[EL] WARNING: SNARK AHEAD RE: Supreme Court and campaign finance

[Trevor Potter]

This post only serves to remind that all IEs are not the same. While it may be true that truly independent IEs run the risk of backfiring and make candidates nervous, in other circumstances they are essentially established or blessed by the candidate and their campaign, and serve a very useful deep-pocketed supplemental (even primary) role in the election. I was struck while reading Ken Vogel's "Big Money" book about the 2012 election by the blatancy of the Romney and Obama creations of "their" SuperPacs, and the close ties (meetings, travel etc) between Gingrich/ Adelson and Santorum/Friess. In these circumstances, contributions to the IEs were the functional equivalent of contributions to the candidates, and clearly immensely appreciated.

Trevor Potter

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From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] on behalf of Thomas J. Cares [Tom at TomCares.com]
Sent: Monday, July 07, 2014 7:23 AM
To: Election Law
Subject: Re: [EL] WARNING: SNARK AHEAD RE: Supreme Court and campaign finance

I think that's exactly (!!!) the point. IEs are not nearly as helpful or critical to a campaign's success as direct contributions. Candidates do not depend on them as much as campaign funds. And, dollar for dollar, they are not appreciated nearly as much.

So, when a candidate is "supported" by massive IE spending (rather than a giant check to a campaign they completely control), they will not feel as dependent on the donor, or as appreciative.

You can't bite the hand that feeds you. But maybe you can bite the hand that puts out supportive messages that are wasteful, counter your own, or backfire by being over the top or annoying. And what the 'bite the hand' metaphor amounts to is "independence." Once elected, how can you be expected to be impartial towards (and not dependent on) a special interested who gave you the funds to pay all your campaign staffers, put together your campaign events, put out your own meticulously crafted messages, etc, etc.

And, if it sometimes happens that a legislator might vote a certain a way on obscure legislation, because it's just not worth losing an 8k campaign contribution over - because it's obscure, it seems misguided to start experimenting with $80k or $800k.

...Let the special interests' IEs make fools of their candidates*.


-Thomas Cares

*(They're more than happy to make fools of their candidates' opponents if they can be successful in doing so).


On Sun, Jul 6, 2014 at 11:37 PM, Larry Levine <larrylevine at earthlink.net<mailto:larrylevine at earthlink.net>> wrote:
The issue would come down to independent expenditures, which I believe to be the most distorting and corrupting influence in the electoral process. As a campaign consultant I always tense up when I know someone is about to hire another consultant to spend heavily in support of my candidate. I know much of the money will be wasted; some of it will be used to make messages that counter, or at least don’t support the messages of our campaign; and frequently the IE committee will do things for which my candidate will be held responsible – like over-the-top attacks on the opposition, posting of signs on public parkways and buildings, etc. For every IE that has served to help elect a candidate there probably are 10 examples of IEs that turned out either useless or counter-productive. So, once again, I would rather see the money go directly to the candidate, be reported and let the voters make the judgment.
Thanks,
Larry
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