The big fear about campaign money is that it corrupts the candidates who have to beg for it. “It’s simply wrong for our democracy,” says Fred Wertheimer, president of the campaign watchdog group Democracy21, “that an individual or his spouse can give $10 million to a particular candidate and thereby potentially buy corrupting influence at the expense of the electorate.”
But that worry applies better to the shadowy bundler than it does to the megabucks super PAC donor. Corruption can’t grow in the sunlight. The people giving big to super PACs are famous. I didn’t fully understand how famous until I tagged along with Gingrich at a speech to Aloma Baptist Church in Florida, when a parishioner asked him to explain why he was taking dirty money from the gambling industry. Gingrich explained that he and Adelson had a simpatico, guns-a-blazin’ view on Israel. Is it corruption if the candidate tells you what he’ll do for the donor?
If only the rest of the campaign finance system worked that way. Allison and Wertheimer, who worked very hard to cure my Pollyannish take on the cuper PAC, point out that the smaller donations, and the ones newly, legally laundered through 501(c)(3) groups, are handy hideouts for corruption. “Take Solyndra,” says Allison. “There’s not a single story that mentioned how an Obama bundler invested in this solar company that got a huge government loan guarantee. That only happened when the thing went bankrupt.”
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