on Jul 1st, 2007Obama sets money record
Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama announced today his campaign raised $32.5 million in the past three months, the largest quarterly sum ever for any Democrat in a pre-election year.
More than 154,000 donors contributed to the Illinois senator’s campaign in the second quarter.
Hillary Clinton has yet to announce her second-quarter tally; her campaign has indicated an expected total of $27-28 million.
The full story from Reuters is here.
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Is there a prescribed cap on fund-raising in the US - or is financial sponsorship of candidates effectively unlimited ?
In this country, big funders of both major parties were historically awarded peerages and knighthoods, although apparently for quite coincidental reasons which were clearly unrelated to politics.
That was supposed to have been stopped a few years ago, until the current administration came up with the clever idea of re-casting such donations as loans (not necessarily ever due for repayment).
There is an ongoing criminal investigation which is going into this in some detail. They’ve interviewed Tony Blair a couple of times recently. This so-called ‘cash for honours’ scandal is likely to lead to much tighter controls on donations to political parties.
In future, there may well be a government-set budget for each election campaign, which at least will save us all from the most intrusive kind of political TV advertising.
Phew.
Hi, I’m flying and look forward to discussing this. For now, I wanted to say that since one of the Thinking Blogger awards I was allowed to give was never claimed and the blog’s been dormant since April 22 I’ve revoked it and given it to you! Details here:
http://ellaella.wordpress.com/2007/04/26/whod-have-thought/
Phew? You’ll really say phew in a minute or two. As there is no real limit on spending, campaign finance reform has been an issue here, moreso last time but we’re in early days this round. Ironically, one of the two main sponsors of reform was John McCain who only yesterday trimmed his campaign staff because his fund-raising is falling short. There are spending limits for publicly-funded campaigns (we have an option of giving $3 of our income tax to this fund) but some eschew it because of the limits.
There is a wink-wink limit on individual donations but I say wink-wink because with Political Action Committees (PACs) and other entities, donations can soar. It’s multi-leveled and I found a little chart for you (and anyone else) here - you can also search this site for info on publicly funded campaigns:
http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/contrib.shtml#Chart
What’s fascinating to me about Obama’s money is that it’s generally small amounts (often well under $100) from many people rather than the maximum allowed from not so many, a la Hillary. Time Magazine had a good piece on that last week:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1638615,00.html?xid=feed-aol-nation
There’s also an insightful, short essay from yesterday from the Washington Monthly:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_07/011599.php
Since we don’t have knighthoods and peerages, big donors are often rewarded with ambassadorships. Our amb. to the Court of St. James is always rich because it costs of a lot of out-of-pocket money to hold up the social end.
Why do I think the cash for honors scandal goes back to John Major’s time? I recall something like that impacting his job. And is Mohammed Fayed still trying to buy his citizenship? (and why is it called that when you (collectively) are called subjects, not citizens?)
Now aren’t you sorry you asked?
Not at all, Ella - thanks very much for the explanation.
That’s more or less as I had thought really - somebody must be paying for all those political adverts which you have to suffer.
John Major - yes, if there was a scandal around, he always seemed to end up taking the rap.
That was unfortunate for him, since it was he who had invented the new political mantra of ‘Back to Basics’ and ‘Family Values’ - clearly forgetting that one of his ministers was a perjurer and his Party Chairman was a serial dissembler.
Meanwhile several of his cabinet were doing rather more than just consulting their secretaries, and he himself was involved in a 12-year clandestine liaison with his Health and Food Minister.
I’m not pretending that any of us is perfect, by the way. It was just the deep irony of John Major so patronisingly and earnestly preaching the virtues of perfection which always seemed so rich, when he and his team so blithely assumed that such strictures could not possibly apply to them.
It must be noted, though, that the reviews of Major’s new book on cricket are first class. The same can’t be said in the case of his Premiership, unfortunately.