you know the McCains have a black baby? Do you know that Cindy McCain is a drag addict?’ But it was hundreds of thousands of calls. I knew people who got four or five calls that said that. So, you know, I mean, it was an unprecedented amount of money; and we, I could feel in the last four or five days of the campaign, I could feel the air going out of the balloon.”

McCain recalled one galling incident in which Richard Hand, a professor at Bob Jones University, sent out an e-mail slurring McCain. CNN reporter Jonathan Karl managed to obtain a copy and then interview its author. “You probably remember this story,” McCain said. “‘Professor, you are sending out e-mails saying that John McCain has fathered illegitimate children.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, what proof do you have that Senator John McCain fathered illegitimate children?’ Answer: ‘It’s up to John McCain to prove that he didn’t father illegitimate children.’ That was on CNN. It was a CNN interview!”

The Center contacted Professor Hand, who refused to provide the e-mail, but in a conversation in which he wanted to know our personal religious beliefs and who we voted for in the 2000 election, he acknowledged writing the offensive missive. “It’s done, it was a disaster. I am very sad, I am sad for any possible misunderstandings. I didn’t wish the limelight in the first place.” However, he is unrepentant about his assertion that McCain fathered children out of wedlock and simply doesn’t understand why the comment might be so objectionable. After all, he said, “Having a child in the secular world out of wedlock is not a damaging comment.”

During the South Carolina primary, the ad hominem undercurrent began to eat away at McCain. Just moments before the South Carolina debate, as the two men were standing together uncomfortably, McCain confronted Bush about the onslaught of negative slurs. As authors James Moore and Wayne Slater reported, McCain said to Bush, shaking his head disapprovingly, “George.”

Bush replied, “John. It’s politics.”

McCain retorted, “George, everything isn’t politics.” Later, during a commercial break, after McCain complained about the vicious, unfair mail and phone campaign by Bush’s supporters against him, Bush proclaimed his innocence. The Texas governor “reached over to grasp his rival’s hand and said the two should put their acrimony behind them.”

“Don’t give me that shit,” McCain said, pulling away. “And take your hands off me.” McCain’s public persona to voters in South Carolina began to fray, reflecting his bitterness over the smears. “I responded by getting angry in my stump speeches and running negative ads about my opponent that only raised the toxic level of the primary,” he wrote in his memoir. “There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about the subterranean assaults on my reputation except to act in a way that contradicted their libel.” But that, too, became unsatisfactory to him as a strategy. At one point — against the advice of his senior staff, who worried about allowing the savagery to go unanswered — McCain halted all of his negative campaign ads in an unsuccessful attempt to change the downward dynamic of the primary battle.

In the meantime, Bush let the outside groups do the dirty work against McCain and assumed a more positive, above-the-fray posture. Perhaps the most bitter irony for McCain is that South Carolina primary voters in exit polling felt McCain had been the most negative campaigner, not Bush.

John Weaver of the McCain campaign told political scientist David Magleby that he had “never seen a more negative environment” than the 2000 South Carolina primary. Trey Walker, another McCain campaign consultant, has termed what happened to McCain in South Carolina as “a jailhouse rape.” McCain’s deputy campaign manager Roy Fletcher said at a National Press Club forum months later, “I’ve never seen anything like it and I come from Louisiana.”

“History will make the judgment,” McCain told us. “Americans do not like sore losers. And for me to look back with anger, bitterness, and complaints, it is neither appropriate, nor, frankly, in keeping with the incredible experience. How many Americans get the chance to run for president of the United States?”

Karl Rove, Bush’s political strategist; Karen Hughes, his now former White House aide; and Joe Allbaugh, the manager of his national presidential campaign who also ran the Bush campaign in South Carolina, all declined to answer our questions about what exactly happened in that fateful primary. (After serving under Bush as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Allbaugh is now a highly paid Washington lobbyist, chairman of New Bridge Strategies, LLC, “a unique company that was created specifically with the aim of assisting clients to evaluate and take advantage of business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the U.S.-led war in Iraq.")

It strains credulity for most people to imagine that the many, disparate, conservative, Republican-leaning interest groups active in South Carolina against McCain did not coordinate their efforts or communicate in some way with the Bush campaign. Of course, in the 28-year history of the Federal Election Commission, there has been only one successful case brought against a campaign for coordinating “independent” expenditures.

Wayne Slater, the bureau chief of The Dallas Morning News in Austin who has followed the careers of George W. Bush and Karl Rove from their political beginnings in Texas, says that McCain’s bushwhacking in South Carolina was the all-too-familiar handiwork of Rove. The negative “push polls” in South Carolina were similar to a “survey” Rove — simultaneously working for Philip Morris while also a political consultant to Governor Bush — had engineered back in Texas years ago to derail Attorney General Dan Morales in the tobacco litigation. The mysterious phone calls spreading innuendo were similar to what happened to Governor Ann Richards, defeated by Bush in 1994. And at the University of Texas, Rove actually taught negative campaigning, including the strategic advantages of “narrowcasting” to small constituencies under the larger public radar, using radio, mail, and phone calling almost immune from media coverage.

What happened in South Carolina has larger implications beyond the 2000 election, of course. Outside groups and both parties have learned that slashing campaigns by candidates and interest groups are immensely effective and can stop an opponent’s momentum cold, with little accountability. According to campaign finance experts David Magleby and J. Quin Monson in their nationwide study of this phenomenon, in 1998 and 2000, interest groups generated more direct mail, print and radio ads, and phone banks than the political parties themselves. Trying to get information about these groups, which are known by their Internal Revenue Service statute as “527” organizations, is a problematic adventure for anyone.

BUYING INFLUENCE, WITH LITTLE OVERSIGHT

The Center for Public Integrity found last year that 537 committees spent more than $480 million over a three-year period to influence elections and policy debates across the country. These shadowy political organizations provide a convenient way around a recent federal ban on soft money — unlimited contributions to the political parties — because they remain almost totally free from fundraising restrictions while engaging in election-related activity, such as issue ads, voter drives, political research, and contributions to state and local candidates. Due to their unique legal status, 527 committees are not subject to regulation by state elections officials or the Federal Election Commission, and may accept unlimited contributions from nearly any source — companies, labor unions, and single-interest groups. No group raised more cash than the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, a labor union representing state and local government workers, which took in almost $36 million over three years. They are required to report their contributors and finances to the Internal Revenue Service.

The larger implications of these groups and their constitutionally permissible mischief are troubling. Their multimillion-dollar hyperactivity in election campaigns obfuscates the responsibility a candidate has for his own campaign, giving him or her “deniability” about the dirty politics being waged. Could that many conservative groups coincidentally, in unison, jump on one conservative candidate? In South Carolina and throughout the entire 2000 presidential election, did George W. Bush personally know that his political strategist might be aggressively engaging in character assassination in cahoots with party-faithful allies? Maybe the question should be, How could he not know? After McCain’s angry exchange with Bush at the South Carolina primary debate, did the Texas governor go back to Rove and his staff and demand, “What the hell is going on here? This is unacceptable!” We don’t know that either, but, for various reasons, that reassuring scenario seems implausible. Neither Bush nor Rove has ever acknowledged any responsibility for what happened there, and no “smoking gun” proof has ever been found directly implicating them, not that anyone is investigating.

Is there any practical difference, in terms of initial political expediency, between the directed ugliness that rattled McCain in South Carolina in 2000 and the “dirty tricks” in the 1972 presidential election and Watergate scandal that derailed the candidacy of Democratic front-runner Edmund Muskie, who broke down and cried publicly one snowy day in New Hampshire because of the pernicious sabotage? Politically, both candidates were successfully removed by their opponents, albeit roughly. Unquestionably, in Muskie’s case, the nefarious conduct was of much greater dimension — the attacks were conceived and orchestrated from inside the Nixon White House and involved everything from infiltrating his campaign staff with spies pilfering internal documents to planting phony letters to embarrass the candidate politically.

But is it possible, three decades later, that today’s political campaign operatives in both parties are merely more shrewd and careful? Especially now that they can discreetly encourage third-party “cutout” allies, who are well funded and more than willing to publicly skewer a perceived foe? If Watergate taught them anything, it was, most of all, not to leave any fingerprints. Best of all for the campaign, these groups slur and slash personal reputations in full public view, conveniently allowing the candidate to feign ignorance and assume a more dignified posture of civility and decorum.

We do know that Karl Rove reportedly organized conferences for young Republicans in 1978 on how to do campaign dirty tricks, and he was influenced and impressed by his friend and parry consultant colleague, the late Lee Atwater, former President Bush’s chief political strategist who was infamous for his ruthless, hardball tactics. Atwater, on his deathbed in 1991 after a public struggle with brain cancer, personally lamented his “reputation as a fierce and ugly campaigner . . . while I didn’t invent negative politics, I am one of its most ardent practitioners.”

Regarding the 1988 presidential election, he said in a Life magazine article that, “In part because of our successful manipulation of his campaign themes, George Bush won handily.” Atwater apologized to Michael S. Dukakis for the “naked cruelty” of a remark he had once made during the 1988 presidential campaign, in which he said he “would strip the bark off the little bastard” and “make Willie Horton his running mate.” Horton, who is African-American, raped a white woman and stabbed her husband while on a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison at the time Dukakis was governor. Supporters of the Bush campaign, in an infamous commercial, linked Dukakis to Horton and portrayed him as soft on crime. Former President Bush never publicly apologized for that ad or for Atwater’s vicious tactics.

Another mysterious mugging similar to McCain’s in South Carolina occurred in Georgia two years later to incumbent Democratic senator Max Cleland, who lost his 2002 bid for reelection amidst another vile personal campaign that also involved “independent” outside groups entering the fray to smear him. The slander was, Senator McCain told us, “run by the same people, Ralph Reed. . . . The same outfit, the same organizations, and I will never, ever get over them running a picture of Max Cleland, Saddam Hussein, and Osama Bin Laden, [this about] a man who left three limbs on the battlefield in Vietnam. That’s just something I will never get over.”

Cleland, still seething nine months after his defeat following the most outrageous commercial in the 2002 election, told The Washington Post, “That was the biggest lie in America — to put me up there with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and say I voted against homeland security! I volunteered 35 years ago to go to Vietnam and the guy I was running against got out of going to Vietnam with a trick knee! I was an author of the homeland security bill, for goodness sake!”

For John McCain, beyond the brutal 2000 South Carolina primary, the insults and indignities continued. In New York, he faced more negative ads both from the Bush campaign and from yet another mysterious group close to the Texas governor. Earlier in February, the Republican Party bosses in New York, firmly behind Bush, had attempted unsuccessfully to prevent McCain from getting on the state GOP primary ballot. In protest, McCain staged a news conference in front of the Russian embassy and excoriated the “Stalinist politics” of the New York Republican Party. He separately went to federal court, and ultimately a judge allowed him to compete against Bush.

In New York, the Bush campaign aired a political commercial that inaccurately warned voters that McCain had opposed federal funding for breast cancer research, which The Buffalo News, among other publications, denounced as “a particularly ugly smear.” Even Bush himself later admitted as much. According to a Washington Post article in March 2000, “When asked if he personally believed that his opponent opposed breast cancer research, Governor Bush replied, ‘No, I don’t believe that.’”

But what drew most public criticism and discussion were the ads run by another outside hit-and-run group no one had ever heard of, a 527 organization called Republicans for Clean Air. Essentially existing only on paper, it consisted, basically, of two brothers who at the time were Bush’s ninth most generous career patrons, sponsoring his political campaigns to the tune of $222,778 through mid-1999. Charles Wyly, a Bush Pioneer, and his brother Sam, had moved $2.5 million through Republicans for Clean Air, producing misleading ads about McCain’s environmental record. While the Arizona senator will never be mistaken for Rachel Carson, Bush in the 2000 election had earned the disdain of virtually all of the nation’s environmental groups. They saw him as a former oil man who as governor had done very little to improve standards in Texas, the state with the worst air pollution in the nation. Once again an outside stealth group, this time with barely a fig leaf of pretense regarding independence, was spending significant cash to diminish Bush’s political opponent; once again the actual truth was obscured from voters.

Outside groups have been proliferating and spending more and more lavishly in American politics. According to the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg Public Policy Center, in 1995-1996 more than two dozen groups — political parties, labor unions, trade associations, business and ideological organizations — spent between $135 million and $150 million on issue advocacy ads. By the 2000 election cycle, there were at least 130 groups sponsoring 1,100 unique issue advocacy ads, at a cost of more than $500 million.

When Bush was confronted with the subterfuge on the CBS news program Face the Nation, and essentially given a chance to publicly repudiate the delusive ads, he instead punted, replying, “People have the right to run ads. They have the right to do what they want to do, under the, under the First Amendment in America.” Does anyone doubt that the Wyly brothers would have pulled their Big Apple ads in a minute if Governor Bush had asked? More to the point, New York was the last important primary state, the Wyly coyotes had howled longer and louder than almost anyone for Governor Bush, and $2.5 million for political ads is serious money, even for millionaires. To suggest that the Wylys were disinterestedly trying to inform the public of John McCain’s record strains credulity.

McCain, of course, lost his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000 and Bush became the 43rd president of the United States. But in Washington McCain kept pushing the campaign finance legislation he and Feingold had been advocating for years. With the aid of the Enron, WorldCom, and other scandals, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 was passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by George W. Bush on March 27. The new law most notably bans unlimited donations to national political parties, those six- and seven-figure checks known as “soft money.” In the 1999-2000 cycle, the two major parties raised about $500 million from corporations, labor unions, and wealthy individuals, double the amount raised four years earlier.

BCRA is the most significant change in the nation’s campaign finance laws since the Federal Election Campaign Act was dramatically signed into law in 1974 by President Gerald Ford just weeks after the Watergate scandal had culminated in the resignation of Richard Nixon. “The times,” Ford said, “demand this legislation.” The new law created the Federal Election Commission, set campaign contribution and expenditure disclosure requirements, and specified limits on what individuals, political action committees, and party committees could give to federal campaigns.

Contrast that historic moment with the signing into law of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. There was no White House ceremony and no speech by the president; instead, a White House spokeswoman told curious reporters that “the manner in which the president signed the campaign finance reform into law was consistent with his views on the legislation.” John McCain, who had pushed the bill for seven long years, got a call at home from a White House underling notifying him that the legislation had just officially become law. Once again, Bush and his aides had stuck it to the Arizona senator.

Bush promptly left the Oval Office that morning and flew off on Air Force One to Greenville, South Carolina, for a $1 million fundraising event, then on to Atlanta and Texas to raise more campaign cash. How fitting that he would give a speech that day to rich contributors at an exclusive fundraising event — in South Carolina no less — while remaining publicly silent on the subject of corruption, having signed into law the first significant political reform legislation since the Watergate reforms a quarter of a century earlier. Although the White House quietly issued a written statement about the signing, there would be no sound bites from Bush that night on the network evening news on this subject.

Within weeks, the Republican National Committee became one of approximately 80 special interests suing in federal court to have the new law declared unconstitutional, on the grounds that it violates free speech. Everyone knows that the president, any president, is traditionally the real head of his national political party, controlling all its major decisions and initiatives from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. So the commander in chief reluctantly signed reform legislation clearly holding his proverbial nose, and almost at the same time authorized his national political party to attempt to nullify it legally. How many informed Americans know that the president’s political party tried to nuke legislation he had actually just signed into law?

Leading the legal efforts to kill the McCain-Feingold legislation are Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, the National Rifle Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, the AFL-CIO, the Chamber of Commerce, and many more. Leading counsel against the new law are former Clinton prosecutor Kenneth Starr and well-known First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams. Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee chose not to file a lawsuit lest Americans think it opposes cleaning up politics; instead it quietly authorized its general counsel in Washington, Joe Sandler, to represent the California Democratic Party in its lawsuit filed together with the California Republican Party.

Within days of Bush signing the McCain-Feingold legislation on March 27, 2002, a phalanx of party lawyers and Washington lobbyists began successful efforts to eviscerate the new law at the Federal Election Commission. The FEC issued a 300-page rule-making document on how the new law would be implemented, weakening the ban on political party use of soft-money contributions.

McCain was apoplectic that an unelected body would have the audacity to ignore and undermine a landmark law that had been debated and discussed for seven long years. “My beef with President Bush and the administration is not that he didn’t have a bill signing — I could care less,” he told us. “But I am deeply disturbed about the appointment of Mr. Toner, Mr. Mason, and Mr. Smith [as FEC Commissioners], who are outspoken opponents to any kind of reform and have therefore issued regulations which contradict both the intent and the letter of the law in the most corrupt fashion that I’ve ever observed.” McCain, Feingold, and other reformers in Congress, not surprisingly, now have their sights set on a major overhaul of the FEC.

The McCain saga since early 2000 is instructive in what it reveals about the state of our democracy today. From being mugged in South Carolina to having his pockets picked back in Washington — his greatest legislative achievement as a U.S. senator snatched away by lawyers, lobbyists, and bureaucrats — John McCain has new scar tissue reminding him that the real powers that be are not on any ballot. They are accountable to no one. Recall Churchill’s quote about war and politics that began this Introduction. McCain once almost died in a North Vietnamese prison, but in politics, he has been stabbed over and over.

What has happened to American politics? Not only is the money and the power behind it out of control, but there seems to be an increasing, vulgar coarseness to political discourse and public life even as “spin” and other manipulations of truth have become more subtle and sophisticated. This at a time when the very basics of democracy seem to be in trouble.

Roughly half the voting-age population, 100 million Americans, routinely do not participate at the polls. Nearly 40 percent of state legislative races have no opponents at all. The incumbent class of Congress has become ever more entrenched and arrogant. Only 19 of 469 people lost their reelection bids to the House and Senate in 2002, and half of them were members running against other members because of census redistricting; 90 percent of the races in the House did not even have significant competition.

To try to put it all in a broader perspective, we spoke with former president and recent Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jimmy Carter, who with his Carter Center has helped monitor and oversee democratic elections in 40 countries around the world.

“Our democracy will survive,” Carter said. “We have a fine country and a fine system of government, there’s no question about that. But there are incumbent major politicians in both parties that are in office because of a certain constituency with which they are knowledgeable and with which they have a good relationship. Otherwise they would not have won in the last election. I think now the entire election process, including the nomination of candidates, is predicated to a major degree on how much money they can raise. And that involves appealing, in most cases, to special-interest groups who hope they can get a favor after the election is over.”

Despite the McCain-Feingold legislation, which he supported, Carter said that “We’ve not made any real progress on the extremely distorting effect of high finance being requisite for any successful candidate. If you look at the list of candidates now who are prominently mentioned for president, almost all of them who have any chance at all are millionaires or multimillionaires. And this is not an accident. An average person like I was, just a peanut farmer back in 1976, you know, we won with practically no money because we campaigned all over the country and built up a grassroots organization. . . . It was very difficult for us to qualify with the $250 per person, 20 contributions in each state, and 20 states, to get matching funds. That was very difficult for me, and it was my middle son, Chip, who personally went to the states and begged people for those contributions that finally let us qualify. And [when] we hit the general election, we depended almost exclusively on the fund derived from the income tax check-off to run our campaign. . . .

“I think nowadays that would be absolutely impossible, which means that there’s a criterion for success in American politics now — the Democratic or Republican Party — and that is extreme wealth or access to major wealth. And we are the only democratic nation in the world, in the Western world, within which that blight or cancer is affecting our system.”

Former presidents Carter and Gerald Ford chaired a bipartisan Election Reform Commission after the controversial 2000 election, which made numerous specific recommendations to Congress. Carter told us that “85 or 90 percent” of the commission’s proposals for improvement were implemented, “which is very gratifying to me. I don’t think there is any doubt that some progress was made. . . . There will be steps forward and ultimately in uniformity of voter lists and registration, hopefully improvements in voting techniques.” However, he also expressed disappointment that there still will not be a single voting system for the nation, and with thousands of counties, “each county in the past has had the authority to set up its voting technique and educate its people and to decide on the registration process, and so forth. It’s not possible to educate politically ignorant people about the electoral process and how to mark a ballot and the issues involved if there’s a wide diversity of voting machines or voting techniques or ballots.”

To compound his frustration, “although President Bush pledged personally to me and President Ford that it would be completely financed, the amount of money that he requested in his upcoming budget is roughly one-third of what the legislation requires.”

That is a worrisome concern, especially recalling that in the 2000 presidential election, we were unable to complete an election. Fidel Castro’s Cuba offered to send “democracy educators” to help South Floridians conduct free and fair elections. A spokesman for corrupt Zimbabwe despot Robert Mugabe joked to reporters, “Maybe Africans and others should send observers to help Americans deal with their democracy.”

What does our respected ex-president, who has monitored elections and democratic processes globally now for two decades, think about the Florida debacle?

While Carter believes there may have been “some deliberate efforts in some counties” to minimize the black, almost always Democratic, vote, he said, “I can’t look into the mind of the voting officials, but there was certainly no real effort made to assure that there was uniform opportunity regardless of economic status or race or ethnic background in the access to a fair and equitable voting procedure that would minimize errors and ensure accuracy in the vote count. People were deprived of their basic American rights as citizens to cast their ballots in a knowledgeable fashion and have assurance that their ballots would be counted accurately.”

In our next chapter, we will try to better understand how exactly that happened, in the United States of America in the 21st century.