Trying to See the Big Picture

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 22, 2003

Byline: Jennifer G. Hickey, INSIGHT

When Strom Thurmond first raised his hand to swear an oath of public service, he did so as an incoming Democratic member of the South Carolina House of Representatives. Taking the oath for the last time in 1996, he had lived through the terms of 17 presidents, as well as societal changes large and small. Even at the end of his last term in the U.S. Senate many of his critics remained focused on the Strom Thurmond who ran for president as a Dixiecrat in 1948 rather than the legislator dedicated to all South Carolinians, and who as a Republican won 20 percent of the black vote in his last campaign 48 years later. He walked a long path from winning as a write-in candidate for the Senate in 1954 to president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate, and when he left this world thousands of his fellow citizens, black and white, stood in the rain to watch as his flag-covered coffin passed.

In a day and age when wars last mere weeks and fashions change even more quickly, misperception is commonplace. In politics this is compounded. With a sudden and unexpected surge in quarterly fund raising, for instance, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean has vaulted himself onto the front pages of many newspapers, leaping from obscurity to the top tier of Democratic presidential candidates. With as many as 59,000 individual contributors providing Dean with a little more than $7 million ($3 million in online donations), the one-time write-off candidate was written in as a serious contender for the nomination.

Fellow contenders may scoff at these fund-raising numbers and Dean's victory in an Internet primary (moveon.org), but their own flurry of e-mail pleas for donations indicates a general concern among the Democratic posse. For the moment, however, Dean's numbers still lag behind the year-to-date totals of Democratic Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina and Missouri Rep. Richard Gephardt. A better picture of the direction the Democratic primary race is taking will appear after the July 15 quarterly Federal Election Commission filing deadline and, more importantly, after the Dean camp experiences the slings and arrows of opponents and intensified media scrutiny that will test his new status.

Meanwhile, Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe and other campaign-finance critics have failed even to glance at the larger fund-raising picture when attacking President George W. Bush for, well, raising money. With an eye on besting the record $100 million raised in the 2000 GOP primary, Bush has been feasting on the support shown at a series of $2,000-a-plate barbecues, amassing more than $34 million by the end of June.

It is no shock that critics of campaign finance (or the finance part of it) launch into declamations against the alleged deep-pocketed special interests of the Republican Party. Having familiarized himself with the system as a fund-raiser for Bill Clinton, McAuliffe recently declared that passage of a new round of tax cuts will benefit the GOP because "the millions saved by the super-rich will go directly out of their pockets and into the pockets of the GOP." However, this is not a true reflection of the patterns of giving in recent years, according to a report released by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics (CRP).

The findings illustrate why Republicans feel they should maintain a healthy advantage over Democrats even after passage of McCain-Feingold, which limits total contributions to candidates, political-action committees and parties to $95,000 per individual per election cycle. Although the analysis, which examined more than 1.4 million contributions of $200 or more given during the 2001-2002 election cycle, found Republicans bringing in more donations from every giving level below $100,000, there was one level on which Democrats cleaned the Republicans' clock.

When examining contributions of $1 million or more, 92 percent ($48 million) of those contributions went to the Democratic Party, while only $4 million of the Republican total was delivered in similar increments. In fact, CRP noted, "Individuals giving less than $200 to federal candidates, parties or leadership PACs gave 64 percent of their money to Republicans during the last election cycle. Democrats raised just 35 percent of the money from those donors," a set of statistics that does not bode well for whichever Democrat earns the nod of his party's primary electorate.

The funding disparity no doubt will place more pressure on outside groups whose futures are tied to Democrats, such as labor unions and trial lawyers, to step up to the plate for congressional candidates and the party nominee and on Democrats in Congress to return the favor. Democrats have fought updating labor-union disclosure forms and allowing small businesses to expand health-care coverage by pooling buying power to purchase coverage for their independent workers at a lower cost. But in resisting such change the unions and their supporters in Congress seem to be remaining stagnant as the shape of the American workforce changes.