Back to the Future
"Recent history tells us that the candidate raising the most money soonest almost always wins"
BY Charles Lewis | November 02, 2007
Charles Lewis
More than 40 years of contemporary political campaign books essentially began with Theodore White’s first of four such books, The Making of the President, 1960, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Back then, reporters, including White, didn’t write much about the grubby issue of candidate and political party money, where it came from, what exactly it bought. It was a simpler, more innocent time — before cable television, the Internet, blogs, and the 24/7 information age, with John F. Kennedy competing in just seven presidential primaries, with relatively fewer political reporters watching or public records available.
It was before the rise of a more critical press chronicling the myriad betrayals of public trust, from Vietnam, Watergate, ABSCAM, Iran-Contra, the 1996 Clinton Democratic campaign finance scandals in which more than 45 potential witnesses fled the country or invoked the Fifth Amendment, the Clinton impeachment, and various brouhahas embroiling no fewer than four Speakers of the House, to the Tom DeLay, Randy Cunningham, Robert Ney, and Jack Abramoff corruptions of 2006, and, of course, Iraq.
At some point, these and other outrages understandably benumbed our enthusiasms for politics, politicians, and glamorizing the presidential election process that White called “the most awesome transfer of power in the world.” As the sheer cost of campaigning for a major presidential candidate increased astronomically, so too did the need arise to go beneath the rhetoric and investigate the machinations and influence of the most powerful forces in our society over the political process. In 1996, 2000, and 2004, the Center for Public Integrity staff and I wrote The Buying of the President books (a popular tradition the Center is continuing), identifying the financial interests and unadvertised past entanglements behind the glossy candidate careers.
That little thing called money and the desperate, un-weaned need for the mother’s milk of politics, as Jesse Unruh famously put it, has gotten badly out of kilter. Candidates need more and more and more of it, so much so that let’s face it — there will never be enough mothers out there. Recall that in the first quarter of 2003 alone, in the last presidential election, Senator John Edwards appeared at 175 fundraising events. And two other competing Democrats, Senators Bob Graham and John Kerry, each recovering from major hospital surgeries just days earlier, nonetheless felt compelled to call and e-mail their donors, despite their bandages, medications, or catheters.
Here we go again, except that it began months ago, every major presidential campaign lining up its most valuable players, its fundraising teams.
The interminable presidential election process seems more incomprehensible with each cycle. In 1991, the year before his unsuccessful reelection campaign, President George H.W. Bush raised approximately $10 million; in 2003, his son, President George W. Bush, raised $128 million for his successful 2004 campaign. By the time the last accountant left the building, the younger Bush and Senator John Kerry’s final record-shattering tallies of money raised for their 2004 presidential primary campaigns alone were roughly $270 million and $235 million, respectively. And from March through the general election, their two campaigns alone mercilessly pummeled the American people with more than 630,000 commercials nationwide. The biggest winners undoubtedly were the broadcast and campaign consultant industries; they’ll get much richer in 2008.
Just two years after the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law was passed and subsequently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, the national political process is more awash in vested interest money than anytime in history. The total amount of money raised by candidates in the 2004 presidential primaries and caucuses shot up to $674 million, nearly double the amount ($352 million) in the 2000 primaries. Doubling the individual contribution limits from $1,000 to $2,000 contributed mightily to that increase, a necessary concession along with others by reformers to achieve the legislation’s enactment. Outside “independent” political advocacy expenditures from “527” groups — sometimes called the “new soft money” — continue to rise, from $276 million in 2002 to roughly $302 million in 2006, from about $600 million in the 2004 presidential election to undoubtedly more than that in 2008. Ready money is more accessible now than ever before, a credit-card click away via Internet political giving, which has also jumped substantially, most dramatically when the presidential campaign of the then-Governor of Vermont, Howard Dean, received an unprecedented $41 million in 2003 from more than 300,000 individual donors.
But for 2008 and beyond, we face an utterly bizarre situation in this post-truth world, in which immediately following “historic reform” our presidential campaigns are substantially more expensive and dependent on money than ever. Wealthy donors seeking favors in Washington are as entrenched or more so, for years now overtly bundling and literally numbering their checks, to ensure that their industries and other groups get “credit” for their loyalty and largess. And the astonishing booty they have received in favors —subsidies, tax breaks, non-regulation, non-investigation, and so forth — is worth many times more, not unlike backing a fleet of trucks up to Fort Knox, only undoubtedly worse and all legal, of course. No journalist has ever adequately inventoried the cumulative damage to the nation of such widespread, “business as usual” chicaneries.
But even more ironic, the frontrunner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, campaign finance reformer Senator John McCain, is considered likely to opt out of the post-Watergate presidential public financing system. So too will many of the other major candidates turn down matching funds in the primaries, as Bush, Kerry, and Dean did in 2004. But the nominees are very likely to also reject taxpayer funds — and federal spending limitations — in the general election, which has not happened since Richard Nixon’s ill-fated re-election in 1972. Departing Federal Election Commission chairman Michael E. Toner was recently quoted in The Washington Post as saying that the 2008 presidential election will be “the longest and most expensive in American history” with the leading candidates attempting “to raise $500 million or more for their campaigns.” He said that “presidential candidates will likely need to raise at least $100 million by the end of 2007 to be a top-tier candidate.”
Recent history of the past three decades tells us that the candidate raising the most money soonest almost always wins. Which 2008 “ka-ching” presidential candidates will be able to raise $274,000 a day every day for the next full year? Political reporters will cover the wealth primary in 2007, mostly just the money totals with euphemisms about the candidates’ building “effective organizations,” the only real horse race for them. What exactly has the next Fundraiser-in-Chief, also known as the next President of the United States, mortgaged of his or her and ultimately America’s soul, in order to obtain power?
We’ve come a long, long way from Abraham Lincoln, Harry Truman, or Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer and governor of Georgia who told me for The Buying of the President 2004 that his 1976 White House triumph couldn’t have happened without the matching fund system, and “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.” He went on to say, “And we are the only democratic nation in the world, in the western world, within which that blight or cancer is affecting our system.”
Few people in Washington believe that this will change anytime soon. Reformer Russell Feingold (along with Christopher Shays in the House of Representatives) will reintroduce his legislation to repair the broken presidential public financing system in the U.S. Senate, where 40 percent are millionaires (in a nation with fewer than 1 percent millionaires and a per capita personal income of about $33,000). If the broken presidential public financing system is fixed, which is uncertain at best, any new law likely would not take effect until 2012.
That’s because the 2008 presidential election, theoretically the most open race for the White House since 1952, began some time ago.