Stealth Campaigns
A Five-Part Examination of the Independent Committees Shaping the Presidential Race
BY Sara Fritz | April 30, 2008
Their names roll off the tongue with a patriotic cadence: Freedom’s Watch, Democracy Alliance, Citizens United, Progress for America, Foundation for a Secure and Prosperous America. These are the new giants of American politics, the well-funded groups organized behind a veil of secrecy to influence the voters’ choice for president of the United States in 2008.
Financed by many of the nation’s wealthiest investors and business leaders, as well as millions of small donors, these organizations are responsible for a flood of political attack advertising. Their work threatens to drown out the traditional voices of the Republican and Democratic parties and undercut the presidential candidates’ efforts to control their own messages.
These include flag-waving conservative organizations responsible for television ads such as one in which a U.S. marine recently returned from Iraq assails unnamed members of “Congress [who] talk about surrendering.” They include the cheeky liberals who wanted to change the name of General Petraeus to General Betray Us. They include the single-minded activists who obsessed on the alleged misdeeds of Senator Hillary Clinton. Yet while they were quick to delve into any real or imagined political scandal that might change the course of the campaign in their favored direction, there was one thing that most of these groups refused to make public: the names of their funders.
Behind the patriotic gloss and high-quality production values of their advertising, these organizations were operating as renegades along the untested margins of the law that purports to control spending in presidential elections. With their identities hidden under stunningly misleading names and legal technicalities, many offered questionable facts and unproven charges intended to confuse voters or appeal to their worst prejudices.
The result, veteran Democratic pollster Peter Hart told the Center for Public Integrity, was “democracy run amok.”
The irony is that all this negative advertising was unleashed by the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002, which was intended to limit political contributions and improve the electoral process. The goal was to control “soft money,” which in the patois of political insiders means money given with political intent but not specifically in support of a candidate; this contrasts with “hard money,” the tightly controlled and limited direct contributions to candidates’ campaigns and to parties.
Senators Russ Feingold and John McCain, lead backers of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (Office of Senator Russ Feingold)The 2002 law prohibited parties from taking soft money, but political money is insistent in finding a productive channel. Very quickly it was flowing into the coffers of independent groups that have become such a force that they are changing the political landscape. In the 2004 presidential campaign, they found their voice, and major groups in support of both parties found themselves defending charges of corrupt collusion – and paying fines to the Federal Election Commission.
Critics of the reform were obviously wrong when they predicted that it would stifle free speech. But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the leading GOP opponent of the legislation, did foresee one of the law’s biggest drawbacks. “McCain-Feingold does not take the money out of politics,” he said. “It takes the parties out of politics.” Even though the Democratic and Republican parties were raising record amounts of hard money, they found that the upstarts were even better funded and the parties’ voices struggled to compete with the independent groups’ aggressive advertising.
In the 2004 election, it was a pro-Republican group, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, that had the biggest impact by producing an ad that smeared the military record of Democratic nominee John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran. By 2008, the technique of “swift-boating,” as it came to be called, had become so widespread that it was considered an integral part of the presidential selection process. These groups were technically independent of the candidates and parties, but there was seldom — if ever — any mystery about the politicians who would benefit from their negative advertising.
Hart said the proliferation of independent advertising groups with hidden motivations made it difficult for voters to assess the information they received from broadcast advertising. “In the end,” he said in an interview, “all it means is voters are getting bombarded with a message they don’t know where it’s coming from, and there’s no accountability.” He said the real beneficiaries of this “boondoggle” were the media consulting firms that made millions of dollars creating and placing the ads on broadcast outlets, as well as the broadcasters themselves. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, independent groups reported spending more than $200 million on the 2006 elections and more than $440 million on the last presidential election, in 2004. And those numbers only include one type of independent organizations: 527 committees.