Guest Blog: Charles Lewis, "The Buying of the President"
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
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Our electoral process is broken, with about half or more of America's eligible voters not voting in every federal election cycle. After the Florida recount debacle, in which the likes of Fidel Castro and Robert Mugabe lectured us on how to conduct democratic elections, we still do not have a single, standardized system of voting throughout the nation. The campaign process has become so expensive that it limits the talent pool available today to only millionaires or those willing and able to raise substantial sums of cash from wealthy and powerful interests with business before the government. Forty members of the current U.S. Senate are millionaires; less than one percent of the American people are millionaires. And big money mixed with irregular and high-tech redistricting help explain why the incumbent reelection rate in the House of Representatives the past three elections has been m! ! ore
than 98 percent. These are the kind of numbers we expect to see in countries like North Korea or China, not the United States.
Despite campaign finance reform, 2004 already is and will ultimately be the most expensive election in U.S. history. President George W. Bush has shattered his own astounding 1999 fundraising record and collected $130 million in 2003 - that's more than half a million dollars a day - and his campaign has $99 million in cash on hand with no major Republican primary challenger. Bush's official third quarter cash on hand number of $73 million was more than all of the major Democratic candidates and all of the Democratic national party committees combined ($54 million) through September!
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But all of that campaign money, of course, comes at a very steep price. Call it "the price of power" in our commercial, pay-to-play democracy, but each of the leading presidentia! l can!
didates for the 2004 election has done public policy favors for his major campaign contributors. They don't exactly put it that way, or want to acknowledge at all how they service their major donors. The simple aim of The Buying of the President 2004 is to get at the unvarnished truth, underneath the layers of obfuscation, rhetorical excess and just plain lies.
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The Center for Public Integrity will continue to update its information on the candidates and their career patrons throughout the 2004 campaign on our Web site.
The real powers that be in this country are not on any ballot. And they are accountable to no one. The Buying of the President 2004 unmasks the powerful special interests behind our national politics today. The bottom line is that the American people have a right to know who is underwriting their presidential candidates, and their democracy.
Charles Lewis is the founder and executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization in Washington that concentrates on ethics and public-service issues.
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http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/buyingpres.html
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The Center for Public Integrity has just published its third large-scale investigation into the money running the race for the White House. THE BUYING OF THE PRESIDENT 2004 took more than 50 researchers, writers and editors over a year, investigating the candidates and the political parties, contacting or interviewing 600 people and analyzing nearly two million financial records at over 100 federal agencies.
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Find out more on THE BUYING OF THE PRESIDENT 2004 from the Center for Public Integrity.
If you'd like to do some campaign finance tracking of your own, you can search the Federal Election Commission's Web site to discover where the dollars come from. The site allows you to search by candidate, company or interest group name. The Campaign Finance Information Center links to state data. To follow the money and politics trail further, take a look at the Web site of the Federal Procurement Data Center. It keeps track of federal contracts over $25,000. The executive departments and agencies award over $200 billion annually for goods and
services. The site has a function which enables visitors to search by federal agency, product and service, state or contractor.
Bill Moyers interviews Chuck Lewis, author of THE BUYING OF THE PRESIDENT 2004 (18:52)
[that says "watch the video" and is a link - at least in the original]
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