Our Views: Hidden donors sway politics
The good news is that Louisiana’s presidential primary on March 24 may be relevant to the task of choosing the next Republican nominee for the highest office in the land.
The bad news is that the airwaves and newspapers may be filled with negative advertising of the type that has pounded voters in the earlier states.
And the worse news: Vast amounts of the attacks will be funded by anonymous wealthy donors, giving their cash to “independent” nonprofit groups created to conceal the donors’ political activities.
There are two categories of big-money political players this year. The “super-PACs” are political action committees that can accept unlimited donations from rich political players, but they must disclose their donors.
Another type is nonprofit “social welfare” organizations and other tax-exempt groups that can spend money without ever reporting the names of their donors.
The Washington Post reported that these new players with confidential donors have spent more than $24 million in the 2012 cycle on political ads naming President Barack Obama or, less frequently, his Republican rivals. That accounts for about 40 percent of the money estimated to have been spent so far on advertising related to the presidential candidates, the Post said. More money has flowed into the campaigns for Senate in battleground states.
Crossroads GPS, a nonprofit group backed by former President George W. Bush’s political guru Karl Rove, has spent more than $10 million on ads targeting Obama over the federal deficit, energy policies and other issues in the 2012 cycle. American Crossroads, a sister group registered as a super-PAC, has spent just $133,000 on such ads, the data show.
The disparity means that nearly all of the broadcast messages that voters have encountered from the Crossroads groups were paid for by persons unknown. The super-PAC side of the operation reported taking in $18.2 million in 2011, including $7 million from Texas billionaire Harold Simmons and his company.
Spokesman Jonathan Collegio said Crossroads GPS is no different than tens of thousands of other nonprofits, from ideological groups to charities, that are entitled to keep their contributors confidential.
“Private organizations don’t have to disclose their donor lists to the government at their beck and call,” Collegio told the Post. “Those who want to support the Crossroads groups have a choice of whether they want to give to a more political- or issue-oriented effort, and they make their decisions according to their tastes and preferences.”
And so they get to play politics without taking responsibility for the messages, and with no contribution limits.
The rule of thumb for social-welfare groups, business groups and other nonprofits is that they must spend less than half their budget on election activities to avoid disclosure of donors, the Post reported. Many nonprofits contend that that leaves them free to spend the rest of their budget on “issue ads,” which often include scathing and pointed attacks on individual politicians but don’t explicitly tell viewers how to vote. Thus, ads might say “tell President Obama not to” do something or the other that the nonprofits wish to criticize.
The super-PAC donors have also provided millions to fund attack ads aimed at the various candidates in the GOP primaries.
For a century, the trend in American law and policy has been to crack down on the influence of big money in politics, mostly by requiring full disclosure of contributions. The pushback, legal and political, has now resulted in a system that makes the robber barons of a century ago look like pikers.
A wealthy individual can now back his chosen candidate with contributions in the millions of dollars, so long as the PAC or nonprofit is not “coordinating” its expenditures with a campaign. This restriction is meaningless, given the number of consultants and admen with close ties to candidates running the new money-raising political machines.
This is a new and depressing development in American democracy, a corporatizing of attack politics.
If the GOP candidates are still hacking away at each other, Louisiana will get a first-hand look at their “uncoordinated” friends’ attack ads next month.