Verbosities

A Bundle of Trouble - Wall Street Journal

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are fund-raising powerhouses. On Saturday alone, Mr. Obama scooped up $3 million at a gala hosted by Oprah Winfrey. The candidates are happy to tout their cash hauls. Just don't ask them to identify the contributors whose money disgraced donor Norman Hsu delivered to their campaigns.

Both campaigns are donating to charity the limited direct contributions Mr. Hsu made to them. But Mr. Hsu's influence went far deeper. In 2005, he helped host a California fund-raiser for Mr. Obama, where he introduced the senator to Mark Gorenberg, a venture capitalist who is now one of Mr. Obama's biggest fund-raisers.

Mr. Hsu later became one of Mrs. Clinton's top bundlers--powerbrokers who collect many small donations for delivery to candidates. He brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars to her and other Democratic causes. The Wall Street Journal reports that many of the contributions came from "people who had no prior history of political giving or obvious means for paying."

Welcome to the new way for politicians to bend the rules to make a ton of campaign money. I wonder how many people believe, whether it's true or not, that most if not all of Clinton and Obama's campaign funds are tainted like Hsu's money?

Bundlers are now very much in the news. All the major GOP candidates have had their own controversies involving bundlers. Last month, Geoffrey Fieger, the trial lawyer who was the 1998 Democratic nominee for Michigan governor, was indicted on charges he conspired to make more than $125,000 in illegal bundled contributions to the 2004 presidential campaign of John Edwards. Back then Mr. Edwards flatly refused to identify his bundlers.
Such scandals were part of what prompted Congress to pass an ethics reform bill that is now on President Bush's desk. It would require all campaigns to disclose the identities of bundlers who are lobbyists and bring in over $15,000 in any six-month period. Both Sens. Clinton and Obama voted for the bill, and Mr. Obama would like to go further. Last week, he announced he will introduce legislation to require campaigns to disclose the identity of all bundlers and the amounts they bring in.

It's about time the door was blown off of the shady world campaign contributions. A lot of money comes from honest citizens, but an equal amount, if not more, comes through people like Hsu.

But, how willing are candidates to provide campaign donator information?

Mr. Obama is sending letters of inquiry to five donors publicly identified in the media as linked to Mr. Hsu, but his campaign says it doesn't have any records of any other possible Hsu-linked donors, even though Mr. Hsu has told friends he was careful always to let the campaigns know which contributions he had brought in.

As for Mrs. Clinton, her spokesman Howard Wolfson told the Los Angeles Times that she was declining to release the names of her bundled donors.

Nobody should be surprised and if it was Rebpublicans with the headline-creating problem, they'd do the same thing. The only problem with this stance is it makes the candidates look incredibly guilty. Whether they are or not.