Tuesday, October 28, 2008
"Small donor" watch: A remarkable report from CBS News
Via Glenn Reynolds, the Tiffany Network issues a remarkable report on Barack Obama's fundraising.
It is remarkable that CBS News would run a report even this critical of Barack Obama even this late in the election cycle. Too late to make a difference, but early enough to allow CBS to claim it was fair to John McCain!
It is remarkable that this story had to be broken by bloggers and their readers, but entirely unremarkable that CBS News made no mention of that fact.
It is remarkable that the Obama campaign has exploited a loophole -- the "small donation" exception to disclosure requirements -- in the federal campaign finance laws to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. It disabled the standard credit card validation function on its web site so that it could "plausibly" deny any knowledge that thousands of donors had exceeded the legal limit by giving in small bits, and it opted out of the government system to avoid the aggregate spending limits.
It is remarkable that we have heard none of the usual complaints of "money politics" that issue forth from the press when Republicans raise a lot of money. Why would that be?
It is unremarkable that the Democrats and the press were so willing to assassinate campaign finance reform when it worked against their candidate. This year, there is a Republican candidate who -- for better or worse -- has led the fight to regulate campaign finance reform. The "hope and change" candidate has made a mockery of John McCain's principled commitment to campaign finance regulation, humiliating him before his fellow Republicans who never supported the McCain-Feingold law. With the lesson of Barack Obama's bait and switch, will any national politician support campaign finance regulation ever again? There would be no surer sign of stupidity or senility. The regulation of campaign donations is effectively dead, and it was Barack Obama who killed it.
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