It wasn’t quite a year ago, at a citizens’ forum on a sunny New Hampshire afternoon, that President Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich clasped hands and promised to reform the way political campaigns are financed.
Asked whether he would appoint a blue-ribbon panel to examine the system that gives such advantage to lobbyists, wealthy donors and moneyed interest groups, Clinton said, “In a heartbeat, I accept.”
“Let’s shake on that,” Gingrich chimed in. “Good deal.”
How little difference a year can make.
Today, as the presidential campaigns of Clinton and Republican challenger Bob Dole steam toward the August conventions, there is no blue-ribbon panel in sight.
Instead, party operatives, lobbyists and interest groups are pumping tens of millions of dollars into scantly regulated “shadow” campaigns that benefit Clinton and Dole, while skirting campaign spending rules.
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Both candidates enjoy the support of televised “issues advertisements”–Clinton’s are financed by labor unions and Dole’s by business groups–as well as “voter education” programs crafted by party leaders and bankrolled by big-ticket donors with an interest in legislation.
“In essence, all of these efforts are back-door political campaigns, disguised as issues and information campaigns,” said Anthony Corrado, a government professor at Colby College in Maine. “What’s new is the amount of money being poured into them.”
The “shadow” campaigns have clearly accomplished one thing: They have given both candidates relief from federal spending restrictions imposed by Congress and the courts in the 1970s in the wake of the Watergate scandal.
To accept the $62 million that taxpayers give each presidential candidate in the autumn, Clinton and Dole agreed to spend no more than $37 million in their party primaries.
Dole quit the Senate to run for president full-time and on Thursday went to Chicago for a symbolic relaunching of his presidential campaign. He has spent lavishly to lock up the Republican nomination early in the primary season and is up against the $37 million limit.
During the next three months, he is expected to have less than $1 million to campaign around the country.
Clinton faced no primaries, so his campaign still has a war chest with nearly $21 million.
The candidates can accept no more than $1,000 a year from individual companies and people. But no limits exist on donations to the political parties, both of which have attracted big-ticket donors partly by offering access to the candidates.
That money is being used to produce advertisements that will augment the campaigns run by Clinton and Dole.
At the Democratic National Committee’s annual fundraising gala this month, $12.3 million was raised over two days.
Democratic donors who gave at least $50,000 or raised $100,000 were treated to intimate dinners with party officials and briefings by senior administration officials, including Labor Secretary Robert Reich, White House aide George Stephanopoulos and Transportation Secretary Federico Pena.
One dinner was held at Vice President Al Gore’s home, Democratic Party spokeswoman Amy Weiss Tobe said.
Meanwhile, Gingrich and GOP Chairman Haley Barbour recently invited top Republican contributors to join a “Chairman’s Advisory Board,” allowing those who gave $5,000 a year to “work intimately” with party leaders, Republican literature said. The donors would be invited to meet with Dole and would enjoy special privileges at the San Diego convention.
A Republican fundraising gala in January netted about $16.3 million.
This month, the Republican National Committee launched a national television ad campaign by airing a 30-second spot mocking Clinton’s 1993 support for a 4.3 cent-per-gallon gas tax increase.
Barbour told reporters that Republicans would spend about $300,000 airing the gas-tax ad for two weeks and then follow with a further $20 million of spots targeting Clinton that will run through the August convention in San Diego.
A new ad Barbour unveiled Thursday ridicules Clinton’s commitment by splicing together clips in which he offered different timetables for balancing the budget, according to an Associated Press report.
“I would present a five-year plan to balance the budget,” Clinton says in a 1992 clip. Then: “We could do it in seven years . . . I think we can reach it in nine years . . . balance the budget in 10 years . . . so we’re between seven and nine now.”
The Democratic National Committee recently has spent about $1 million a week on a TV campaign designed to bolster Clinton in key regions, including Florida, Tennessee, parts of California and some Midwest states.
The ads show Dole alongside Gingrich and feature the slogan “The old ways don’t work.” Clinton’s plans are called “the new way.”
The committee already has spent more than $25 million on the campaign.
“It is subterfuge campaigning,” said Alex Benes, managing director of the Center for Public Integrity, an election watchdog group.
“The parties contend the ad campaigns are for party building and education, but that is a bit disingenuous,” Benes said. “This is presidential politics flying beneath the radar. It is a time-tested tactic, but not in the spirit of the laws.”
Separate campaigns have been launched by groups with an interest in legislation.
The AFL-CIO announced this month that it will spend about $35 million on a voter education campaign that will boost Clinton by attacking Republican efforts to block a minimum wage increase and curtail Medicare.
It is running the ads in the districts of the most vulnerable of the 73 House Republican freshmen–those 33 who won in 1994 with less than 55 percent of the vote in congressional districts carried by Clinton in 1992.
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In response to the union campaign, a coalition of pro-business political action committees, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, will coordinate a $20 million advertising program that centers on minimum-wage rules and workplace safety. Those ads will target the same districts as the union’s.
“The influx of money this election cycle is unprecedented and disturbing,” said Sheila Krumholz, project director with the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics.
“These `issues advocacy’ campaigns affect the presidential race but they’re run by groups that don’t have to report where the money is coming from and what they’re trying to accomplish.”
Corrado said, “Business and labor have always spent millions of dollars outside of the campaign system communicating with their members and engaging in electoral activities, but these ads emphasize the battleground issues of the campaign and are designed to make one candidate’s prospects better than the other’s.”
“Under federal law, it is not a campaign ad unless it expressly advocates the defeat of one candidate or election of the other,” he said. “The problem, is, you don’t know how much money is being raised, and to what extent it is being used to influence elections.”