It's payback time in Bushland. As June comes to an end, President Bush and Vice President Cheney are going to the people they've enriched over the last two-and-a-half years and who they've promised to fight to enrich even further, and asking them to help build the most obscenely porcine campaign war-chest in almost all of American political history.
Who are these happy backers of the GOP?
- Corporate executives from the oil, gas, electricity, nuke, defense, banking, securities, accounting, telecom, agribusiness, pharmaceutical, HMO, mining, chemical, timber and real estate industries, and their spouses.
- All the humdrum companies benefiting from the lack of a crackdown on offshore tax havens.
- All the individual wealthy enjoying their newly lowered tax brackets.
- The lobbyists who grease the skids for all of the above.
Bush-Cheney '04 Inc., as it is officially known, expects to bring in at least $20 million by the Federal Election Commission's June 30 filing deadline for the current quarter. They had almost hit $12 million by June 23, counting a $3.5 million kickoff event in DC and a $4.1 blowout in NYC. Some campaign officials say they might tally as much as $26 million -- a number that would equal the total raised by
all nine declared Democratic presidential candidates in the first three months of the year.
But this is just the beginning. Campaign officials are also projecting that Bush will raise at least $170 million in all for next year's primaries. This staggering sum is far more than anyone needs to run a competitive campaign next year, let alone an incumbent president with no challengers from his own party. No one doubts that Bush will be able to collect it, based on the $101 million he raised for the primaries in 2000, plus the dubious decision by the new McCain-Feingold law to double the individual contribution limit to $2,000.
To put this in proper perspective, that $170 million will be more than the total combined amount of private money raised for the presidential primaries by Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, George H.W. Bush in 1988 and 1992, and Bob Dole in 1996, adjusted for inflation. Bush can do this because, unlike all his forbears, he is choosing once again to opt out of the voluntary spending limits that attach to any presidential candidate seeking public matching funds for the primaries.
So, to be perfectly clear, President Bush is trashing a presidential campaign finance system that was good enough for his Poppy and Ronald Reagan. But, like President Clinton, who also pulled out all the stops for his re-election campaign in 1996, Junior is leaving nothing to chance. Only, instead of charging fatcats $20,000 to join him for an hour-long coffee, he's asking that amount for a 20-second back-stage snapshot! Talk about inflation.
(Technically, a Clinton coffee could be gotten for a $20,000 "soft money" check to the Democratic National Committee, which is now illegal, while a Bush photo-keepsake is for a donor who fulfills his pledge to raise $20,000 in hard money for his campaign -- but the effect is the same.)
Asked about Bush's unrivaled dash for cash, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer denied that the President was doing anything extraordinary. "I think the amount of money that candidates raise in our democracy is a reflection of the amount of support they have around the country," he said. "The President is proud to have the support of the American people, and the American people will ultimately be the ones who decide how much funding goes to any Democrat or any Republican."
A truer statement of what critic Tom Frank calls "market democracy," in which we are said to vote with our dollars, could not be found. The fact that only one-quarter of one-percent of the population even makes a meaningful campaign contribution (of $200 or more) and that this "donor class" is far richer, maler, older and whiter than the rest of America means nothing to believers in market democracy.
The reality of the Bush Cheney '04 Inc. lucre-naut is a lot seamier. Take Republican uber-lobbyist Wayne Berman, who popped up on CNN a week ago at the campaign's opening bacchanal in Washington. Berman is a Ranger, which means he has pledged to raise $200,000 for the campaign; in 2000, he was a Pioneer who raised at least $100,000. Asked by Jonathan Karl what he got in return for all that heavy-lifting, he said, "Last time, you got a chance to buy some good cufflinks." He insisted that he didn't get anything more tangible, other than a chance "to participate in the process."
Of course, Wayne Berman's definition of participating "in the process" is a lot different than the average person's. Back in 1999 the Bush campaign actually asked him to suspend his fundraising on its behalf after his name surfaced in a major corruption scandal in Connecticut. The Republican state treasurer, Paul Silvester, was convicted on money-laundering and racketeering charges after he steered lucrative state pension fund contracts -- with Berman's help -- to various Republican firms and fatcats in exchange for kickbacks and campaign contributions.
Berman took in at least $1.4 million in finder's fees for helping fellow Bush Pioneer Maurice Greenberg and the Carlyle Group each snag huge state pension fund accounts. This made him a liability to Bush in 2000, but -- as Berman was listed prominently as a co-chair of the campaign's NYC fundraiser Monday night -- obviously times have changed.
Big campaign contributors rarely give solely for altruistic reasons. Many of them are looking for policy paybacks, such as tax breaks or freedom from environmental and safety regulations. Thus we have Bush drastically loosening clean air rules, proposing that prescription drug benefits be used to channel Medicare patients into private HMOs, and maintaining government contracts for corporations who take advantage of offshore tax havens.
Republican consultant Scott Reed, a Berman partner, says that the purpose of the president's dash for cash is "to overwhelm the Democrats, to demoralize them, and to create this sense of inevitability that Bush cannot be beaten." But there is a chance that Bush's prodigious fundraising could be his campaign's Achilles heel.
In the summer of 1999, a Wall Street Journal poll asked voters if Bush's then-record-breaking haul of $37 million for his first campaign was "impressive and a sign of broad-based support" or "excessive and a sign of what's wrong with politics today." By 56 percent to 29 percent, the public said the latter. And polls today regularly show that the public thinks the Bush Administration is doing too much for its wealthy backers and not enough for average folks.
The question is whether people will start drawing connections between Bush's war-chest, the wealthy special interests filling it, and the policies that result. Unfortunately, people who defended Clinton's fundraising excesses will have a hard time attacking Bush's. And it's very likely whoever wins the Democratic nomination will undoubtedly be saddled by some similar obligations to big donors.
But even if they're tainted by the requirements of big money fundraising, Bush's Democratic rivals could distinguish themselves by coming out for reforms that would overhaul the present system in a meaningful way. And there's nothing to stop the public interest community from uniting around this demand. They should take a look at the Clean Money/Clean Elections systems of Arizona and Maine, where more than half the candidates for state office -- including the governor of Arizona -- participated in a full public funding option that freed them from any post-election obligations to major donors and the special interests they often represent. We can get the market out of our democracy. Another way is possible.
Micah L. Sifry is senior analyst with Public Campaign.
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