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Stealth Campaigns – Part Five

The $20 Million Men

We may never know exactly why any American would contribute more than $20 million in a single year to influence a presidential election. That is because Bob Perry, a residential housing developer in Houston, Texas, refuses to explain his reasoning and investor George Soros is somewhat vague about his motives.

Neither man seems to want—or need—anything in return from the candidates they finance. Men in the top tier of wealth are not usually seeking a government job or a framed, autographed photo of themselves with the president. And while they are funding some of the most ideologically extreme advertising in American history—Soros on the left and Perry on the right—both men prefer to portray themselves as political centrists.

No matter what their reasons, it was astonishing to many long-time observers of campaign financing that rich Americans were making record-breaking political contributions legally after three decades of post-Watergate efforts by Congress to limit the amounts of money that flow into campaign coffers. The role played by Soros, Perry, and other wealthy men and women in financing today’s presidential selection process suggests that little has changed since 1974, when the public was outraged that millionaire insurance executive W. Clement Stone had secretly provided more than $2 million to assist the reelection of Richard M. Nixon.

In fact, neither Perry nor Soros were big political contributors until after the enactment of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act, whose stated aim was to eliminate unregulated contributions. It was as if the new law had triggered an all-out arms race between Democrats and Republicans to see which camp could create the biggest independent, permanent campaign apparatus. In 2008, this race was still under way as independent groups scouted for new combatants in the contest of writing big checks. In the process, they were elevating the place of secrecy and negativity in the campaign arsenal, dramatically reshaping the political landscape, and attracting an array of corruption allegations.

As the 2008 election got under way, more new names appeared on the list of big contributors to independent groups. One of the most prominent was Sheldon Adelson, owner of the Las Vegas Sands, whom Forbes magazine has identified as the nation’s third-richest man. Adelson, who advocates a hard, pro-Israeli line in the Middle East, helped to establish the conservative independent group Freedom’s Watch with an early contribution. His influence is apparently reflected in the group’s decision to mount an energetic campaign against what its website calls “radical Islam and the emerging Iranian threat.” A few months earlier, he contributed $1 million to a new independent group established by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Some political insiders think the 2002 law’s abolition of soft-money contributions to political parties actually encouraged wealthy donors to contribute even larger sums to independent groups. It takes a lot of concentration for wealthy people to pass out hard-money donations of no more than $4,600 to each of a wide variety of candidates. But when they decide to fund an independent group, they only need to write one big check.

Conservative strategist Grover Norquist noted that it is easy to create a new independent advocacy organization with just a few big checks. “Normally that would be the party’s job,” Norquist told The Associated Press. “But if you can only write a $2,000 check to the parties, five guys can’t get together and do that. But five guys can get together and set up Freedom’s Watch . . . and can make an impact.” Democratic campaign consultant Bill Carrick said men and women who in past elections have acted as bundlers for parties – people who gather many of those small checks from individual donors – also prefer the option of giving to an independent, election-related group instead: “Sometimes, if you go to some traditional fundraising person and they decide, ‘Well, it would be easier for me just to write a check to this 527 [one kind of independent group, named after the section of the federal tax code that governs it] . . .than it would be for me to sit on the phone for hours asking friends and associates to give money to the campaign.’”

Perry’s political giving has been described as the natural extension of his aggressive support for charities. If he sees something that interests him, he gives generously to it and seldom asks to be consulted about how the money will be spent. In April 2007, Texas Monthly quoted an unnamed friend who described Perry’s contributions as “completely binary — the switch is on or the switch is off; he believes in it or he doesn’t.”

In 2004, Perry made his debut as a major national donor to independent GOP committees and quickly became a leading player. He gave $4.5 million to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, $3 million to Progress for America, and $600,000 to Club for Growth. Half of his 2006 contributions of $10 million went to the Economic Freedom Fund, which ran attack ads in congressional races in West Virginia, Indiana, Georgia, Iowa, Oregon, Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada. Among the political issues that have drawn his attention in recent years: tort reform, immigration reform, education, tax relief, public safety, and job creation. Perhaps because he is a contractor and presumably hires immigrant labor, he does not share the Republican Party’s increasing interest in deporting undocumented workers.