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Democrats Work Hard for Soft Money
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
Democrats Work Hard for Soft Money
Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Thursday, April 18, 2002
According to all those Democrats who voted to ban it, soft money is baaad ... so bad that they're falling all over themselves to raise all they can before it's illegal.
The honorables in Congress, filled with sanctity in their effort to cleanse politics of the corrupting influence of money, made sure that the ban would not go into effect before this year's congressional elections. They arranged it so it would not take effect until the November elections are history and they are all safely re-elected and back in Washington squandering the taxpayers' money.
According to the New York Times' Adam Clymer, President Bush's favorite political columnist, while Democrats are full of plans to raise hard money, they still find themselves so hooked on the soft variety they can't stop themselves from chasing it while the chasing is still good.
Clymer wrote in Tuesday's Times that the Democrats' "three main fundraising committees together raised a majority of their money from big soft-money donors, one of whom gave $7 million," in the past three months. The Dems raised $48.7 million, "three-fifths of it in soft money."
On the other hand, fully 70 percent of the money the GOP raised - a whopping $68.2 - was of the good hard-money variety, the only kind that will be legal once the anti-free-speech campaign "reform" law goes into effect (unless the Supreme Court rains on the McCain-Feingold parade and declares the ban not in keeping with the long-neglected U.S. Constitution.
Democrats claim they're doing their best to refocus their fund-raising efforts on getting their hands on all the hard money they can find. Rep. Nita Lowey of New York, who runs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which raises money for House candidates, told Clymer that since she took over the committee in January 2001, her "focus has been to increase hard-money donations, even before campaign finance reform passed."
Pols Tax Themselves for a Change!
Part of her effort was socking her fellow Democrat members of the House with a $5,000 increase in the amount of money each one is assessed, from $10,000 to $15,000.
A Republican spokesman told Clymer that the GOP assessed its membership for $12,500 each.
Lowey noted that she was shocked that her committee's fund-raising technology, which the party spent $1 million to upgrade, was still able to raise only $4.9 million in small, hard-money donations while taking in $7.1 million in soft money.
The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee's executive director, Jim Jordan, explained to Clymer: "This isn't an institution that has focused on raising $1,000 checks. We thought they were better left to campaigns."
Jordan said his committee would convert its soft-money donors into "hard-dollar raisers" after the new law takes effect on Nov. 6.
That would be a tactic borrowed from the Bush 2000 campaign, Clymer noted. To cope with the problem posed by the $1,000 limit on individual donations, the Bush campaign organized 215 "Pioneers," who each raised at least $100,000.
"That tactic," the Times explained, "will be more important next year, because the most an individual can give to all party committees in a two-year election cycle will go to $57,500 under McCain-Feingold from $50,000. The maximum to any one party committee will increase, to $50,000 from $40,000."
Jordan said he expected Democrats to begin kicking their addiction to soft money with their "new focus" on small donors. In the first three months of the year, however, Jordan's committee still raked in more soft money than the hard variety, only $4.8 million in hard money against $6.2 million in the soft variety. The GOP, on the other hand, raised $15 million, more than half of it - $9.9 million - in hard money.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe says his group "has had the best first-quarter in direct-mail fund-raising" in party history. In an April 4 memo to party leaders, McAuliffe wrote that the party took in $8 million from 205,514 individuals, of whom 34,636 were first-time donors.
But that $8 million, the Times reveals, "was almost all the party raised in hard money, which had a total of $8.7 million." The soft-money total of $17 million, however, included gifts of $7 million and $5 million from two prominent Hollywood executives.
The Republican National Committee raised $31.7 million, all but $5.4 million in soft money, according to Clymer. "Its cash on hand of $38.8 million is, in terms of election resources, vastly larger than the Democratic committee's $23.7 million."
McAuliffe has plans for $15.5 million of the soft money the Democrats have in their kitty. If his party fails to win control of the House it will have a new house of their own in which to contemplate the unfairness of it all - the $15.5 million will mostly go to building a new Democrat party headquarters. http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/4/17/105555.shtml
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Thursday, April 18, 2002
According to all those Democrats who voted to ban it, soft money is baaad ... so bad that they're falling all over themselves to raise all they can before it's illegal.
The honorables in Congress, filled with sanctity in their effort to cleanse politics of the corrupting influence of money, made sure that the ban would not go into effect before this year's congressional elections. They arranged it so it would not take effect until the November elections are history and they are all safely re-elected and back in Washington squandering the taxpayers' money.
According to the New York Times' Adam Clymer, President Bush's favorite political columnist, while Democrats are full of plans to raise hard money, they still find themselves so hooked on the soft variety they can't stop themselves from chasing it while the chasing is still good.
Clymer wrote in Tuesday's Times that the Democrats' "three main fundraising committees together raised a majority of their money from big soft-money donors, one of whom gave $7 million," in the past three months. The Dems raised $48.7 million, "three-fifths of it in soft money."
On the other hand, fully 70 percent of the money the GOP raised - a whopping $68.2 - was of the good hard-money variety, the only kind that will be legal once the anti-free-speech campaign "reform" law goes into effect (unless the Supreme Court rains on the McCain-Feingold parade and declares the ban not in keeping with the long-neglected U.S. Constitution.
Democrats claim they're doing their best to refocus their fund-raising efforts on getting their hands on all the hard money they can find. Rep. Nita Lowey of New York, who runs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which raises money for House candidates, told Clymer that since she took over the committee in January 2001, her "focus has been to increase hard-money donations, even before campaign finance reform passed."
Pols Tax Themselves for a Change!
Part of her effort was socking her fellow Democrat members of the House with a $5,000 increase in the amount of money each one is assessed, from $10,000 to $15,000.
A Republican spokesman told Clymer that the GOP assessed its membership for $12,500 each.
Lowey noted that she was shocked that her committee's fund-raising technology, which the party spent $1 million to upgrade, was still able to raise only $4.9 million in small, hard-money donations while taking in $7.1 million in soft money.
The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee's executive director, Jim Jordan, explained to Clymer: "This isn't an institution that has focused on raising $1,000 checks. We thought they were better left to campaigns."
Jordan said his committee would convert its soft-money donors into "hard-dollar raisers" after the new law takes effect on Nov. 6.
That would be a tactic borrowed from the Bush 2000 campaign, Clymer noted. To cope with the problem posed by the $1,000 limit on individual donations, the Bush campaign organized 215 "Pioneers," who each raised at least $100,000.
"That tactic," the Times explained, "will be more important next year, because the most an individual can give to all party committees in a two-year election cycle will go to $57,500 under McCain-Feingold from $50,000. The maximum to any one party committee will increase, to $50,000 from $40,000."
Jordan said he expected Democrats to begin kicking their addiction to soft money with their "new focus" on small donors. In the first three months of the year, however, Jordan's committee still raked in more soft money than the hard variety, only $4.8 million in hard money against $6.2 million in the soft variety. The GOP, on the other hand, raised $15 million, more than half of it - $9.9 million - in hard money.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe says his group "has had the best first-quarter in direct-mail fund-raising" in party history. In an April 4 memo to party leaders, McAuliffe wrote that the party took in $8 million from 205,514 individuals, of whom 34,636 were first-time donors.
But that $8 million, the Times reveals, "was almost all the party raised in hard money, which had a total of $8.7 million." The soft-money total of $17 million, however, included gifts of $7 million and $5 million from two prominent Hollywood executives.
The Republican National Committee raised $31.7 million, all but $5.4 million in soft money, according to Clymer. "Its cash on hand of $38.8 million is, in terms of election resources, vastly larger than the Democratic committee's $23.7 million."
McAuliffe has plans for $15.5 million of the soft money the Democrats have in their kitty. If his party fails to win control of the House it will have a new house of their own in which to contemplate the unfairness of it all - the $15.5 million will mostly go to building a new Democrat party headquarters. http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/4/17/105555.shtml
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878