Campaign 2012: Election or Auction?

By H. N. Burdett

The rationale for President Obama's recently announced acceptance of political action committee funds to grease the skids for his re-election bid is all too understandable. That it fails the sniff test is regrettable. That it almost certainly further prolongs the restoration of any semblance of decency to political campaign financing is deplorable.

"With so much at stake," Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina said in his announcement of the sell-out to special interests, "we can't allow for two sets of rules in this election whereby the Republican nominee is the beneficiary of unlimited spending and Democrats unilaterally disarm."

In his 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama lambasted the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision - one that is among the more abominable in American judiciary annals - as a ruling that "reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests...to spend without limits in our elections." The president added that he did not feel "elections should be bankrolled by...special interests."

Bill Burton, a co-founder of Priorities USA, a super PAC supporting Obama, asserted, "We're committed to providing a balance to Karl Rove and the Koch brothers, who have pledged more than half a billion dollars to their effort (to defeat Obama)."

Ironically, on the day after the Obama campaign capitulated to fighting-fire-with-fire mentality, Rick Santorum's pitifully under-funded drive to win the Republican presidential nomination made a laughingstock of the well-oiled, all-but-inevitable effort of Mitt Romney to be so anointed by whipping the front-runner in Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota.

In the great game of politics, pragmatism regularly trumps principle. But the line between pragmatism and cynicism is blurred at best. The cynicism of the American electorate at least partially explains the abysmal turnouts at U.S. elections, whereas at this very moment throughout the world men and women defy bullets and bayonets to replace despotic tyrants with their own voices in free elections.

Former Wisconsin Democratic U.S. Senator Russ Feingold, co-author of the campaign finance reform law that the Supreme Court's conservative majority shredded in its Citizens United ruling, characterized the Obama campaign green light to special interests as "dancing with the devil."

Feingold said that this "dumb approach...guts the president's message and the Democratic party's message...people will see this as phony, that Democrats start playing by Republican rules. People will see us as weak and not being a true alternative and just being the same as the other guy."

Bob Edgar, president of Common Cause, issued a statement asserting, "If President Obama had fixed presidential public financing, as he pledged to do in 2008, and seriously gone to bat for more transparency in campaign spending, our political system would be healthier and this would be less of an issue."

Though Edgar said that super PACs would not be abolished by strengthening the presidential campaign financial system, he claimed that "by helping presidential candidates run competitive campaigns from a base of small donors and matching public funds, we would have made it possible for candidates, including the president, to make good on their stated desire to succeed without the aid of super PACS."

The president's determination to outspend which ever opponent the Republican party finally settles upon was announced only three days prior to a report that in 2011 he was outpacing his record-setting contributions four years ago from donors of an aggregated $200 or less.

In 2008, 22 percent of Obama's $96.7 million war chest was pulled from small donations. But lower-end donors contributed 48 percent of the $56.7 million he raised in 2011, according to the Campaign Finance Institute, which tracks money in politics.

The CFI reports that contributors of $200 or less accounted for a mere 9 percent of the $56.3 million Mitt Romney's campaign raised last year. Two-thirds of the Romney contributions came from donors of $2,500, the maximum allowed by an individual to a candidate under Federal Election Commission rules. By comparison with other contenders for the GOP presidential nomination, small contributions made up 49 percent of the funds raised by Newt Gingrich, 48 percent of those raised by Ron Paul and 32 percent by Rick Santorum in 2011.

The Obama campaign decision to take advantage of the Citizen United ruling's "floodgates" of unlimited funds from undisclosed sources contributing to super PACs that support the president will reveal the most admired nation in the world as, at its very core, the moral equivalent of a banana republic.

President Obama's only saving grace is that his misguided submission to playing by rules that thoroughly distort democracy is that he has no viable opponent with the courage to stand up to forces relentlessly seeking the best chief executive money can buy leading a government of, by and for the wealthy.

There must be a redoubling of efforts to seal the coffin of the Citizens United travesty. Small donors truly concerned about their sacred trust and the sanctity of the ballot box who had intended to contribute to the Obama campaign might be better advised to send their checks instead to organizations in the trenches of the battle for campaign finance reform, like Common Cause, Progressives United and Public Citizen. Let the Big Boys duke this one out, while the rest of us dedicate ourselves to ensuring that November will see the very last U.S. presidential auction.
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