by John McCormick, updated
NEW UPDATE: Obama’s campaign has now provided an undated copy of an amended 2006 tax return that shows he and his wife did contribute to the federal matching program that year. But it remains unclear when the amendment was made and why that version was not provided to reporters when the senator’s tax records were posted on the campaign’s Web site several weeks ago.
INDIANAPOLIS – Sen. Barack Obama said today that he was not trying to send a signal earlier this week during a meeting with donors in Washington that he might back away from a pledge he made last year to accept public financing if the Republican nominee does the same.
“I really wasn’t trying to send a signal,” Obama told reporters this morning. “I was talking to a group of funders who are representative of over 1.3 million who have been giving us donations and applauding them for doing what I think all of us who have been interested in campaign finance reform have touted as the way to go, which is small donations in large numbers and a lot of people participating, as opposed to a few people participating.”
Obama said what he was trying to suggest was that through the Internet and enthusiasm about his campaign he has created a “model for being able to compete at the highest levels of politics without being dependent on big-moneyed interests.”
Should he win the Democratic nomination, Obama said he continues to believe that he could cut a deal with presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain to address spending and public financing for the general election campaign.
“I would like to see a system preserved,” he said. “And I intend, if I am the nominee, to have conversations with Sen. McCain about how to move forward in a way that doesn’t allow third parties to overwhelm the system.”
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McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds issued this statement in response: “We will always welcome an open discussion with Barack Obama, but he has clearly committed to public financing in the general election should he win his party’s nomination, and we expect him to keep his word. Any hedging or clever language from Sen. Obama seems more like something you would read in a predatory home-loan, not the ‘Audacity of Hope.'”Obama, meanwhile, suggested that the current system is antiquated in the age of the Internet, where donors can easily send money to national candidates and bypass a check-off system on their tax returns that provides public presidential campaign funding.
“It is creaky and needs to be reformed if it is going to work,” he said. “We know that the check-off system has been declining in participation, and as a consequence, the amount of money raised through the public finance system may be substantially lower than the amount of money that can be raised through small donations over the Internet.”
Obama said the current system presents candidates with “some pretty tough decisions in terms of how they want to move forward, if they want to compete in as many states as possible.”
The Illinois Democrat said he envisions a bipartisan group would be needed to draft reforms that would limit spending by candidates and outside groups. “I don’t think that’s something that’s going to be fixed just by legislative fiat by one party,” he said.
Obama said both Republicans and Democrats are guilty of spending too much to try to influence elections, but he is unsure whether such reforms could really be accomplished in the heat of a general election campaign.
“I think everybody – including the public – would benefit from a system in which you did not have third-parties raining down millions of dollars, primarily in negative ads directed at the other candidates, which I think will be a distraction from the substantive issues of the campaign,” he said. “Whether or not we can pull it off, I don’t know.”
Obama was also asked whether his money bundlers have any undo influence on his policies.
“First of all, I think it’s important to know that from the start we said we would disclose all our bundlers,” he said. “I thought that was a very important principal that people knew who was raising significant amounts of money from me, or on my behalf. We have a national finance committee. They are very active, although they don’t interact much with me. They interact mostly with each other. They are not, as a general rule, part of my day-to-day policy or advisory committee. Although there are some people who have raised money for me who are also prominent business leaders, and, so, for example, if we were putting forward an economic plan and there was some expertise there, we might tap into it. But they’re not, as a general rule, part of our policy-making apparatus or determining the course of the campaign. Their focus is on raising money.”
Obama attributed his lack of a contribution to the federal check program in 2005 and 2006 to an error on the part of his accountant.
“I have always checked off $3 in the past, so I’m going to have to talk to my accountant,” he said. “That may have been an oversight or a mistake. In all my previous years when I’ve prepared it, I have, so I should find out what’s going on there. This may be a situation where my accountant, through oversight, didn’t do it.”