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By The Hill Editors
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Posted: 09/26/07 07:52 PM [ET] |
No candidate running for the presidency is approaching the third-quarter fundraising deadline this weekend in the same way that he or she approached the first or second.
Back in those heady days, when the presidential campaign was fresh and new rather than the continuous background noise of public life, White House hopefuls simply wanted to accumulate as much money as possible.
This was the money primary, and the gathering of a massive war chest was deemed simple proof of popularity and viability. The policy could be summed up as “never mind the quality, it’s quantity that matters.”
No longer. Quantity still matters, but not to the exclusion of everything else. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) decision to return $850,000 bundled for her campaign by the previously unknown mega-fundraiser, Norman Hsu, was a massive shot across the bow of each candidate.
Cash is still king, but it has to be clean cash. Hsu was wanted on outstanding fraud charges and is now being “processed” by the justice system. He is not the kind of benefactor that anyone wants in their accounts between now and Election Day next year.
Campaigns have, as The Hill’s Sam Youngman reported Tuesday, instituted criminal background checks on donors. Although Clinton took the biggest hit in the Hsu affair, Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Joseph Biden (D-Del.) were also revealed to have taken money from him. And former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) is awaiting the outcome of a case against lawyer Geoffrey Feiger, who has been charged with trying to donate $125,000 illegally to his 2004 campaign.
So, as was perhaps inevitable, the dash for cash has now produced a strong whiff of scandal, and every candidate is at pains to avoid being tainted.
No election cycle has ever been so steeped in lucre. Many voters are disillusioned or dismayed by this, wondering how the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars is necessary to, or even compatible with, genuine popular democracy.
This newspaper does not share that view, regarding it as unavoidable in the communications age that political candidates reach out to voters as never before. And reaching voters is not free.
But the power of a newspaper story, TV airtime or viral blog post, to help or mar a candidate, means the ’08 hopefuls have to walk a fine line. They need the financial means to pay to get their message out, but they also need to make sure they’re not inadvertently collecting dirty money to finance their efforts. Dirty money is ammo for their opponents.
If another hidden Hsu emerges from the accounts of any candidate, it will inflict huge, perhaps fatal damage on that candidate’s prospects. Which means that the squeaking noise you can hear is the sound of presidential campaigns scrubbing their donor lists. |
