Why do these people make such large campaign contributions if they don’t care about the election?!
This might not be as big a story if it were not about McCain – author of the McCain-Feingold Bill, what currently passes for campaign finance reform in America.
From the beginning of the quote in the OP: “Harry Sargeant III, a former naval officer and the owner of an oil-trading company that recently inked defense contracts potentially worth more than $1 billion…”
That doesn’t mean he’s worth $1B, but clearly the amounts of the suspicious contributions are orders of magnitude below what he hopes to gain if the GOP stays in control of the Executive Branch.
Sounds familiar? You bet. It hit the news some months ago when most people became aware of bundling for the first time - and learned the name Norman Hsu.
And I’ll say the same thing I said then - if there is evidence that Sargeant engaged in illegal activities with his bundling, then McCain should give up the donations (return them or donate them to charity) just as Hillary Clinton did when the Hsu mess hit.
Frankly, I don’t think there is more you can do beyond that so long as bundling remains legal, and I didn’t beat up on Clinton much at the time precisely because of this.
Given the level of contributions that Obama is getting, he must be tapping into sources who have never contributed to presidential campaigns before, too. Both candidates are relying heavily on Bundlers. There was an article in the SJ Merc today about Obama’s network of Bundlers. It’s not on their web site yet, but I’ll check later and see if it is.
That’s exactly what I came here to post. Hsu’s story came to light after a paper in San Francisco discovered that every member of a family of modest means, connected to Hsu in some way, had given thousands of dollars to Hillary Clinton’s campaigns even though they almost never voted. It sounds pretty similar to this story.
Bundling is perfectly legal, btw, and I can’t see why it should be otherwise.
I know there’d been talk about changing the laws so that bundlers would have to be identified as such, so that people would know who was gaining influence through their bundling. If that wasn’t passed, it should be, IMHO.
The issue here, as it was in the Hsu case, is that a number of contributors gave amounts that were seemingly beyond their ability to give. One possibility suggested by common sense is that money was given to them to give in turn to McCain, which would be illegal.
Campaign finance reform is like the war on drugs. In the same manner that some people will always do drugs, some people will always want to contribute money to political campaigns. You can push it underground through 527’s, soft money contributions, or any other of a plethora of means described in the above linked-to articles, but in these modern days, money is speech, and you can’t stop people from speaking.
I just saw this last night, and it seems to be on point. It’s certainly a big question mark in my mind, and this one seems even more egregious than the one in the OP.
But (based on previous GD and GQ threads and discussions), while there might not be any countries that have effectively stamped out drug abuse, there are many other democracies where campaign-finance law is truly effective and really does prevent the rich and the corporate interests from wielding political influence vastly disproportionate to their numbers. (Their political influence will always be somewhat disproportionate to their numbers, of course, campaign funding notwithstanding, just because they are so well-connected.)