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

[Larry Levine]

I think the reality of dealing with IEs these days doesn’t fit the narrative you outlined. Some of these IEs have become such regular players than candidates and consultants court them just as surely as they would and individual major donor. Member organizations of IE committees submit issues questionnaires to candidates, who know exactly who they are courting. Take a look, for instance, at the MICRA coalition, or JOBS PAC. There is no secret as to what each is up to and how they operate. Candidates court the individual member groups. The game is to either win support of one of these IE committees or convince them to play elsewhere. Were the narrative you sketch completely true I might agree with it. However, it isn’t working that way. Political directors of some of the member organizations run point on the candidate screening, including direct contact with the candidates up to the moment when that is no longer legal. Then the candidate is told “I no longer can talk with you,” which is code for “we’re in.” 

Larry 

 

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Thomas J. Cares
Sent: Monday, July 07, 2014 4:24 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> 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

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20140707/6ed51711/attachment.html>