As the amount of money it takes to win an election balloons, so do the completely legal opportunities to make contributions secretly, and so do the legal opportunities for certain legal entities to help finance a candidate's campaign without revealing who its contributors are. So long as these entities do not actually tell a voter how to vote, they are legal. They are "limited" to "educating" the public. The entity highlighted in this blog is a 501 (c) 3, a not-for-profit created to inform the public about certain matters conservative and pro-growth.
When Ann Marie Buerkle's race became important to conservatives, the Tea Party and Republicans during the last three months before the election in November 2010, money began to pour into the district via at least one fund shrouded in secrecy, Commission on Hope, Growth and Opportunity, as well as from Republic leaders' PACs and Paul Singer and his Elliott Associates (about which Blueskygirl blogged earlier in the year. The Singer article makes interesting reading if you haven't seen it yet.)
A section of an article appearing today on Bloomberg News is about secret legal campaign money spent against Dan Maffei among others late last fall.
Thanks to Bloomberg News for this section of the article:
A Desk Downtown
Former Democratic Representative Dan Maffei said he would have been re-elected "if it were not for the outside advertising which came in exclusively for my opponent late in the campaign." Maffei lost to Republican Ann Marie Buerkle in New York's 25th Congressional District, which includes Syracuse.
Nationally, Maffei said, outside money made the difference between the Republicans picking up "30 or 40" seats in the House and the 63 they won in the end.
Commission on Hope paid at least $2.10 million for ads against [Representative John, D-SC] Spratt, Maffei and nine other Democrats in seven states in the 60 days prior to voting, according to estimates by Campaign Media. Ten of the 11 Democrats lost.
Formed in March 2010, Commission on Hope lists only one person on its website - William B. Canfield, a former Republican Senate aide who is the group's general counsel. Its address is a downtown Washington law office where he has a desk. Canfield declined to comment.
[Note: Blueskygirl's bold]
We learn from FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenburg Public Policy Center, some information about Commission on Hope, Growth and Opportunity:
According to the Form 1024 that it filed with the Internal Revenue Service, the president and executive director of CHGO is Steve Powell, a media consultant based in Vista, Calif., who has worked for Republican candidates, corporations and conservative causes. The group’s general counsel is William B. Canfield, a one-time lawyer for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, who was until last year a registered lobbyist with the firm of Williams and Jensen. Some news reports credit GOP consultant Scott Reed with founding the organization. Reed was quoted by the Center for Public Integrity as saying that the group’s "big three" donors are "the financial services industry, the energy industry, and the health insurance industry."
No surprises here, except that nobody is accountable, nobody is limited in how much they can give, nobody is held to even the standards that we have more or less had to trust when it came to campaign finance for several decades.
The up-shot is that several hundred thousand dollars came into the Buerkle campaign or "educated" the public in the last weeks of the campaign and she overcame Dan's substantial lead. Buerkle attributed her victory to a “grassroots campaign” based on volunteers who had never been politically active before, said Liza Lowery, her spokeswoman. Really?
